Agriculture Education Quotes

We have to go from what is essentially an industrial model of education, a manufacturing model, which is based on linearity and conformity and batching people. We have to move to a model that is based more on principles of agriculture. We have to recognize that human flourishing is not a mechanical process; it's an organic process. And you cannot predict the outcome of human development. All you can do, like a farmer, is create the conditions under which they will begin to flourish.

Football: A sport that bears the same relation to education that bullfighting does to agriculture.

Sanjit says his apartment, the same one in which he grew up, has been flooded many times by the midsummer torrents. For what has been for millennia a primarily agricultural society, rains simultaneously destroy, create, and preserve life in India, similar to the functions of the three premier Hindu gods, Shiva, Brahma, and Vishnu. Every time Kolkata gets pounded by a cyclone, or when the monsoon first erupts in June (although the recent warming of the Indian Ocean increasingly disturbs a once-consistent timeline), Sanjit never fails to send along a video, his house flooded – seemingly destroyed – but the smiles on his, Bajju’s, or other house-guest’s faces signify just the opposite, having been cooled and relieved of perpetual heat. Flooded, they remain preserved.

Whatever of social importance is done today, whether in politics, finance, manufacture, agriculture, charity, education, or other fields, must be done with the help of propaganda.

The Negro is not the man farthest down. The condition of the coloured farmer in the most backward parts of the Southern States of America, even where he has the least education and the least encouragement, is incomparably better than the condition and opportunities of the agricultural population in Sicily.

Many questions come to mind. How influenced by contemporary religions were many of the scholars who wrote the texts available today? How many scholars have simply assumed that males have always played the dominant role in leadership and creative invention and projected this assumption into their analysis of ancient cultures? Why do so many people educated in this century think of classical Greece as the first major culture when written language was in use and great cities built at least twenty-five centuries before that time? And perhaps most important, why is it continually inferred that the age of the "pagan" religions, the time of the worship of female deities (if mentioned at all), was dark and chaotic, mysterious and evil, without the light of order and reason that supposedly accompanied the later male religions, when it has been archaeologically confirmed that the earliest law, government, medicine, agriculture, architecture, metallurgy, wheeled vehicles, ceramics, textiles and written language were initially developed in societies that worshiped the Goddess? We may find ourselves wondering about the reasons for the lack of easily available information on societies who, for thousands of years, worshiped the ancient Creatress of the Universe.

Education became Finland’s best hope for preparing its population for a new economy based not on agriculture or manufacturing, but on knowledge.

Organic is something we can all partake of and benefit from. When we demand organic, we are demanding poison-free food. We are demanding clean air. We are demanding pure, fresh water. We are demanding soil that is free to do its job and seeds that are free of toxins. We are demanding that our children be protected from harm. We all need to bite the bullet and do what needs to be done—buy organic whenever we can, insist on organic, fight for organic and work to make it the norm. We must make organic the conventional choice and not the exception available only to the rich and educated.

As John Adams famously wrote during the American Revolution, “I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.” So maybe today they’re writing apps rather than studying poetry, but that’s an adjustment for the age.

We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements—transportation, communications, and all other industries; agriculture, medicine, education, entertainment, protecting the environment; and even the key democratic institution of voting—profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.

Most people of my grandparents' generation had an intuitive sense of agricultural basics ... This knowledge has vanished from our culture. We also have largely convinced ourselves it wasn't too important. Consider how many Americans might respond to a proposal that agriculture was to become a mandatory subject in all schools ... A fair number of parents would get hot under the collar to see their kids' attention being pulled away from the essentials of grammar, the all-important trigonometry, to make room for down-on-the-farm stuff. The baby boom psyche embraces a powerful presumption that education is a key to moving away from manual labor and dirt--two undeniable ingredients of farming. It's good enough for us that somebody, somewhere, knows food production well enough to serve the rest of us with all we need to eat, each day of our lives.

It could be said that a liberal education has the nature of a bequest, in that it looks upon the student as the potential heir of a cultural birthright, whereas a practical education has the nature of a commodity to be exchanged for position, status, wealth, etc., in the future. A liberal education rests on the assumption that nature and human nature do not change very much or very fast and that one therefore needs to understand the past. The practical educators assume that human society itself is the only significant context, that change is therefore fundamental, constant, and necessary, that the future will be wholly unlike the past, that the past is outmoded, irrelevant, and an encumbrance upon the future -- the present being only a time for dividing past from future, for getting ready. But these definitions, based on division and opposition, are too simple. It is easy, accepting the viewpoint of either side, to find fault with the other. But the wrong is on neither side; it is in their division... Without the balance of historic value, practical education gives us that most absurd of standards: "relevance," based upon the suppositional needs of a theoretical future. But liberal education, divorced from practicality, gives something no less absurd: the specialist professor of one or another of the liberal arts, the custodian of an inheritance he has learned much about, but nothing from.

I’ve said that education is a living process that can best be compared to agriculture. Gardeners know that they don’t make plants grow.

Physics, Chemistry, and Biology had been replaced by Fundamentals of Industry and Agriculture, because of Chairman Mao’s instruction to “combine education with practical experience.

We have the money. We’ve just made choices about how to spend it. Over the years, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have restricted housing aid to the poor but expanded it to the affluent in the form of tax benefits for homeowners. 57 Today, housing-related tax expenditures far outpace those for housing assistance. In 2008, the year Arleen was evicted from Thirteenth Street, federal expenditures for direct housing assistance totaled less than $40.2 billion, but homeowner tax benefits exceeded $171 billion. That number, $171 billion, was equivalent to the 2008 budgets for the Department of Education, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Agriculture combined. 58 Each year, we spend three times what a universal housing voucher program is estimated to cost (in total ) on homeowner benefits, like the mortgage-interest deduction and the capital-gains exclusion. Most federal housing subsidies benefit families with six-figure incomes. 59 If we are going to spend the bulk of our public dollars on the affluent—at least when it comes to housing—we should own up to that decision and stop repeating the politicians’ canard about one of the richest countries on the planet being unable to afford doing more. If poverty persists in America, it is not for lack of resources.

his education had had the curious effect of making things that he read and wrote more real to him than things he saw. Statistics about agricultural laborers were the substance; any real ditcher, plowman or farmer's boy, was the shadow. Though he had never noticed it himself, he had a great reluctance, in his work, ever to use words as 'man' or 'woman.' He preferred to write about 'vocational groups,' 'elements,' 'classes' and 'populations:' for, in his own way, he believed as firmly as any mystic in the superior reality of the things that are not seen.

The goal of the Deep Southern oligarchy has been consistent for over four centuries: to control and maintain a one-party state with a colonial-style economy based on large-scale agriculture and the extraction of primary resources by a compliant, poorly educated, low-wage workforce with as few labor, workplace safety, health care, and environmental regulations as possible.

Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties; and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in various parts of the country, and among the different orders of the people, it shall be the duty of legislators and magistrates in all future periods of this commonwealth to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them, especially the university at Cambridge, public schools, and grammar schools in the towns; to encourage private societies and public institutions, rewards and immunities, for the promotion of agriculture, arts, sciences, commerce, trades, manufactures, and a natural history of the country; to countenance and inculcate the principles of humanity and general benevolence, public and private charity, industry and frugality, honesty and punctuality in their dealings, sincerity, good humor, and all social affections, and generous sentiments among the people.

One of the solutions to increasing the resilience of the rural economy is the automation of the rural economy in a sustainable manner. The adoption of a sustainable and inclusive approach to automating the rural economy can enhance efficiency and speed at each stage of the supply chain.

popular education’s goal is to empower groups of people who have been marginalized socially and politically. The

some modern ‘labour-saving’ devices might more precisely be labelled ‘male labour-saving’ devices. A 2014 study in Syria, for example, found while the introduction of mechanisation in farming did reduce demand for male labour, freeing men up to ‘pursue better-paying opportunities outside of agriculture’, it actually increased demand ‘for women’s labour-intensive tasks such as transplanting, weeding, harvesting and processing’.20 Conversely, when some agricultural tasks were mechanised in Turkey, women’s participation in the agricultural labour force decreased, ‘because of men’s appropriation of machinery’, and because women were reluctant to adopt it. This was in part due to lack of education and sociocultural norms, but also ‘because the machinery was not designed for use by women’.

invest simultaneously in the agricultural sector, in education, in productivity-enhancing technology and its dissemination, and in infrastructure that enables connectivity to the rest of the economy.

While motherhood and warship were associated with Parvati and Durga, Tantra was associated to Kali, food and agriculture to Annapurna, knowledge and education to Saraswati and, of course, luck and money to Lakshmi.

Even though I was appointed by the White House to be executive director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s agency in charge of the 2010 United States Dietary Guidelines, and even though I am a past president of the Society for Nutrition Education and Behavior, I still don’t think most nutrition education is very effective. People know that an apple is better for them than a Snickers bar, but . . . they eat the Snickers bar anyway.

Meanwhile, Mme Mao and her cohorts were renewing their efforts to prevent the country from working. In industry, their slogan was: "To stop production is revolution itself." In agriculture, in which they now began to meddle seriously: "We would rather have socialist weeds than capitalist crops." Acquiring foreign technology became "sniffing after foreigners' farts and calling them sweet." In education: "We want illiterate working people, not educated spiritual aristocrats." They called for schoolchildren to rebel against their teachers again; in January 1974, classroom windows, tables, and chairs in schools in Peking were smashed, as in 1966. Mme Mao claimed this was like "the revolutionary action of English workers destroying machines in the eighteenth century." Mme Mao launched a fresh attack on foreign culture. In early 1974 there was a big media campaign denouncing the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni for a film he had made about China, although no one in China had seen the film, and few had even heard of it or of Antonioni. This xenophobia was extended to Beethoven after a visit by the Philadelphia Orchestra.

Meanwhile, Mme Mao and her cohorts were renewing their efforts to prevent the country from working. In industry, their slogan was: "To stop production is revolution itself." In agriculture, in which they now began to meddle seriously: "We would rather have socialist weeds than capitalist crops." Acquiring foreign technology became "sniffing after foreigners' farts and calling them sweet." In education: "We want illiterate working people, not educated spiritual aristocrats." They called for schoolchildren to rebel against their teachers again; in January 1974, classroom windows, tables, and chairs in schools in Peking were smashed, as in 1966. Mme Mao claimed this was like "the revolutionary action of English workers destroying machines in the eighteenth century." All this demagoguery' had one purpose: to create trouble for Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiao-ping and generate chaos. It was only in persecuting people and in destruction that Mme Mao and the other luminaries of the Cultural Revolution had a chance to "shine." In construction they had no place. Zhou and Deng had been making tentative efforts to open the country up, so Mme Mao launched a fresh attack on foreign culture. In early 1974 there was a big media campaign denouncing the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni for a film he had made about China, although no one in China had seen the film, and few had even heard of it or of Antonioni. This xenophobia was extended to Beethoven after a visit by the Philadelphia Orchestra. In the two years since the fall of Lin Biao, my mood had changed from hope to despair and fury. The only source of comfort was that there was a fight going on at all, and that the lunacy was not reigning supreme, as it had in the earlier years of the Cultural Revolution. During this period, Mao was not giving his full backing to either side. He hated the efforts of Zhou and Deng to reverse the Cultural Revolution, but he knew that his wife and her acolytes could not make the country work. Mao let Zhou carry on with the administration of the country, but set his wife upon Zhou, particularly in a new campaign to 'criticize Confucius." The slogans ostensibly denounced Lin Biao, but were really aimed at Zhou, who, it was widely held, epitomized the virtues advocated by the ancient sage. Even though Zhou had been unwaveringly loyal, Mao still could not leave him alone. Not even now, when Zhou was fatally ill with advanced cancer of the bladder.

III. THE PLANTER How seven per cent of a section within a nation ruled five million white people and four million black people and sought to make agriculture equal to industry through the rule of property without yielding political power or education to labor.

Educator and agricultural chemist George Washington Carver made an incredible observation: “How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in life you will have been all of these.

When corporate-endowed foundations first made their appearance in the United States, there was a fierce debate about their provenance, legality, and lack of accountability. People suggested that if companies had so much surplus money, they should raise the wages of their workers. (People made these outrageous suggestions in those days, even in America.) The idea of these foundations, so ordinary now, was in fact a leap of the business imagination. Non-tax-paying legal entities with massive resources and an almost unlimited brief—wholly unaccountable, wholly nontransparent— what better way to parlay economic wealth into political, social, and cultural capital, to turn money into power? What better way for usurers to use a minuscule percentage of their profits to run the world? How else would Bill Gates, who admittedly knows a thing or two about computers, find himself designing education, health, and agriculture policies, not just for the US government but for governments all over the world?35

When the culture of the East, its chief characteristic, is added to the strength of body and the strength of mind of the agricultural center, its special contribution, and these two great characteristics are constantly imbued with the spirit of independence and love of liberty which lives in the hearts of the dwellers of the mountains, their main quality added to the national character, there is every reason to believe that we shall have a people and institutions such as will be permanent; with such wealth of resources, of such high education and intelligence, and of such vitality, of such longevity, of such devotion to freedom and hostility to centralization and tyranny as shall enable this Nation of ours to stand indefinitely; and to maintain in the future years its manifest destiny of leading the peoples and nations of earth in the principles of free government, constitutional security and individual liberty. Under these and under these alone, the faculties, the aspirations and inspirations of mankind may be unfolded into their full flowering to the fruition of an ever greater and more humane civilization.

High-quality and affordable childcare and eldercare • Paid family and medical leave for women and men • A right to request part-time or flexible work • Investment in early education comparable to our investment in elementary and secondary education • Comprehensive job protection for pregnant workers • Higher wages and training for paid caregivers • Community support structures to allow elders to live at home longer • Legal protections against discrimination for part-time workers and flexible workers • Better enforcement of existing laws against age discrimination • Financial and social support for single parents • Reform of elementary and secondary school schedules to meet the needs of a digital rather than an agricultural economy and to take advantage of what we now know about how children learn

The range and variety of Chaucer's English did much to establish English as a national language. Chaucer also contributed much to the formation of a standard English based on the dialect of the East Midlands region which was basically the dialect of London which Chaucer himself spoke. Indeed, by the end of the fourteenth century the educated language of London, bolstered by the economic power of London itself, was beginning to become the standard form of written language throughout the country, although the process was not to be completed for several centuries. The cultural, commercial, administrative and intellectual importance of the East Midlands (one of the two main universities, Cambridge, was also in this region), the agricultural richness of the region and the presence of major cities, Norwich and London, contributed much to the increasing standardisation of the dialect.

Like the monks chanting their Pali mantras, learning by rote was the accepted method of education just as in English schools of the time. ‘In geography,’ Sokheang recalled, ‘we would have to learn the size of a country, the population, the agricultural produce, etcetera. And we would get called up to recite it to the rest of the class.’ The accuracy of this recitation was the measure of a successful student. ‘Knowledge,’ said Sokheang, ‘was the storage of facts.

No, plenty for all is not a dream – though it was a dream indeed in those days when man, for all his pains, could hardly win a few bushels of wheat from an acre of land, and had to fashion by hand all the implements he used in agriculture and industry. Now it is no longer a dream, because man has invented a motor which, with a little iron and a few sacks of coal, gives him the mastery of a creature strong and docile as a horse, and capable of setting the most complicated machinery in motion. But, if plenty for all is to become a reality, this immense capital – cities, houses, pastures, arable lands, factories, highways, education – must cease to be regarded as private property, for the monopolist to dispose of at his pleasure. This rich endowment, painfully won, builded, fashioned, or invented by our ancestors, must become common property, so that the collective interests of men may gain from it the greatest good for all.

technology means there is more to learn before becoming a productive adult. With the economy shifting away from agriculture and toward knowledge-based jobs, more education becomes necessary. As a result, it takes longer to grow to adulthood—you can no longer start working full-time at 12, as my grandfather did, and have all the skills you need. Instead, it takes until 18, 22, or longer to finish education and begin full-time work, one measure of reaching adulthood.

Cette alternative les indigna, persuadés qu’on voulait détruire la République. L’existence loin de la Capitale les affligeait comme un exil ; ils se voyaient mourants par les fièvres, dans des régions farouches. Pour beaucoup, d’ailleurs, accoutumés à des travaux délicats, l’agriculture semblait un avilissement ; c’était un leurre enfin, une dérision, le déni formel de toutes les promesses. S’ils résistaient, on emploierait la force ; ils n’en doutaient pas et se disposaient à la prévenir.

As concerned beekeepers, we need to educate ourselves about the dangers that threaten our communities, and advocate against them. We once could trust in nature to provide for us, and as good stewards of these amazing creatures, we knew the returns were almost guaranteed. Now it can be very difficult indeed to care for honeybees, and beekeepers are becoming as threatened as their colonies. We strongly believe that advocating for organic agriculture is an important part of being a beekeeper in today’s world.

agricultural economy based upon farming, to an industrial economy based upon factories,” Charles told me. “Factory workers must possess very specific skills. They must be educated to a basic minimum standard of literacy and numeracy, and they must be reliable, nondisruptive, and good at following instructions. Most importantly, they must do exactly what they are told, when they are told to do it. Industrialising countries lacked such workers, therefore institutions were set up to produce them. Replaceable parts for a machine.” I

told his students in “The World Since 1914” class that there was little point in discussing the Third World when they knew so little about how their own society works: “So I told them about the USA — really very hair-raising when it is all laid out in sequence: . . . . 1. cosmic hierarchy; 2. energy; 3. agriculture; 4. food; 5. health and medical services; 6. education; 7. income flows and the worship of GROWTH; 8. inflation. . . showing how we are violating every aspect of life by turning everything into a ripoff because we. . . have adopted the view that insatiable individualistic greed must run the world.” 7 He feared “that the students will come to feel that all is hopeless, so I must. . . show them how solutions can be found by holistic methods seeking diversity, de-centralization, communities. . .etc.” 8 Pleased with the class response, he later recalled: “The students were very excited and my last lecture in which I put the whole picture together was about the best lecture I ever gave. That was 10 Dec. [1975], my last full day of teaching after 41 years.

In the winter of 1987 India was full of iskeems that had gone awry. Agricultural iskeems, political iskeems, economic iskeems, educational iskeems, stop black money iskeems, attract white tourists iskeems, drinkable water iskeems, animal protection iskeems, women's welfare iskeems, nurture children iskeems, don't scan female foetus iskeems, privatization iskeems, medical iskeems, entertainment iskeems, old India iskeems and new India iskeems. We had mastered the art of nomenclature from the white man. Grand labels could disguise unforgivable things.

Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties; and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in various parts of the country, and among the different orders of the people, it shall be the duty of legislators and magistrates in all future periods of this commonwealth to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them, especially the university at Cambridge, public schools, and grammar schools in the towns; to encourage private societies and public institutions, rewards and immunities, for the promotion of agriculture, arts, sciences, commerce, trades, manufactures, and a natural history of the country; to countenance and inculcate the principles of humanity and general benevolence, public and private charity, industry and frugality, honesty and punctuality in their dealings, sincerity, good humor, and all social affections, and generous sentiments among the people.   “It was, in all,” writes McCullough, “a declaration of Adams’s faith in education as the bulwark of the good society, the old abiding faith of his Puritan forebears.

Cynics have observed that those who have benefited the most from “progress”—the citizens of the First World—are the people most inclined to disdain it. The privileged few who eat better, lead longer and more stimulating lives because of modern agriculture, medicine, education, mass communications, and travel, and are most cushioned from physical discomfort and inconvenience by industrial technology are the most nostalgic about the primitive world. This attitude is more difficult to find among the real “victims of progress” in the Third World except among members of these nations’ Western-educated elites.

It’s a demonic feedback loop. Let me see if I can get this straight. Pharmaceutical companies sell mountains of drugs to factory farms, which depend on them to maintain their abnormally intensive systems. The animals develop antibiotic resistance that spreads to humans. Humans need stronger drugs. In the meantime, the animal industries flood the government with cash in exchange for subsidies. The government, invested in keeping the generous animal food lobbies flush, runs federal programs pushing people to eat increasing amounts of animal-based foods. People oblige. People get sick, requiring medication for the rest of their lives, along with expensive medical procedures. The drugs and procedures falsely assure them that they can continue to eat the food that made them sick in the first place. People continue to support the animal agriculture industry by buying their products, which pay for studies to further convince the public that animal products are an essential part of a healthy diet. People continue to support the pharmaceutical companies because they are tethered to their prescription drugs. This allows drug companies to pay for the “education” of our doctors who prescribe more drugs to us. Then pharmaceutical companies sell mountains of drugs to factory farms…

...The [Renaissance] interest in education was also influenced by a changing economy. For different reasons in different countries, agriculture was becoming less lucrative, and many farmers decided to move to the cities to take up new occupations. However, to succeed in a trade they needed to know how to read and perform bookkeeping tasks ... Those who remained on the farm found life much the same as in the Middle Ages. In fact, in some agricultural regions the Renaissance economy devastated farmers. For example, as the wool industry grew in importance, more landowners in England decided to raise sheep instead of growing crops. They therefore needed fewer farmworkers, and many peasants lost their livelihoods.

Burlington, Vermont, is an example of a certain kind of small city that David Brooks calls “Latte Towns,” enclaves of affluent and well-educated people, sometimes in scenic locales such as Santa Fe or Aspen and sometimes in university towns such as Ann Arbor, Berkeley, or Chapel Hill. Of Burlington, Brooks writes: Burlington boasts a phenomenally busy public square. There are kite festivals and yoga festivals and eating festivals. There are arts councils, school-to-work collaboratives, environmental groups, preservation groups, community-supported agriculture, antidevelopment groups, and ad hoc activist groups.… And this public square is one of the features that draw people to Latte Towns. People in these places apparently would rather spend less time in the private sphere of their home and their one-acre yard and more time in the common areas.

Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties; and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in various parts of the country, and among the different orders of the people, it shall be the duty of legislators and magistrates in all future periods of this commonwealth to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them, especially the university at Cambridge, public schools, and grammar schools in the towns; to encourage private societies and public institutions, rewards and immunities, for the promotion of agriculture, arts, sciences, commerce, trades, manufactures, and a natural history of the country; to countenance and inculcate the principles of humanity and general benevolence, public and private charity, industry and frugality, honesty and punctuality in their dealings, sincerity, good humor, and all social affections, and generous sentiments among the people.

The modern educational system provides numerous other examples of reality bowing down to written records. When measuring the width of my desk, the yardstick I am using matters little. My desk remains the same width regardless of whether I say it is 200 centimetres or 78.74 inches. However, when bureaucracies measure people, the yardsticks they choose make all the difference. When schools began assessing people according to precise marks, the lives of millions of students and teachers changed dramatically. Marks are a relatively new invention. Hunter-gatherers were never marked for their achievements, and even thousands of years after the Agricultural Revolution, few educational establishments used precise marks. A medieval apprentice cobbler did not receive at the end of the year a piece of paper saying he has got an A on shoelaces but a C minus on buckles. An undergraduate in Shakespeare’s day left Oxford with one of only two possible results – with a degree, or without one. Nobody thought of giving one student a final mark of 74 and another student 88.6

Now, I suggest four tests to judge whether the Government is progressive, and, further, whether it is continuously progressive. The first test that I would apply is what measures it adopts for the moral and material improvement of the mass of the people, and under these measures I do not include those appliances of modern Governments which the British Government has applied in this country, because they were appliances necessary for its very existence, though they have benefited the people, such as the construction of Railways, the introduction of Post and Telegraphs, and things of that kind. By measures for the moral and material improvement of the people, I mean what the Government does for education, what the Government does for sanitation, what the Government does for agricultural development, and so forth. That is my first test. The second test that I would apply is what steps the Government takes to give us a larger share in the administration of our local affairs—in municipalities and local boards. My third test is what voice the Government gives us in its Councils—in those deliberate assemblies, where policies are considered. And, lastly, we must consider how far Indians are admitted into the ranks of the public service. A

But I am pondering over the skill with which you have presented the whole argument in support of your proposition, Ischomachus. For you stated that husbandry is the easiest of all arts to learn, and after hearing all that you have said, I am quite convinced that this is so. Of course it is, cried Ischomachus; but I grant you, Socrates, that in respect of aptitude for command, which is common to all forms of business alike—agriculture, politics, estate-management, warfare—in that respect the intelligence shown by different classes of men varies greatly. [...]Just as a love of work may spring up in the mind of a private soldier here and there, so a whole army under the influence of a good leader is inspired with love of work and ambition to distinguish itself under the commander’s eye. Let this be the feeling of the rank and file for their commander; and I tell you, he is the strong leader, he, and not the sturdiest soldier, not the best with bow and javelin, not the man who rides the best horse and is foremost in facing danger, not the ideal of knight or targeteer, but he who can make his soldiers feel that they are bound to follow him through fire and in any adventure. [...]And this, in my judgment, is the greatest thing in every operation that makes any demand on the labour of men, and therefore in agriculture. Mind you, I do not go so far as to say that this can be learnt at sight or at a single hearing. On the contrary, to acquire these powers a man needs education; he must be possessed of great natural gifts; above all, he must be a genius. For I reckon this gift is not altogether human, but divine—this power to win willing obedience: it is manifestly a gift of the gods to the true votaries of prudence. Despotic rule over unwilling subjects they give, I fancy, to those whom they judge worthy to live the life of Tantalus, of whom it is said that in hell he spends eternity, dreading a second death.

The free man is immoral, because it is his will to depend upon himself and not upon tradition: in all the primitive states of humanity “evil” is equivalent to “individual,” “free,” “arbitrary,” “unaccustomed,” “unforeseen,” “incalculable.” In such primitive conditions, always measured by this standard, any action performed — not because tradition commands it, but for other reasons (e.g. on account of its individual utility), even for the same reasons as had been formerly established by custom — is termed immoral, and is felt to be so even by the very man who performs it, for it has not been done out of obedience to the tradition. What is tradition? A higher authority, which is obeyed, not because it commands what is useful to us, but merely because it commands. And in what way can this feeling for tradition be distinguished from a general feeling of fear? It is the fear of a higher intelligence which commands, the fear of an incomprehensible power, of something that is more than personal — there is superstition in this fear. In primitive times the domain of morality included education and hygienics, marriage, medicine, agriculture, war, speech and silence, the relationship between man and man, and between man and the gods — morality required that a man should observe her prescriptions without thinking of himself as individual. Everything, therefore, was originally custom, and whoever wished to raise himself above it, had first of all to make himself a kind of lawgiver and medicine-man, a sort of demi-god — in other words, he had to create customs, a dangerous and fearful thing to do! — Who is the most moral man? On the one hand, he who most frequently obeys the law: e.g. he who, like the Brahmins, carries a consciousness of the law about with him wherever he may go, and introduces it into the smallest divisions of time, continually exercising his mind in finding opportunities for obeying the law. On the other hand, he who obeys the law in the most difficult cases.

This extreme situation in which all data is processed and all decisions are made by a single central processor is called communism. In a communist economy, people allegedly work according to their abilities, and receive according to their needs. In other words, the government takes 100 per cent of your profits, decides what you need and then supplies these needs. Though no country ever realised this scheme in its extreme form, the Soviet Union and its satellites came as close as they could. They abandoned the principle of distributed data processing, and switched to a model of centralised data processing. All information from throughout the Soviet Union flowed to a single location in Moscow, where all the important decisions were made. Producers and consumers could not communicate directly, and had to obey government orders. For instance, the Soviet economics ministry might decide that the price of bread in all shops should be exactly two roubles and four kopeks, that a particular kolkhoz in the Odessa oblast should switch from growing wheat to raising chickens, and that the Red October bakery in Moscow should produce 3.5 million loaves of bread per day, and not a single loaf more. Meanwhile the Soviet science ministry forced all Soviet biotech laboratories to adopt the theories of Trofim Lysenko – the infamous head of the Lenin Academy for Agricultural Sciences. Lysenko rejected the dominant genetic theories of his day. He insisted that if an organism acquired some new trait during its lifetime, this quality could pass directly to its descendants. This idea flew in the face of Darwinian orthodoxy, but it dovetailed nicely with communist educational principles. It implied that if you could train wheat plants to withstand cold weather, their progenies will also be cold-resistant. Lysenko accordingly sent billions of counter-revolutionary wheat plants to be re-educated in Siberia – and the Soviet Union was soon forced to import more and more flour from the United States.

The modern educational system provides numerous other examples of reality bowing down to written records. When measuring the width of my desk, the yardstick I am using matters little. My desk remains the same width regardless of whether I say it is 200 centimetres or 78.74 inches. However, when bureaucracies measure people, the yardsticks they choose make all the difference. When schools began assessing people according to precise marks, the lives of millions of students and teachers changed dramatically. Marks are a relatively new invention. Hunter-gatherers were never marked for their achievements, and even thousands of years after the Agricultural Revolution, few educational establishments used precise marks. A medieval apprentice cobbler did not receive at the end of the year a piece of paper saying he has got an A on shoelaces but a C minus on buckles. An undergraduate in Shakespeare’s day left Oxford with one of only two possible results – with a degree, or without one. Nobody thought of giving one student a final mark of 74 and another student 88.6 Credit 1.24 24. A European map of Africa from the mid-nineteenth century. The Europeans knew very little about the African interior, which did not prevent them from dividing the continent and drawing its borders. Only the mass educational systems of the industrial age began using precise marks on a regular basis. Since both factories and government ministries became accustomed to thinking in the language of numbers, schools followed suit. They started to gauge the worth of each student according to his or her average mark, whereas the worth of each teacher and principal was judged according to the school’s overall average. Once bureaucrats adopted this yardstick, reality was transformed. Originally, schools were supposed to focus on enlightening and educating students, and marks were merely a means of measuring success. But naturally enough, schools soon began focusing on getting high marks. As every child, teacher and inspector knows, the skills required to get high marks in an exam are not the same as a true understanding of literature, biology or mathematics. Every child, teacher and inspector also knows that when forced to choose between the two, most schools will go for the marks.

During the second half of the sixties, the center of the crisis shifted to the sprawling ghettos of the North. Here black experience was radically different from that in the South. The stability of institutional relationships was largely absent in Northern ghettos, especially among the poor. Over twenty years ago, the black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier was able to see the brutalizing effect of urbanization upon lower class blacks : ". . . The bonds of sympathy and community of interests that held their parents together in the rural environment have been unable to withstand the disintegrating forces in the city." Southern blacks migrated North in search of work, seeking to become transformed from a peasantry into a working class. But instead of jobs they found only misery, and far from becoming a proletariat, they came to constitute a lumpenproletariat, an underclass of rejected people. Frazier's prophetic words resound today with terrifying precision: ". . . As long as the bankrupt system of Southern agriculture exists, Negro families will continue to seek a living in the towns and cities of the country. They will crowd the slum areas of Southern cities or make their way to Northern cities, where their family life will become disrupted and their poverty will force them to depend upon charity." Out of such conditions, social protest was to emerge in a form peculiar to the ghetto, a form which could never have taken root in the South except in such large cities as Atlanta or Houston. The evils in the North are not easy to understand and fight against, or at least not as easy as Jim Crow, and this has given the protest from the ghetto a special edge of frustration. There are few specific injustices, such as a segregated lunch counter, that offer both a clear object of protest and a good chance of victory. Indeed, the problem in the North is not one of social injustice so much as the results of institutional pathology. Each of the various institutions touching the lives of urban blacks—those relating to education, health, employment, housing, and crime—is in need of drastic reform. One might say that the Northern race problem has in good part become simply the problem of the American city—which is gradually becoming a reservation for the unwanted, most of whom are black.

Today I address professionals, business leaders and researchers on how they can contribute with innovative ideas to achieve these ten pillars. These are as follows: 1) A nation where the rural and urban divide has reduced to a thin line. 2) A nation where there is equitable distribution and adequate access to energy and quality water. 3) A nation where agriculture, industry and the service sector work together in symphony. 4) A nation where education with value systems is not denied to any meritorious candidates because of societal or economic discrimination. 5) A nation which is the best destination for the most talented scholars, scientists and investors. 6) A nation where the best of healthcare is available to all. 7) A nation where the governance is responsive, transparent and corruption free. 8) A nation where poverty has been totally eradicated, illiteracy removed and crimes against women and children are absent and no one in the society feels alienated. 9) A nation that is prosperous, healthy, secure, peaceful and happy and follows a sustainable growth path. 10) A nation that is one of the best places to live in and is proud of its leadership.

There are five areas where India has core competencies for integrated action: (1) Agriculture and food processing (2) Reliable and quality electric power, surface transport and infrastructure for all parts of the country (3) Education and healthcare (4) Information and communication technology (5) Strategic sectors

leaders of the colonization movement endeavored to educate Negroes in mechanic arts, agriculture, science, and Biblical literature.

We have the money. We've just made choices about how to spend it. Over the years, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have restricted housing aid to the poor but expanded it to the affluent in the form of tax benefits for homeowners. Today, housing-related tax expenditures far outpace those for housing assistance. In 2008, the year Arleen was evicted from Thirteenth Street, federal expenditures for direct housing assistance totaled less than $40.2 billion, but homeowner tax benefits exceeded $171 billion. That number, $171 billion, was equivalent to the 2008 budgets for the Department of Education, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Agriculture combined. Each year, we spend three times what a universal housing voucher program is estimated to cost (in total) on homeowner benefits, like the mortgage-interest deduction and the capital-gains exclusion. Most federal housing subsidies benefit families with six-figure incomes. If we are going to spend the bulk of our public dollars on the affluent - at least when it comes to housing - we should own up to that decision and stop repeating the politicians' canard about one of the richest countries on the planet being unable to afford doing more. If poverty persists in America, it is not for lack of resources.

you view the current status of the human body as a whole, many countries, like the United States, now confront a novel paradox. On the one hand, more wealth and impressive advances in health care, sanitation, and education since the Industrial Revolution have dramatically improved billions of people’s health, especially in developed nations. Children born today are far less likely to die from infectious mismatch diseases caused by the Agricultural Revolution and they are much more likely to live longer, grow taller, and be generally healthier than children born in my grandfather’s generation. As a consequence, the world’s population tripled over the course of the twentieth century. But on the other hand, our bodies face new problems that were barely on anyone’s radar screen a few generations ago. People today are much more likely to get sick from new mismatch diseases such as type 2 diabetes, heart disease, osteoporosis, and colon cancer, which were either absent or much less common for most of human evolutionary history, including most of the agricultural era. To understand how and why all this happened—and how to address these new problems—requires considering the industrial era through the lens of evolution. How did the Industrial Revolution along with the growth of capitalism, medical science, and public health affect the way our bodies grow and function? In

Maury and I spent more than one month in Pakistan, talking with AID personnel and their Pakistani counterparts and learning about the conduct of the projects over the six-year period. Most importantly, we focused on the dialogue between senior U.S. embassy and mission personnel and those in the Pakistani government responsible for economic policy formulation. One day, he and I were asked to attend a “brown bag luncheon” with the senior mission staff. The idea was to be totally informal, put our feet on the desks and just chat about our impressions. Everyone was eager to learn what Maury thought about the program. Three important things emerged for me out of that discussion. 1. The mission director explained that he had held some very successful consultations and brainstorming sessions with senior Pakistani government leaders. He said the Pakistanis were open to his ideas for needed reform, listened carefully and took extensive notes during these meetings. Although there had been little concrete action to implement these recommendations to date, he was confident they were seriously considering them. Maury smiled and responded, “Yeah. They used to jerk me around the same way when I was in your position. The Paks are masters at that game. They know how to make you feel good. I doubt that they are serious. This is a government of inaction.” The mission director was crestfallen. 2. Then the program officer asked what Maury thought about the mix of projects that had been selected by the government of Pakistan and the mission for inclusion in the program for funding. Maury responded that the projects selected were “old friends” of his. He too, had focused on the same areas i.e. agriculture, health, and power generation and supply. That said, the development problems had not gone away. He gave the new program credit for identifying the same obstacles to economic development that had existed twenty years earlier. 3. Finally, the mission director asked Maury for his impressions of any major changes he sensed had occurred in Pakistan since his departure. Maury thought about that for a while. Then he offered perhaps the most prescient observation of the entire review. He said, when he served in Pakistan in the 1960s, he had found that the educated Pakistani visualized himself and his society as being an important part of the South-Asian subcontinent. “Today” he said, “after having lost East Pakistan, they seem to perceive themselves as being the eastern anchor of the Middle-East.” One wonders whether the Indian government understands this significant shift in its neighbor’s outlook and how important it is to work to reverse that world view among the Pakistanis for India’s own security andwell-being.

Maury and I spent more than one month in Pakistan, talking with AID personnel and their Pakistani counterparts and learning about the conduct of the projects over the six-year period. Most importantly, we focused on the dialogue between senior U.S. embassy and mission personnel and those in the Pakistani government responsible for economic policy formulation. One day, he and I were asked to attend a “brown bag luncheon” with the senior mission staff. The idea was to be totally informal, put our feet on the desks and just chat about our impressions. Everyone was eager to learn what Maury thought about the program. Three important things emerged for me out of that discussion. 1. The mission director explained that he had held some very successful consultations and brainstorming sessions with senior Pakistani government leaders. He said the Pakistanis were open to his ideas for needed reform, listened carefully and took extensive notes during these meetings. Although there had been little concrete action to implement these recommendations to date, he was confident they were seriously considering them. Maury smiled and responded, “Yeah. They used to jerk me around the same way when I was in your position. The Paks are masters at that game. They know how to make you feel good. I doubt that they are serious. This is a government of inaction.” The mission director was crestfallen. 2. Then the program officer asked what Maury thought about the mix of projects that had been selected by the government of Pakistan and the mission for inclusion in the program for funding. Maury responded that the projects selected were “old friends” of his. He too, had focused on the same areas i.e. agriculture, health, and power generation and supply. That said, the development problems had not gone away. He gave the new program credit for identifying the same obstacles to economic development that had existed twenty years earlier. 3. Finally, the mission director asked Maury for his impressions of any major changes he sensed had occurred in Pakistan since his departure. Maury thought about that for a while. Then he offered perhaps the most prescient observation of the entire review. He said, when he served in Pakistan in the 1960s, he had found that the educated Pakistani visualized himself and his society as being an important part of the South-Asian subcontinent. “Today” he said, “after having lost East Pakistan, they seem to perceive themselves as being the eastern anchor of the Middle-East.” One wonders whether the Indian government understands this significant shift in its neighbor’s outlook and how important it is to work to reverse that world view among the Pakistanis for India’s own security andwell-being.

While marriage rates for middle-class white women soared through the 1940s and 1950s, for black women, mid-twentieth century conditions were very different. Since emancipation, black women had married earlier and more often than their white counterparts. In the years directly after World War II, thanks to the return of soldiers, black marriage rates briefly increased further.66 However, as white women kept marrying in bigger numbers and at younger ages throughout the 1950s, black marriage rates began to decrease, and the age of first marriage to climb.67 By 1970, there had been a sharp reversal: Black women were not marrying nearly as often or as early as their white counterparts. It was nothing as benign as coincidence. While one of the bedrocks of the expansion of the middle class was the aggressive reassignment of white women to domestic roles within the idealized nuclear family, another was the exclusion of African-Americans from the opportunities and communities that permitted those nuclear families to flourish. Put more plainly, the economic benefits extended to the white middle class, both during the New Deal and in the post-World War II years, did not extend to African-Americans. Social Security, created in 1935, did not apply to either domestic laborers or agricultural workers, who tended to be African-Americans, or Asian or Mexican immigrants. Discriminatory hiring practices, the low percentages of black workers in the country’s newly strengthened labor unions, and the persistent (if slightly narrowed68) racial wage gap, along with questionable practices by the Veterans Administration, and the reality that many colleges barred the admission of black students, also meant that returning black servicemen had a far harder time taking advantage of the GI Bill’s promise of college education.69 Then there was housing. The suburbs that bloomed around American cities after the war, images of which are still summoned as symbols of midcentury familial prosperity, were built for white families. In William Levitt’s four enormous “Levittowns,” suburban developments which, thanks to government guarantees from the VA and the Federal Housing Association, provided low-cost housing to qualified veterans, there was not one black resident.70 Between 1934 and 1962, the government subsidized $120 billion in new housing; 98 percent of it for white families.

For the vast majority of our time on earth, our species did not buy its food or its clothing or its shelter or its education or its medical healing. We chased down our food, skinned rabbits and deer and buffalo for clothing, found caves and built shelters of buffalo hides attached to tree trunks, and carved limbs and even buffalo bones, and sought out plants that heal. Our elders told the important stories around camp-fires, healers studied plants for their powers and chanted to the heavens for theirs. In short, for 98 percent of our existence as hunter-gatherers, we did not consume. We created. Ten thousand years ago, in a creative discovery that has proven to be a mixed blessing indeed, we started to plant things. We no longer imitated the prairie in the way it seeded itself patiently each year: We hurried the process along and chose to do our own planting. We called this “agriculture.” Agriculture was not a moment of “pure progress” for humankind. It looked like a good deal—we could choose our diets no matter what the game were doing in our neighborhoods; we could stay home more and wander less; we could even have some people do the seeding and growing while others gathered in villages and then cities and were fed by the growers. But we paid a great price for this. Wes

Page 52-53: Classical Jewish society has no peasants, and in this it differs profoundly from earlier Jewish societies in the two centers, Palestine and Mesopotamia. It is difficult for us, in modern times, to understand what this means. We have to make an effort to imagine what serfdom was like; the enormous difference in literacy, let alone education, between village and town throughout this period; the incomparably greater freedom enjoyed by all the small minority who were not peasants – in order to realize that during the whole of the classical period [800-1790 AD.] the Jews, in spite of all the persecutions to which they were subjected, formed an integral part of the privileged classes. Jewish historiography, especially in English, is misleading on this point inasmuch as it tends to focus on Jewish poverty and anti-Jewish discrimination. Both were real enough at times; but the poorest Jewish craftsman, peddler, landlord’s steward or petty cleric was immeasurably better off than a serf. … [It is significant that] prior to the beginning of the great Jewish migration of modern times (around 1880), a large majority of all Jews were living in [areas [where serfdom persisted] and that their most important social function there was to mediate the oppression of the peasants on behalf of the nobility and the Crown. Everywhere, classical Judaism developed hatred and contempt for agriculture as an occupation and for peasants as a class, even more than for other Gentiles – a hatred of which I know no parallel in other societies.

all the coffee beans are cage-free and organically raised according to an individualized Montessori education plan before getting dumped into the roaster.

Agricultural education is still overwhelmingly about change and innovation, and "disruption," not what is sustainable and what will work in the long run. From the modernizing perspective, the student in my hay meadow was right. The current economics of farming are such that almost no genuinely sustainable farming is profitable at present. Farming for nature is economic suicide. Produce meat at a greater cost than intensively produced chicken or pork and you are considered an anachronism on the supermarket shelf.     I have to ignore my accounts in this bid for good husbandry and hope the rest of the world comes to its senses someday soon. Of course this is no basis for a sound system, but I decided years ago that if I had to work off the farm to top up our income, to enable me to look after our land properly, than I would. There is nothing new in having to adapt and earn a crust away from the farm. I know that if we are too proud, too stubborn, and too unbending, then we will be finished.

Our leading agricultural colleges still churn out "business-focused" young farmers, fired up with productive zeal. Students are taught to be at the cutting edge of the new farming, applying science and technology to control nature. They are taught to think about the land like economists. They are taught nothing about tradition, community, or ecological limits. Rachel Carson isn't on the curriculum. Different colleges and courses elsewhere churn out young ecologists who know nothing about farming or rural lives. Education is divided by specialism, and sorts the young people into two separate tribes who can barely understand each other.

LOVE IS THE FIRST CHEMISTRY; WAR IS THE FIRST HISTORY; DISCOVERY IS THE FIRST GEOGRAPHY; NATURE IS THE FIRST LANGUAGE; AGRICULTURE IS THE FIRST SCIENCE; BUSINESS IS THE FIRST MATHEMATICS; CULTURE IS THE FIRST ZOOLOGY; LAW IS THE FIRST PHYSICS; MEDICINE IS THE FIRST BIOLOGY; ENGINEERING IS THE FIRST EDUCATION; RELIGION IS THE FIRST GOD

Scientists have linked this alarming decline in large part to habitat loss. Monarch Watch, the University of Kansas’s education, conservation, and research program, estimates that each day, 6000 acres of monarch breeding habitat in the United States are converted to something else: housing or commercial developments, farms, roads, and other human uses. Even farms, which once invited milkweed to thrive between crops and along farm edges, are changing tactics and destroying milkweed. The presence of milkweed in agricultural fields (between crops and on field edges) declined 97 percent from 1999 to 2009 in Iowa, and 94 percent in Illinois. Each year, the migrating monarchs have fewer places to feed on nectar and lay their eggs. They are losing their habitat, losing their homes. Eviction, extinction.

Modern natural science experiences the emerging of seeds as a chemical process that is interpolated in terms of the grinding gears of the mechanistically viewed interaction between seeds, the condition of the soil, and thermal radiation. In this situation, the modern mind sees only mechanistic cause- and-effect relationships within chemical procedures that have particular effects following upon them. Modern natural science—chemistry no less than physics, biology no less than physics and chemistry—are and remain, so long as they exist, ‘mechanistic.’ Additionally, ‘dynamics’ is a mechanics of ‘power.’ How else could modern natural science ‘verify’ itself in ‘technology’ (as one says)? The technical efficaciousness and applicability of modern natural science is not, however, the subsequent proof of the ‘truth’ of science: rather, the practical technology of modern natural science is itself only possible because modern natural science as a whole, in its metaphysical essence, is itself already merely an application of ‘technology,’ where ‘technology’ means here something other than only what engineers bring about. The oft-quoted saying of Goethe’s—namely, that the fruitful alone is the true—is already nihilism. Indeed, when the time comes when we no longer merely fiddle around with artworks and literature in terms of their value for education or intellectual history, we should perhaps examine our so-called ‘classics’ more closely. Moreover, Goethe’s view of nature is in its essence no different from Newton’s; the former depends along with the latter on the ground of modern (and especially Leibnizian) metaphysics, which one finds present in every object and every process available to us living today. The fact that we, however, when considering a seed, still see how something closed emerges and, as emerging, comes forth, may seem insubstantial, outdated, and half-poetic compared to the perspective of the objective determination and explanation belonging to the modern understanding of the germination process. The agricultural chemist, but also the modern physicist, have, as the saying goes, ‘nothing to do’ with φύσις. Indeed, it would be a fool’s errand even to try to persuade them that they could have ‘something to do’ with the Greek experience of φύσις. Now, the Greek essence of φύσις is in no way a generalization of what those today would consider the naïve experience of the emerging of seeds and flowers and the emergence of the sun. Rather, to the contrary, the original experience of emerging and of coming-forth from out of the concealed and veiled is the relation to the ‘light’ in whose luminance the seed and the flower are first grasped in their emerging, and in which is seen the manner by which the seed ‘is’ in the sprouting, and the flower ‘is’ in the blooming.

Modern natural science experiences the emerging of seeds as a chemical process that is interpolated in terms of the grinding gears of the mechanistically viewed interaction between seeds, the condition of the soil, and thermal radiation. In this situation, the modern mind sees only mechanistic cause- and-effect relationships within chemical procedures that have particular effects following upon them. Modern natural science—chemistry no less than physics, biology no less than physics and chemistry—are and remain, so long as they exist, ‘mechanistic.’ Additionally, ‘dynamics’ is a mechanics of ‘power.’ How else could modern [89] natural science ‘verify’ itself in ‘technology’ (as one says)? The technical efficaciousness and applicability of modern natural science is not, however, the subsequent proof of the ‘truth’ of science: rather, the practical technology of modern natural science is itself only possible because modern natural science as a whole, in its metaphysical essence, is itself already merely an application of ‘technology,’ where ‘technology’ means here something other than only what engineers bring about. The oft-quoted saying of Goethe’s—namely, that the fruitful alone is the true—is already nihilism. Indeed, when the time comes when we no longer merely fiddle around with artworks and literature in terms of their value for education or intellectual history, we should perhaps examine our so-called ‘classics’ more closely. Moreover, Goethe’s view of nature is in its essence no different from Newton’s; the former depends along with the latter on the ground of modern (and especially Leibnizian) metaphysics, which one finds present in every object and every process available to us living today. The fact that we, however, when considering a seed, still see how something closed emerges and, as emerging, comes forth, may seem insubstantial, outdated, and half-poetic compared to the perspective of the objective determination and explanation belonging to the modern understanding of the germination process. The agricultural chemist, but also the modern physicist, have, as the saying goes, ‘nothing to do’ with φύσις. Indeed, it would be a fool’s errand even to try to persuade them that they could have ‘something to do’ with the Greek experience of φύσις. Now, the Greek essence of φύσις is in no way a generalization of what those today would consider the naïve experience of the emerging of seeds and flowers and the emergence of the sun. Rather, to the contrary, the original experience of emerging and of coming-forth from out of the concealed and veiled is the relation to the ‘light’ in whose luminance the [90] seed and the flower are first grasped in their emerging, and in which is seen the manner by which the seed ‘is’ in the sprouting, and the flower ‘is’ in the blooming.

When Leopold II began his great work, which today finds its culmination, he presented himself to you not as a conqueror but as a bringer of civilization. The Congo was endowed with railways, roads, shipping and air connections. Our medical facilities have freed you from many devastating diseases. Many well-equipped hospitals have been established. Agriculture has been improved and modernized. Great cities have been built. Living conditions and hygiene have improved. Mission and state schools have brought education on a large scale.

a reliable agricultural base, and a highly developed education system.

At a Gates Foundation conference, former US president Barack Obama declared, “If you had to choose one moment in history in which to be born, and you didn’t know in advance whether you were going to be male or female, which country you were going to be from, what your status was, you’d choose right now.” He observes that the world has never been “healthier, or wealthier, or better educated, or in many ways more tolerant, or less violent, than it is today.” As a species, we’re moving far beyond the survival mentality of Caveman Brain. We’re leaving behind the standards of behavior that defined “normal” in the last century. A critical mass of people is using the human superpower—unique in evolutionary history—to reshape the tissue of their own brains. Bliss Brain is a wonderful-feeling state, but when practiced consistently, it leads to trait change, as neural pathways are repatterned in much healthier ways. This isn’t simply helping us feel better as individuals. It’s contributing to Jump Time in collective planetary evolution. Just as the Renaissance of the 1300s changed art, law, education, politics, religion, agriculture, science, and every other facet of human existence, the compassion produced by Bliss Brain transforms the material reality in which we live. This is the most exciting time in all of history to be alive. As we as a species jump to the next level of flourishing, we are unlocking creative potential the world has never known before. From changing our minds to changing our brains to changing our societies to solving global problems, we’re ushering in a completely different future for the planet.

engineering projects could have benefits beyond infrastructure, namely providing access to better education, jobs, agriculture, and health.

IRCC Announces Eligible Programs for PGWPs Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) has updated its guidelines regarding the programs eligible for a Post-Graduation Work Permit (PGWP). As of November 1, international graduates applying for a PGWP must meet additional field of study requirements to qualify for this essential work permit. Eligible Fields of Study for PGWPs The eligible fields of study for the PGWP correspond to the occupation-based Express Entry categories introduced by IRCC in 2023. These categories are aligned with national labor market demands and include the following: • Agriculture and Agri-Food • Healthcare • Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) • Trade • Transport Eligible programs in these fields are classified using the Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP), a systematic approach to describing and categorizing educational programs in Canada, akin to the National Occupation Classification (NOC) system used for job classification. Below is a summary of selected instructional programs eligible for the PGWP, along with their respective CIP codes: CIP 2021 Title CIP 2021 Code Field of Study Category Agricultural business and management, general 01.0101 Agriculture and agri-food Animal/livestock husbandry and production 01.0302 Agriculture and agri-food Plant nursery operations and management 01.0606 Agriculture and agri-food Animal health 01.0903 Agriculture and agri-food Agronomy and crop science 01.1102 Agriculture and agri-food Special education and teaching, general 13.1001 Healthcare Exercise physiology 26.0908 Healthcare Physical therapy assistant 51.0806 Healthcare Polysomnography 51.0917 Healthcare Cytotechnology/cytotechnologist 51.1002 Healthcare Computer programming/programmer, general 11.0201 STEM Chemical engineering 14.0701 STEM Engineering mechanics 14.1101 STEM Water, wetlands and marine resources management 03.0205 STEM Computer graphics 11.0803 STEM Electrician 46.0302 Trade Heating, air conditioning, ventilation and refrigeration maintenance technology/technician 47.0201 Trade Machine tool technology/machinist 48.0501 Trade Insulator 46.0414 Trade Plumbing technology/plumber 46.0503 Trade Heavy equipment maintenance technology/technician 47.0302 Transport Air traffic controller 49.0105 Transport Truck and bus driver/commercial vehicle operator and instructor 49.0205 Transport Flight instructor 49.0108 Transport Transportation and materials moving, other 49.9999 Transport

Beyond One-Way ANOVA The approach described in the preceding section is called one-way ANOVA. This scenario is easily generalized to accommodate more than one independent variable. These independent variables are either discrete (called factors) or continuous (called covariates). These approaches are called n-way ANOVA or ANCOVA (the “C” indicates the presence of covariates). Two way ANOVA, for example, allows for testing of the effect of two different independent variables on the dependent variable, as well as the interaction of these two independent variables. An interaction effect between two variables describes the way that variables “work together” to have an effect on the dependent variable. This is perhaps best illustrated by an example. Suppose that an analyst wants to know whether the number of health care information workshops attended, as well as a person’s education, are associated with healthy lifestyle behaviors. Although we can surely theorize how attending health care information workshops and a person’s education can each affect an individual’s healthy lifestyle behaviors, it is also easy to see that the level of education can affect a person’s propensity for attending health care information workshops, as well. Hence, an interaction effect could also exist between these two independent variables (factors). The effects of each independent variable on the dependent variable are called main effects (as distinct from interaction effects). To continue the earlier example, suppose that in addition to population, an analyst also wants to consider a measure of the watershed’s preexisting condition, such as the number of plant and animal species at risk in the watershed. Two-way ANOVA produces the results shown in Table 13.4, using the transformed variable mentioned earlier. The first row, labeled “model,” refers to the combined effects of all main and interaction effects in the model on the dependent variable. This is the global F-test. The “model” row shows that the two main effects and the single interaction effect, when considered together, are significantly associated with changes in the dependent variable (p < .000). However, the results also show a reduced significance level of “population” (now, p = .064), which seems related to the interaction effect (p = .076). Although neither effect is significant at conventional levels, the results do suggest that an interaction effect is present between population and watershed condition (of which the number of at-risk species is an indicator) on watershed wetland loss. Post-hoc tests are only provided separately for each of the independent variables (factors), and the results show the same homogeneous grouping for both of the independent variables. Table 13.4 Two-Way ANOVA Results As we noted earlier, ANOVA is a family of statistical techniques that allow for a broad range of rather complex experimental designs. Complete coverage of these techniques is well beyond the scope of this book, but in general, many of these techniques aim to discern the effect of variables in the presence of other (control) variables. ANOVA is but one approach for addressing control variables. A far more common approach in public policy, economics, political science, and public administration (as well as in many others fields) is multiple regression (see Chapter 15). Many analysts feel that ANOVA and regression are largely equivalent. Historically, the preference for ANOVA stems from its uses in medical and agricultural research, with applications in education and psychology. Finally, the ANOVA approach can be generalized to allow for testing on two or more dependent variables. This approach is called multiple analysis of variance, or MANOVA. Regression-based analysis can also be used for dealing with multiple dependent variables, as mentioned in Chapter 17.

Known as Naxalites...they attacked "class enemies"- big landlords, policemen, bureaucrats, and "liberated" territories which they hoped would form bases for an eventual assault on the cities, as had happened in China. The Indian government responded brutally, killing and torturing thousands. Driven underground, the Naxalite movement splintered and remained dormant for many years. In the 1990s, when India began to move towards a free market, the Naxalite movement revived in some of the poorest and most populous Indian states. Part of the reason for this is that successive Indian governments have steadily reduced subsidies for agriculture, public health, education, and poverty eradication, exposing large sections of the population to disease, debt, hunger and starvation. Almost three thousand farmers committed suicide in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh after the government, advised by McKinsey, cut agricultural subsidies in an attempt to initiate farmers into the world of unregulated markets. In recent years, Naxalite movements, which have long organized landless, low-caste peasants in Bihar and Andhra Pradesh, have grown quickly in parts of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh- where an enfeebled Indian state is increasingly absent- to the extent that police and intelligence officials in India now speak anxiously of an unbroken belt of Communist-dominated territory from Nepal to South India.

Consider for a moment the problem of obesity among children in the most economically developed countries. A business executive may frame the issue as one of market potential for new lines of food and clothing, but an educator may frame it as a problem of learning deficits, behavioral disorders, and long-term development issues. A scientist may frame the obesity problem as a population-growth rate that has outstripped agricultural activity, and a sociologist might frame the problem as inadequate family and social structures. An economist may frame the same problem in terms of insufficient purchasing power or the inequitable distribution of agricultural commodities. Each of us frames our strategic problem according to our own experience and what we “know.” Accordingly, we proceed to make assumptions that inform and influence our decision making. Figure 12.1 illustrates this dynamic cycle.

China, despite many imperfections in its economic and political system, has been the most rapidly growing nation of the past three decades. Chinese poverty until Mao Zedong’s death had nothing to do with Chinese culture; it was due to the disastrous way Mao organized the economy and conducted politics. In the 1950s, he promoted the Great Leap Forward, a drastic industrialization policy that led to mass starvation and famine. In the 1960s, he propagated the Cultural Revolution, which led to the mass persecution of intellectuals and educated people—anyone whose party loyalty might be doubted. This again led to terror and a huge waste of the society’s talent and resources. In the same way, current Chinese growth has nothing to do with Chinese values or changes in Chinese culture; it results from a process of economic transformation unleashed by the reforms implemented by Deng Xiaoping and his allies, who, after Mao Zedong’s death, gradually abandoned socialist economic policies and institutions, first in agriculture and then in industry. Just

Gates put it to me this way: “For good stuff to happen, it requires a lot of things to go well—you need many pieces to get stability right.” None of it is going to happen overnight, but we need to work with the forces of order that do still exist in the World of Disorder to start building a different trajectory, beginning with all the basics: basic education, basic infrastructure—roads, ports, electricity, telecom, mobile banking—basic agriculture, and basic governance. The goal, said Gates, is to get these frail states to a level of stability where enough women and girls are getting educated and empowered for population growth to stabilize, where farmers can feed their families, and where you “start to get a reverse brain drain” as young people feel that they have a chance to connect to and contribute and benefit from today’s global flows by staying at home and not emigrating. Believe

Japan, a country that had done its best to have no contact with strangers and to seal out the rest of the world. Its economy and politics were dominated by feudal agriculture and a Confucian hierarchical social structure, and they were steadily declining. Merchants were the lowest social class, and trading with foreigners was actually forbidden except for limited contact with China and the Dutch. But then Japan had an unexpected encounter with a stranger—Commodore Matthew Perry—who burst in on July 8, 1853, demanding that Japan’s ports be open to America for trade and insisting on better treatment for shipwrecked sailors. His demands were rebuffed, but Perry came back a year later with a bigger fleet and more firepower. He explained to the Japanese the virtues of trading with other countries, and eventually they signed the Treaty of Kanagawa on March 31, 1854, opening the Japanese market to foreign trade and ending two hundred years of near isolation. The encounter shocked the Japanese political elites, forcing them to realize just how far behind the United States and other Western nations Japan had fallen in military technology. This realization set in motion an internal revolution that toppled the Tokugawa Shogunate, which had ruled Tokyo in the name of the emperor since 1603, and brought Emperor Meiji, and a coalition of reformers, in his place. They chose adaptation by learning from those who had defeated them. They launched a political, economic, and social transformation of Japan, based on the notion that if they wanted to be as strong as the West they had to break from their current cultural norms and make a wholesale adoption of Western science, technology, engineering, education, art, literature, and even clothing and architecture. It turned out to be more difficult than they thought, but the net result was that by the late nineteenth century Japan had built itself into a major industrial power with the heft to not only reverse the unequal economic treaties imposed on it by Western powers but actually defeat one of those powers—Russia—in a war in 1905. The Meiji Restoration made Japan not only more resilient but also more powerful.

There are many facets to the decline in fairness and opportunity in American life. Perhaps the worst are the conditions now imposed upon young children born into the underclass and subjected to the recent evolution of the educational system. They are related, and they reinforce each other; their combined result is to condemn tens of millions of children, particularly those born into the new underclass, to a life of hardship and unfairness. For any young child whose parents don’t have money, or who is the child of a migrant agricultural worker and/or an illegal immigrant, prenatal care, nursery, day care, after school, school nutrition, and foster-care systems are nothing short of appalling. And then comes school itself. The “American dream”, stated simply, is that no matter how poor or humble your origins—even if you never knew your parents—you have a shot at a decent life. America’s promise is that anyone willing to work hard can do better over time, and have at least a reasonable life for themselves and their own children. You could expect to do better than your parents, and even be able to help them as they grew old. More than ever before, the key to such a dream is a good education. The rise of information technology, and the opening of Asian economies, means that only a small portion of America’s population can make a good living through unskilled or manual labour. But instead of elevating the educational system and the opportunities it should provide, American politicians, and those who follow their lead around the globe, have been going in exactly the wrong direction. As a result, we are developing not a new class system, but, without exaggeration, a new caste system—a society in which the circumstances of your birth determine your entire life. As a result, the dream of opportunity is dying. Increasingly, the most important determinant of a child’s life prospects—future income, wealth, educational level, even health and life expectancy—is totally arbitrary and unfair. It’s also very simple. A child’s future is increasingly determined by his or her parents’ wealth, not by his or her intelligence or energy. To be sure, there are a number of reasons for this. Income is correlated with many other things, and it’s therefore difficult to isolate the impact of individual factors. Children in poor households are more likely to grow up in single-parent versus two-parent households, exposed to drugs and alcohol, with one or both parents in prison, with their immigration status questionable, and more likely to have problems with diet and obesity. Culture and race play a role: Asian children have far higher school graduation rates, test scores, and grades than all other groups, including whites, in the US; Latinos, the lowest.

However, it still has a backward agricultural sector of 62 per cent of the people, where there are farmer suicides because of inability to repay loans. There is a national unemployment rate that is of over 15 per cent of the adult labour force, a prevalence of child labour arising out of nearly 50 per cent of children not making it to school beyond standard five, a deeply malfunctioning primary and secondary educational system, and 300 million illiterates and 250 million people in dire poverty.

The world’s socioeconomic landscape has been drastically altered in the last three decades. The list of changes—indeed, of achievements—is as long as it is surprising: 84 percent of the world’s population is now literate, compared to 75 percent in 1990. University education is up, and even average scores on intelligence tests all over the world are now higher. Meanwhile, combat deaths are down—by more than 40 percent since 2000. Life expectancy in countries most hard-hit by the HIV/AIDS pandemic is starting to rise again. And we are providing for our agricultural needs better than ever: since 2000, cereal production in the developing world has increased twice as fast as population.

The German stamp on Wisconsin endures in the state's commitment to efficient agriculture, hard work, education, culture, and to good citizenship and political freedom - all of which were an integral part of the German immigrant's language.

the Handbook of Economics series (which has volumes on agriculture, development, education, labor, and many other sectors), the Annual Review of Economics, and the Journal of Economic Perspectives are all good sources for reviews

In comparison with the mode of life of whole millennia of mankind we present-day men live in a very immoral age: the power of custom is astonishingly enfeebled and the moral sense so rarefied and lofty it may be described as having more or less evaporated. That is why the fundamental insights into the origin of morality are so difficult for us latecomers, and even when we have acquired them we find it impossible to enunciate them, because they sound so uncouth or because they seem to slander morality! This is, for example, already the case with the chief proposition: morality is nothing other (therefore no more!) than obedience to customs, of whatever kind they may be; customs, however, are the traditional way of behaving and evaluating. In things in which no tradition commands there is no morality; and the less life is determined by tradition, the smaller the circle of morality. The free human being is immoral because in all things he is determined to depend upon himself and not upon a tradition: in all the original conditions of mankind, 'evil' signifies the same as 'individual', 'free', 'capricious', 'unusual', 'unforeseen', 'incalculable'. Judged by the standard of these conditions, if an action is performed not because tradition commands it but for other motives (because of its usefulness to the individual, for example), even indeed for precisely the motives which once founded the tradition, it is called immoral and is felt to be so by him who performed it: for it was not performed in obedience to tradition. What is tradition? A higher authority which one obeys, not because it commands what is useful to us, but because it commands. What distinguishes this feeling in the presence of tradition from the feeling of fear in general? It is fear in the presence of a higher intellect which here commands, of an incomprehensible, indefinite power, of something more than personal there is superstition in this fear. Originally all education and care of health, marriage, cure of sickness, agriculture, war, speech and silence, traffic with one another and with the gods belonged within the domain of morality: they demanded one observe prescriptions without thinking of oneself as an individual. Originally, therefore, everything was custom, and whoever wanted to elevate himself above it had to become lawgiver and medicine man and a kind of demi-god: that is to say, he had to make customs a dreadful, mortally dangerous thing! Who is the most moral man? First, he who obeys the law most frequently: who, like the Brahmin12, bears a consciousness of the law with him everywhere and into every minute division of time, so that he is continually inventive in creating opportunities for obeying the law. Then, he who obeys it even in the most difficult cases. The most moral man is he who sacrifices the most to custom: what, however, are the greatest sacrifices? The way in which this question is answered determines the development of several divers kinds of morality; but the most important distinction remains that which divides the morality of most frequent obedience from that of the most difficult obedience.

This table only counts physical health effects due to disruptions that took place in the Illusion of Control phase. It considers both short-run and long-run effects. Each of the claimed effects is based on a published study about that effect. First on the list is the disruption to vaccination programs for measles, diphtheria, cholera, and polio, which were either cancelled or reduced in scope in some 70 countries. That disruption was caused by travel restrictions. Western experts could not travel, and within many poor countries travel and general activity were also halted in the early days of the Illusion of Control phase. This depressive effect on vaccination programs for the poor is expected to lead to large loss of life in the coming years. The poor countries paying this cost are most countries in Africa, the poorer nations in Asia, such as India, Indonesia and Myanmar, and the poorer countries in Latin America. The second listed effect in the table relates to schooling. An estimated 90% of the world’s children have had their schooling disrupted, often for months, which reduces their lifetime opportunities and social development through numerous direct and indirect pathways. The UN children’s organisation, UNICEF, has released several reports on just how bad the consequences of this will be in the coming decades.116 The third element in Joffe’s table refers to reports of economic and social primitivisation in poor countries. Primitivisation, also seen after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, is just what it sounds like: a regression away from specialisation, trade and economic advancement through markets to more isolated and ‘primitive’ choices, including attempted economic self-sufficiency and higher fertility. Due to diminished labour market prospects, curtailed educational activities and decreased access to reproductive health services, populations in the Illusion of Control phase began reverting to having more children precisely in those countries where there is already huge pressure on resources. The fourth and fifth elements listed in the table reflect the biggest disaster of this period, namely the increase in extreme poverty and expected famines in poor countries. Over the 20 years leading up to 2020, gradual improvements in economic conditions around the world had significantly eased poverty and famines. Now, international organisations are signalling rapid deterioration in both. The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) now expects the world to have approximately an additional 100 million extremely poor people facing starvation as a result of Covid policies. That will translate into civil wars, waves of refugees and huge loss of life. The last two items in Joffe’s table relate to the effect of lower perinatal and infant care and impoverishment. Millions of preventable deaths are now expected due to infections and weakness in new mothers and young infants, and neglect of other health problems like malaria and tuberculosis that affect people in all walks of life. The whole of the poor world has suffered fewer than one million deaths from Covid. The price to be paid in human losses in these countries through hunger and health neglect caused by lockdowns and other restrictions is much, much larger. All in the name of stopping Covid.

The government must begin to withdraw from a whole series of programs that are outside its constitutional mandate—from social welfare programs, education, public power, agriculture, public housing, urban renewal and all the other activities that can be better performed by lower levels of government or by private institutions or by individuals. I do not suggest that the federal government drop all of these programs overnight. But I do suggest that we establish, by law, a rigid timetable for a staged withdrawal.

As an Iranian woman in the West, I see and share a lot of concern about the fate of my country’s women. But I’m also disturbed at how commonly the Western people I know view female Iranians as either helpless victims or brainwashed enemies—even if they personally know vibrant, successful, multicultural Persian women. In both Iran and the West it’s still widely assumed that males have always been the authors of Iranian culture, business, law, religion, art, education, literature, agriculture, science, architecture, philosophy, social mores, and the writing of history. But of course Iranian women have always been creative, influential players in all of these fields. They’ve always had their own goals, values, passions, and accomplishments, whatever challenges they've faced, and their contributions have enriched the world. As I recall the commonly obscured female half of my heritage, I want to paint a big picture of women’s initiatives in every period of Iranian history. Of course many excellent authors and scholars have been working on that for decades, and their work has helped to dispel traditional bias. But I and my Western male co-author hope to make our own contribution. We want to link the insights and accounts of many Iranian women together, show their significance for the world, and do it through a stream of stories that people of all cultures might enjoy.

Tana Africa focuses its efforts on food, beverages and personal care, fast-moving consumer goods, retail and education, and will also consider select opportunities in healthcare, consumer financial services, media, logistics and agriculture. ‘We are Africans, and we would like to invest in Africa,’ says Nicky. ‘So we are busy looking for things to do.

women must become enlightened or educated, because being enlightened encompasses all the fields of human science: Physiology, Geology, Geography, Chemistry, Physics, Astronomy, Engineering, Agriculture, Geometry, History, Music, and Painting...Education is a beautiful and necessary thing.

We know that if engineers, scientists or doctors are paid ten or a hundred times more than a labourer, and if a weaver earns three times more than an agricultural labourer, and ten times more than a girl in a match factory, it is not by reason of their 'cost of production', but by reason of a monopoly of education, or a monopoly of industry. Engineers, scientists and doctors merely exploit their capital - their diplomas - as middle-class employers exploit a factory, or as nobles used to exploit their titles of nobility.

The rabbinical form of Judaism that emerged from this movement emphasized literacy and the skills to read and interpret the Torah. Even before the destruction of the temple, the Pharisee high priest Joshua ben Gamla issued a requirement in 63 or 65 AD that every Jewish father should send his sons to school at age six or seven. The goal of the Pharisees was universal male literacy so that everyone could understand and obey Jewish laws. Between 200 and 600 AD, this goal was largely attained, as Judaism became transformed into a religion based on study of the Torah (the first five books of the Bible) and the Talmud (a compendium of rabbinic commentaries). This remarkable educational reform was not accomplished without difficulty. Most Jews at the time earned their living by farming, as did everyone else. It was expensive for farmers to educate their sons and the education had no practical value. Many seem to have been unwilling to do so because the Talmud is full of imprecations against the ammei ha-aretz, which in Talmudic usage means boorish country folk who refuse to educate their children. Fathers are advised on no account to let their daughters marry the untutored sons of the ammei ha-aretz. The scorned country folk could escape this hectoring without totally abandoning Judaism. They could switch to a form of Judaism Lite developed by a diaspora Jew, one that did not require literacy or study of the Torah and was growing in popularity throughout this period. The diaspora Jew was Paul of Tarsus, and Christianity, the religion he developed, seamlessly wraps Judaism around the mystery cult creed of an agricultural vegetation god who dies in the fall and is resurrected in the spring.

Such an attitude does not come from technique or technology. It does not come from education; in more than two decades in universities I have rarely seen it. It does not come even from principle. It comes from a passion that is culturally prepared—a passion for excellence and order that is handed down to young people by older people whom they respect and love. When we destroy the possibility of that succession, we will have gone far toward destroying ourselves.

The Jews did not “take Palestine.” There was no Palestine for the taking. There was no state, no united governance, not much industry, or a healthcare system, or agriculture, economic or education systems. There was certainly no democracy, equality, safety, or prosperity for the people living there.

Stringent pollution control measures are imperative to mitigate the impact of industrial and agricultural pollutants on freshwater habitats. This requires the implementation and enforcement of environmental regulations, investment in wastewater treatment infrastructure, and the promotion of eco-friendly agricultural practices. In parallel, efforts to restore degraded ecosystems can aid in revitalizing habitats and providing a lifeline for endangered fish species.

The First Industrial Revolution (1700s–1800s) Beginning in the UK in the 1700s, freeing people to be inventive and productive and providing them with capital led many societies to shift to new machine-based manufacturing processes, creating the first sustained and widespread period of productivity improvement in thousands of years. These improvements began with agricultural inventions that increased productivity, which led to a population boom and a secular shift toward urbanization as the labor intensity of farming declined. As people flocked to cities, industry benefited from the steadily increasing supply of labor, creating a virtuous cycle and leading to shifts in wealth and power both within and between nations. The new urban populations needed new types of goods and services, which required the government to get bigger and spend money on things like housing, sanitation, and education, as well as on the infrastructure for the new industrial capitalist system, such as courts, regulators, and central banks. Power moved into the hands of central government bureaucrats and the capitalists who controlled the means of production. Geopolitically, these developments most helped the UK, which pioneered many of the most important innovations. The UK caught up to the Netherlands in output per capita around 1800, before overtaking them in the mid-19th century, when the British Empire approached its peak share of world output (around 20 percent).

I do not know if my mother broke off her studies at Charles University only because her parents’ money had run out. How far was she pushed to emigrate to Palestine by the violent hatred of Jews that filled the streets of Europe in the mid-1930s and spread to the universities, or to what extent did she come here as the result of her education in a Tar-buth school and her membership in a Zionist youth movement? What did she hope to find here, what did she find, what did she not find? What did Tel Aviv and Jerusalem look like to someone who had grown up in a mansion in Rovno and arrived straight from the Gothic beauty of Prague? What did spoken Hebrew sound like to the sensitive ears of a young lady coming with the refined, booklearned Hebrew of the Tar-buth school and possessing a finely tuned linguistic sensibility? How did my young mother respond to the sand dunes, the motor pumps in the citrus groves, the rocky hillsides, the archaeology field trips, the biblical ruins and remains of the Second Temple period, the headlines in the newspapers and the cooperative dairy produce, the wadis, the hamsins, the domes of the walled convents, the ice-cold water from the jarra, the cultural evenings with accordion and harmonica music, the cooperative bus drivers in their khaki shorts, the sounds of English (the language of the rulers of the country), the dark orchards, the minarets, strings of camels carrying building sand, Hebrew watchmen, suntanned pioneers from the kibbutz, construction workers in shabby caps? How much was she repelled, or attracted, by tempestuous nights of arguments, ideological conflicts, and courtships, Saturday afternoon outings, the fire of party politics, the secret intrigues of the various underground groups and their sympathizers, the enlisting of volunteers for agricultural tasks, the dark blue nights punctuated by howls of jackals and echoes of distant gunfire?

The Negro is not the man farthest down. The condition of the coloured farmer in the most backward parts of the Southern States in America, even where he has the least education and the least encouragement, is incomparably better than the condition and opportunities of the agricultural population in Sicily.