I know even less about wine than I do about jazz but I enjoy it as much, although fortunately not in the same quantity. There was a nice piece by Adam Gopnik on the wine, “Through a Glass Darkly,” in the September 6, issue of the New Yorker. Here is a link thanks to the commentor below.
There is a lot of discussion on Bordeaux, my favorite region. Adam critiques the naïve views of Robert Parker, who tried to quantify wine raking in the 1970s, much to the pleasure of American wine buyers and displeasure of French wine lovers. As Adam writes, “(Parker) was uncannily successful because (he was an) apostle of a radical American empiricism – an insistence that facts and numbers could show you what was really going on, against everything tradition told you…The debate is not about whether the numbers are right but whether it is right to have numbers.”
Adam continues, “…the French connoisseur believes that, with his glass of a turpentinery Gascon wine, he is in a truer relation to history than the American searching for his jammy high scorers.”
This reminds me of similar issues that came up in cognitive psychology. Jean Piaget, the Swiss (French speaking) psychologist who many feel invented the developmental approach, chose certain tasks that were not being taught in the Genevan school system to test children’s problem solving ability. This was the same guy who was more interested in the mistakes (than correct answers) children made on IQ tests to better understand their thought processes. Some American psychologists who followed Piaget devised ways to teach children so they could perform Piaget’s tasks at an earlier age. The goal was to determine how young can we induce success on this task.
Piaget was dismayed and amused by how these psychologists missed his point, driven by empiricism. He referred to this as the “American” problem. Piaget felt that children should spent time at each developmental stage to fully absorb it and not be hurried through stages prematurely. He felt that not all Americans were wrong and his educational hero was John Dewey who also felt that education should focus on experience and be comprehensive.
It is the same simple faith in numbers that has led many states, including mine, Massachusetts, to develop a test as a sole measure of the quality of a student's education. Now the state tax payers' money is spent on testing rather than programs to actually teach stuff and the shrinking local school budgets are forced to be applied to preparation for these tests, to stay competitive for outside funding, rather than using the same time and money to prepare students to be successful in life.
Now like most things, I feel it is matter of balance. There is a place for simplicity and numbers and a place for “tradition, chemistry, and complexity.” The trick is picking your spots. I think the recent NBA title series showed that that numbers are not always the answers by themselves, but also the intangibles matter. Having taught how to use numbers in research, I tend to err on the side of complexity.
I believe this is the link you are looking for: http://ny-2.live.advance.net/printable/?critics/040906crat_atlarge
Posted by: Wine Lover | September 17, 2004 at 12:38 AM