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Monday, May 20th, 2024
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| 8:00a | Hear Leo Tolstoy Read From His Last Major Work in Four Languages, 1909
In years past, we’ve brought you rare recordings of Sigmund Freud and Jorge Luis Borges speaking in English. Today we present a remarkable series of recordings of the great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy reading a passage from his book, Wise Thoughts for Every Day, in four languages: English, German, French and Russian. Wise Thoughts For Every Day was Tolstoy’s last major work. It first appeared in 1903 as The Thoughts of Wise Men, and was revised and renamed several times before the author’s death in 1910. Eventually banned by the Soviet regime, the book reappeared in 1995 as a bestseller in Russia. Then, in 1997, the text was translated into English by Peter Sekirin and published as A Calendar of Wisdom. The book is a collection of passages from a diverse group of thinkers, ranging from Laozi to Ralph Waldo Emerson. “I felt that I have been elevated to great spiritual and moral heights by communication with the best and wisest people whose books I read and whose thoughts I selected for my Circle of Reading,” wrote Tolstoy in his diary. As an old man (watch video of him shortly before he died) Tolstoy rejected his great works of fiction, believing that it was more important to give moral and spiritual guidance to the common people. “To create a book for the masses, for millions of people,” wrote Tolstoy, “is incomparably more important and fruitful than to compose a novel of the kind which diverts some members of the wealthy classes for a short time, and then is forever forgotten.” Tolstoy arranged his book for the masses as a calendar, with a series of readings for each day of the year. For example under the date, May 9, Tolstoy selects brief passages from Immanuel Kant, Solon, and the Koran. Underneath he writes, “We cannot stop on the way to self-perfection. As soon as you notice that you have a bigger interest in the outer world than in yourself, then you should know that the world moves behind you.” The audio recordings above were made at the writer’s home in Yasnaya Polyana on October 31, 1909, when he was 81 years old. He died just over a year later. Tolstoy apparently translated the passage himself. The English version sounds a bit like the King James Bible. The words are hard to make out in the recording, but he says: That the object of life is self-perfection, the perfection of all immortal souls, that this is the only object of my life, is seen to be correct by the fact alone that every other object is essentially a new object. Therefore, the question whether thou hast done what thou shoudst have done is of immense importance, for the only meaning of thy life is in doing in this short term allowed thee, that which is desired of thee by He or That which has sent thee into life. Art thou doing the right thing? Tolstoy is known to have made several voice recordings in his life, dating back to 1895 when he made two wax cylinder recordings for Julius Block. Russian literary scholar Andrew D. Kaufman has collected three more vintage recordings (all in Russian) including Tolstoy’s lesson to peasant children on his estate, a reading of his fairy tale “The Wolf,” and an excerpt from his essay “I Cannot be Silent.” Related Content: The Last Days of Leo Tolstoy Captured on Video Leo Tolstoy Creates a List of the 50+ Books That Influenced Him Most (1891) Leo Tolstoy’s 17 “Rules of Life:” Wake at 5am, Help the Poor, & Only Two Brothel Visits Per Month |
| 9:00a | Isaac Asimov Predicts the Future of Online Education in 1988–and It’s Now Coming True in the Age of AI & Smartphones
“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” Though that line probably originated with a Canadian novelist called Grant Allen, it’s long been popularly attributed to his more colorful nineteenth-century contemporary Mark Twain. It isn’t hard to understand why it now has so much traction as a social media-ready quote, though during much of the period between Allen’s day and our own, many must have found it practically unintelligible. The industrialized world of the twentieth century attempted to make education and schooling synonymous, an ambition sufficiently wrongheaded that, by the nineteen-eighties, no less powerful a mind than Isaac Asimov was lamenting it on national television. “In the old days you used to have tutors for children,” Asimov tells Bill Moyers in a 1988 World of Ideas interview. “But how many people could afford to hire a pedagogue? Most children went uneducated. Then we reached the point where it was absolutely necessary to educate everybody. The only way we could do it is to have one teacher for a great many students and, in order to organize the situation properly, we gave them a curriculum to teach from.” And yet “the number of teachers is far greater than the number of good teachers.” The ideal solution, personal tutors for all, would be made possible by personal computers, “each of them hooked up to enormous libraries where anyone can ask any question and be given answers.” At the time, this wasn’t an obvious future for non-science-fiction-visionaries to imagine. “Well, what if I want to learn only about baseball?” asks a faintly skeptical Moyers. “You learn all you want about baseball,” Asimov replies, “because the more you learn about baseball the more you might grow interested in mathematics to try to figure out what they mean by those earned run averages and the batting averages and so on. You might, in the end, become more interested in math than baseball if you follow your own bent.” And indeed, similarly equipped with a personal-computer-as-tutor, “someone who is interested in mathematics may suddenly find himself very enticed by the problem of how you throw a curve ball.”
The trouble was how to get every household a computer, which was still seen by many in 1988 as an extravagant, not necessarily useful purchase. Three and a half decades later, you see a computer in the hand of nearly every man, woman, and child in the developed countries (and many developing ones as well). This is the technological reality that gave rise to Khan Academy, which offers free online education in math, sciences, literature, history, and much else besides. In the interview clip above, its founder Sal Khan remembers how, when his internet-tutoring project was first gaining momentum, it occurred to him that “maybe we’re in the right moment in history that something like this could become what Isaac Asimov envisioned.” More recently, Khan has been promoting the educational use of a technology at the edge of even Asimov’s vision. Just days ago, he published the book Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That’s a Good Thing) and made a video with his teenage son demonstrating how the latest version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT — sounding, it must be said, uncannily like Scarlett Johansson in the now-prophetic-seeming Her — can act as a geometry tutor. Not that it works only, or even primarily, for kids in school: “That’s another trouble with education as we now have it,” as Asimov says. “It is for the young, and people think of education as something that they can finish.” We may be as relieved as generations past when our schooling ends, but now we have no excuse ever to finish our education. Find a transcript of Asimov and Moyers’ conversation here. Related content: 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities Arthur C. Clarke Predicts the Future in 1964 … And Kind of Nails It Noam Chomsky Spells Out the Purpose of Education The President of Northwestern University Predicts Online Learning … in 1934! Salman Khan Returns to MIT, Gives Commencement Speech, Likens School to Hogwarts Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. |
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