My writing has been terrible lately and I've hardly made any sense. It's dificult to get myself across directly so for today's lesson it's time for another delightful parable. Same rules as last time, I won't tell you what it means unless you are all clearly not getting it.

~*~

Once upon a time a distinguished elder blue-winged teal by the name of Titi called a great conference of other distinguished elders to be held on the Isle of Wright in the English Channel. When they were at last gathered and settled down, one slightly less distinguished blue-winged teal by the name of Ooli stepped forward to make some introductory remarks.

"I'm sure you all know who Titi is," he began, "but in case you don't, I'll tell you. He is, without doubt, the greatest scientist of our age, and the world's foremost authority on avian migration, which he has studied longer and deeper than any other teal in history, blue-winged or otherwise. I don't know why he's called us together here at this time, but I don't doubt that his reasons are excellent." And with that, Ooli turned the meeting over to Titi.

Titi ruffled his feathers a bit to gather everyone's attention, then said, "I've come here today to urge upon you a vitally important innovation in the rearing of our young." Well, Titi certainly got everyone's attention with this announcement, and he was deluged with questions from teals who demanded to know what was supposed to be wrong with chick-rearing practices that had worked for blue-winged teals for more generations than any of them could count.

"I recognize and acknowledge your indignation," Titi replied when he finally had them quieted down. "But in order for you to understand my point, you'll have to recognize and acknowledge that I'm very different from you. As my old friend Ooli mentioned, I am the world's foremost authority on avian migration. This means I have a deep theoretical understanding of a process that you merely experience in an unthinking and routine manner. Very simply speaking, in the spring and fall of every year you experience a certain restlessness that is ultimately relieved by taking flight in one direction or the other over the English Channel. Isn't this so?"

All his listeners had to agree that this was so, and Titi went on. "I don't dispute the fact that your vague feelings of restlessness serve the essential purpose of getting you moving, but wouldn't you like to be able to see your children's lives guided by something more reliable than vague feelings of restlessness?"

When he was asked to explain what he meant, he said, "If you were making the sort of detailed observations that are made by scientists like me, you would know how amazingly often you dither about for a week or ten days, making one halfhearted start after another, flying this way and that, setting out as if you really meant to migrate, then turning back after five or ten or even twenty miles. You would know how many of you actually set out and make what amounts to the whole trip -- flying in the wrong direction!"

The teals in his audience waggled their wings in a nervous way and ruffled their feathers to hide their embarrassment. They knew that what Titi was saying was absolutely true (and indeed it is actually true -- not only of teals but of migratory birds in general), but they were mortified to learn this sloppy behavior had actually been noticed by someone. They asked what could be done to improve their performance.

"We must make our chicks aware of the elements of an ideal migrating schedule. We must prepare them to observe relevant conditions and to calculate the optimum moment to set out."

"But it would seem that you, as a scientist, are already able to do that," one of his listeners pointed out. "Couldn't you just tell us when to migrate?"

"That would be supremely stupid," Titi replied. "There's no way I can be everywhere at once, making all the relevant calculations. You yourselves must make these calculations where you are, in reference to the specific conditions you individually face."

It's not easy to hear a teal groan in ordinary circumstances, but this flock of teals produced a mighty groan on hearing these words. But Titi went on, saying, "Come, come, it's not as difficult as all that. You simply have to understand that migration becomes an advantage when the suitability of your present habitat is less than the suitability of the target habitat times what is known as the migration factor, which is just a measure of the extent to which the portion of your potential reproductive success that is under your active control would decrease as a result of this migration. I realize that this may sound like rather a beakful to you at the moment, but a few definitions and mathematical formulas will make it perfectly clear to you."

Well, these teals were mostly just ordinary birds, and they couldn't imagine opposing such a renowned and respected authority, who clearly knew a great deal more about migration than they did. They felt they had no choice but to go along with plans so obviously intended for their own good. Soon they were spending long evening hours with their chicks trying to comprehend and explain such things as track patterns, navigational mechanisms, degree of return, and degrees of dispersal and convergence. Instead of frolicking in the morning sunshine, chicks learned calculus, a mathematical tool developed in the seventeenth century by two famous blue wings named Leibniz and Newton that enables one to deal with the differentiation and integration of functions of one or more variables. Within just a few years every chick was expected to calculate the migration-cost variables in both facultative and obligatory migrations. Weather conditions, wind direction and speed, even body weight and fat percentages enter into the calculation of migration thresholds.

The initial failures of the new education system were spectacular but not unexpected. Titi had predicted that migratory success would actually be lower than normal for the first five years of the program but then would return to and surpass the norm within another five years. By the end of twenty years, he said, more teals would be migrating more successfully than ever before. But when teals eventually began to migrate with normal success once again, it was discovered that most were faking the calculations -- merely following their instincts, matching data to behavior rather than behavior to data. When stringent new rules were enacted to prevent this form of cheating, migratory success dropped steeply. It was finally accepted that ordinary parents were not in fact qualified to teach their children anything as complex as migratory science. This was something only professionals could be expected to handle. Chicks were henceforth taken from the nest at an early age and turned over to a new cadre of specialists, who organized their young charges into brutally competitive units, imposing on them high standards, uniform testing, and harsh discipline. A certain amount of adverse reaction to the new regime was expected and soon materialized, in the form of chronic truancy, hostility, depression and suicide among the young. New cadres of truancy officers, guards, psychotherapists and counselors struggled to keep things under control, but before long members of the flock were streaking away like residents of a burning building (for Titi and Ooli were not quite insane enough to think they could keep the flock together by force).

After the two old friends watched the last remnants of the flock scatter into the sky, Ooli shook his head and wondered where they'd gone wrong. Titi ruffled his feathers irritably and said, "We went wrong by failing to take into account a great truth, namely that teals are stupid and lazy, and perfectly content to stay that way."