Information, That's What I Need, Some Information...

Way back when I was a young friar, still in high school, I had United States history with the feared George Love. He was a tyrant, we were told by those juniors who survived his course. He required weekly research projects put on index cards about some topic in U.S. history. He would flip a coin in class and say, "Oh, too bad. Pop quiz." He never used the book, he just talked for the fifty minutes or so of class and expected you to take notes on what he said and then use that information to answer test questions. He required a research paper each semester!

Mr. Love was also a devoted anti-communist and I remember his bookshelves were filled with little paperbacks with titles like You Can Trust the Communists(To Be Communists). The author of this 1960 million-seller, Australian physician Dr. Fred Schwarz, died earlier this year, which is something I had not known but ferreted out with a quick Google entry. If I lived in China, I'd have no guarantees such information would be freely available.

Mr. Love and his copy of Dr. Schwarz's book came to mind when I read this report on President Obama's speech to Chinese university students at Shanghai.

Students had the chance to ask the U.S. president questions, one noted that they were trained for an afternoon in how to do it and told they had to have "a friendly manner." The White House streamed the event live on its website. The local Shanghai TV station broadcast it live, but wouldn't you know it? The darn national online feed went down 20 minutes before the press conference and was replaced by a kids' program. No national TV station aired it, and the official Xinhua news agency didn't stream it either. Although Xinhua did publish a transcript, including the president's answer to an internet question in which he said internet freedom like the U.S. has is a strength.

But they later deleted that part.

Although Mr. Love taught me a whole lot about some important skills that generate learning, we always found his 1950s-style anti-communisn kind of amusing. That kind of ham-fisted blunt-force trauma presentation of an idea just seemed so amateurish and laughable.

I think the Chinese government could have learned a lot from Mr. Love.