The Great Pursuits

The Secret of the West.

There are profound differences between the Western and Eastern approach to education in science and mathematics. These differences briefly became a matter of public interest around the beginning of 2025, when Vivek Ramaswamy wrote his now infamous message decrying the lack of academic seriousness in Western culture. His criticisms are not unfounded. Indeed, the culture of native-born Americans has become increasingly anti-intellectual, and has become ever more so each passing year since the end of the Cold War. He suggests that the cure is for American students to spend long hours in cram schools after hours, predicting that only then shall they match the abilities of the bright minds of the Orient.

These cram schools are institutions held by many to be largely responsible for the mathematical prowess of the Far East. They typically provide progressively challenging drill in mathematics and reading comprehension. The experience is certainly superior to institutional school in some respects, as instruction is frequently self-paced. These institutions, whether in China, India or Japan, exist to provide the most ambitious students with an elevated chance of entering the bureaucratic echelons of Leviathan. Demand for them is such that in India, the entire city of Kota is devoted to these institutions. While these schools have existed for ages in the East, in recent years they have begun to appear in America and other nations throughout the West. Within the United States, these cram schools are places where Westerners are seldom seen. As part of my education, I attended one due to the abysmal quality of mathematical education in my region of the Cornlands. It certainly did improve my computational acumen. I regard the place with no ill will, it launched my career as a math tutor. As far as I know, I was the only Westerner in my cram school to advance beyond long division. I now suspect that this was largely because the program employed at this cram school presented algebra in a very different way from the curriculum commonly encountered in American high schools.

In my college years, I was a referee at high school robotics matches, which were competitions between small mobile robots held in rings. It was here that I realized that the Western approach to science and mathematics was completely different from that espoused in cram schools. In designing robots, mathematics is transformed from a priestly exercise to the basis for an investigation of the physical world. This exercise recapitulates the scientific method in microcosm. It was the first time I saw young native-born Americans interested in any scientific pursuit outside of school hours. In retrospect, this should have been no surprise. After all, America is a nation of independent tinkerers and investigators. Throughout the West, the divide between the tradesman and the scholar was always smaller than elsewhere. It is worth noting that neither Thomas Edison nor Henry Ford were born or educated in environments that would today be considered “elite human capital”. It is for this reason that Tom Swift will be publishing a series of articles discussing the hobbies of rocketry, electrical circuits, and other forms of independent scientific and mechanical investigation. Due to their fundamental role in advancing science over the centuries, I call them the Great Pursuits.

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This experience is what inspired me to devote this publication to promoting these Great Pursuits, the pastimes which define the Gentleman Scientist. Model rocketry is a primary example of one of these enterprises. It is perfect for training scientists, as one must form and test new hypotheses when accounting for the natural defects of materials employed in designing each rocket. The vagaries of weather and air resistance also ensure that every test flight becomes a novel experiment. This pursuit is largely responsible for inspiring the career of Robert Goddard. Model robotics is another pursuit which shall be extensively discussed in upcoming articles on Tom Swift. It is in my opinion superior to pure software development as a method of teaching programming. Every robot must to some extent make its way in the real world, and gather data, with which to improve its decision making capabilities. Natural history is perhaps the oldest of these enterprises, and evolved from such pastimes as hunting and fishing. Collecting specimens, be they catfish or microbes, and learning to observe and identify them is a far better way to learn the science of life than any computer based activity. This overview of the Great Pursuits is by no means exhaustive. More shall surely be considered in future articles on Tom Swift.

In Eastern civilizations, mathematics was a tool of imperial administration in societies such as China, or the academic preserve of a priestly elite, as in the Indian Subcontinent. While the Kerala School had advanced to within striking distance of the fundamental theorem of calculus, mathematics, and even astronomy, were not usually coupled with direct empirical observations of the natural world. Hence these mathematical endeavors suffered similar limitations to the investigations of the ancient Greeks. While the elite of the East were training in cram schools for the purpose of rising within a rigid hierarchy, noblemen and mechanics across the West developed the great pursuits as natural extensions of other activities. In the Faustian Age of the West, mathematics became not only a tool of a priestly elite, but also a tool used by tradesmen to further their enterprises, and to bend the physical world to the will of man. It is this close connection of theory and practice which allowed the West to dominate the world. In conclusion, it is not at all clear that the advent of cram schools in America bodes well for the rapid advancement of scientific progress. They seem best suited to producing willing employees for the massive conglomerates which control the infrastructure of the Information Age, and it is by no means apparent that they have yet given rise to a new generation of great scientists and inventors.

It is for this reason that I have founded the Tom Swift Academy. This is a program designed to provide aspiring inventors and scientists the mathematically rigorous and physically embodied education they need. After a recent conversation with some of the most thoughtful intellectuals of our time, I expect Westerners and Easterners to benefit from it in different ways. Westerners will benefit from an approach which combines mathematical rigor with solid investigation of the physical world. Easterners will certainly gain a far more physically embodied perspective regarding mathematics and science than they would otherwise encounter. While cram schools are certainly a useful alternative to the abysmal state of most American public education, they cannot alone create the next Heroic Age of Invention.