If he had only learnt a little less, how infinitely better he might have taught much more!

Charles Dickens parodies (Hard Times 1854) the overly educated teacher who knows so many theories and facts that he cannot teach a class, naming him Mr. M'Choakumchild. "He and some one hundred and forty other schoolmasters, has been lately turned at the same time, in the same factory, on the same principles, like so many pianoforte legs.

"He had been put through an immense variety of paces, and had answered volumes of head-breaking questions. Orthography, etymology, syntax, and prosody, biography, astronomy, geography, and general cosmography, the sciences of compound proportion, algebra, land-surveying and levelling, coral music, and drawing from models, were all at the ends of his ten chilled fingers. . . .

"He knew all about all the Water Sheds of all the world (whatever they are), and all the histories of all the people, and all the names of all the rivers and mountains, and all the productions, manners, and customs of all the countries, and all their boundaries and bearings on the two-and-thirty points of the compass. . . .

"If he had only learnt a little less, how infinitely better he might have taught much more!"

Similarly, American school teachers with too many advanced degrees are too distant from their charges to teach well.

can government transparency learn from the epistemology of Islamic finance?

Jeremy Harding offers (LRB 14 May 2009) an epistemological account of transparency based on Islamic finance: "A contract for a contract, which is what many derivatives amount to, is a sign for a sign, not a sign for a thing; it introduces clutter and congestion into the realm of signs -- a realm of solemnity for practicing Muslims -- and erodes consensus on the value of underlying assets, just as riba (or interest) earned on a principal, like on like, turns money from a counter into an agent, to the detriment of authentic counters and legitimate agents."

According to a UK financier specializing in Islamic finance: "economies in which wealth transfer predominates over wealth creation are destined for poverty, because 'real' wealth -- food, medicine, bricks and mortar, high and low technology goods -- is consumed or decays and has to be renewed. Exchange on its own, however vigorous, is unable to do this renewing. A farm or a factory producing electronic parts is more desirable than a casino, even if they all put resources and people to work."

Similarly transparent governments need to show the thing itself, not a refabricated version. Post decision-making documents, not gussied up explanations; share actual decisions, not just spin; open up decision-making meetings, not just press conferences.