Reconstructing 'Education' Through Mindful Attention: Positioning The Mind at The Center of Curriculum and Pedagogy 1st Edition Oren Ergas (Auth.)
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Reconstructing ‘Education’
through
Mindful Attention
Oren Ergas
Reconstructing
‘Education’ through
Mindful Attention
Positioning the Mind at the Center of
Curriculum and Pedagogy
Oren Ergas
Beit Berl Academic College and Hebrew University
Modi’in, Israel
What are the goals of a true education? Where is the focus of the heart and
mind in the curriculum? And what is the basis on which we should develop
educational curricula? In this engaging book, Oren Ergas deeply inquires
into the requirements and practices for a truly educated person. In doing
so, he lifts the veil of hidden assumptions that drive our current achieve-
ment-assessed model of curriculum and directs our thinking to a deeper
set of postulates about the meaning of education. I should place ‘educa-
tion’ in quotes, because Ergas takes us on an experiential journey into the
deeper meaning of ‘education’ as a task of meaning-making that is pro-
found, reflective, and insightful. In doing so, he reveals to the reader the
central role of attention as the fundamental and basic building block for
the development of awareness and discernment.
Drawing on the roots of Western Psychology as articulated by William
James, modern philosophy of mind, the latest neuroscience, and the
wisdom of contemplative practices, this tour de force of inner awareness
takes the modern educator through a first-person, investigative journey
into the nature of mind. In doing so, the book explores the inner curri-
culum, the nature of awareness, and its direct relation to compassion.
In a world obsessed with outer achievements and a blindness that
prioritizes the acquiring of information over knowledge and virtue,
Ergas asks the reader to take a deep look at the inner curriculum of self-
knowledge and self-awareness that unfolds through the sharpening of
attentional capacities. By turning attention to explore the mind and per-
ception, Ergas leads us on a voyage into the nature of the mind and self-
knowledge and positions the reader to consider the need to rebalance the
v
vi FOREWORD
vii
viii PREFACE
that, and throughout all those years it was as if a BIG mind called society
was parenting you from above, pointing its finger at all those things in
which you were engaged saying – ‘this is education’. An automated habit
was created – your brain-mind was ‘made’ to associate the word ‘educa-
tion’ with all that. The two became one.
This book will work our way back to separate ‘education’ from the
mind. Indeed, ‘education is a mind-making’ process, but were there not
minds there that made ‘education’ in the first place? It must then follow
that those minds have stamped something of their nature on to this ‘social
endeavor’. That which we see out there as a collective ‘social’ creation must
reflect tendencies of the human mind. This means that any problem we
identify today in ‘educational’ theory and practice must somehow reflect
problems in the nature of minds that brought this operation about. It is
very likely that you have heard critique of ‘society’s’ one-size fits all
‘education’, or you’ve read about school problems of violence, dropout,
bullying, and substance abuse. Perhaps you’ve heard about ‘curricular’
problems concerned with ‘not enough’ math or science or too much of
them at the expense of the arts and the deprivation of creativity. Maybe
those problems are related to teacher burnout? Or, is it accountability
or our rushing kindergarteners to begin their resume-building toward
glamorous careers? Many of these observations are right on the mark,
but could all these ‘social’ problems emerge without minds that think
‘education’ in certain ways, enact it, and become ‘educated’ by it?
Paradoxically, however, ‘education’ has mostly come to mean a ‘mind-
making process’ that has very little to do with your mind – the mind that’s
reading these words now, living in this body in here, breathing, sensing, and
emoting. How is it that ‘curriculum’ and ‘pedagogy’ have mostly become
practices in which the mind is to attend to the world out there – the
teachers’/lecturers’ words, the PowerPoint presentations, the textbooks,
the class discussions, the math, the history . . . yet the embodied life of this
very mind itself is expelled from the game? Can an ‘education’ that hopes
to ‘make minds’ and create the ‘society’ we want succeed without posi-
tioning that mind at the center of ‘curriculum’ and ‘pedagogy’; without
this mind’s turning in here to examine its very own makings?
Do you realize how much of your conscious experience consists of the
internal life of your embodied mind – your own thoughts, sensations, and
emotions? Discoveries from the past decade of neuroscience demonstrate
that healthy brains-minds spend close to half of their waking hours
remembering the past, planning the future, worrying, regretting, thinking
PREFACE ix
initiates us in the idea that the ‘subject matter’ out there is somehow more
important than the mind that studies it in here; that the mind is merely a
means and not also an end. This mind – this embodied mind, which is
mysteriously associated with the brain – is that with which we will have to
live for our entire lives. It is that which governs the hand that is raised to
hit or caress and the mouth that is opened to curse or to bless. You are the
only one that has a privileged direct access to your mind as I have to my
own. We are the only ones that can take responsibility for it. It seem like
we need to engage in a far more rigorous study of this mind and what it
brings to the ‘curriculum’ so that ‘education’ as a ‘mind-making practice’
will indeed tackle the problem at its source.
The ideas with which this book will engage you, are the result of an on-
going endeavor that has begun more than 20 years ago as I started to tread
what I initially thought of as a ‘dual’ path of ‘education’: a standard and
familiar Academic path and a less standard one of studying my own
embodied mind based on diverse contemplative practices. It took time
to realize that these are two paths only in as far as they are seen from a
mind that was ‘educated’ to understand ‘education’ in certain ways. At
some point I began to question this entire ‘social’ construct that had
instilled in me the idea that ‘education’ is something that ‘society’ does
to the mind rather than a process that includes what this mind does to itself
wittingly or unwittingly. We are educated by all those disciplines and skills
taught at schools but we are also educated by our own minds and bodies at
this very moment with every thought, sensation, and emotion many of
which arise in here without our knowing why, or where they come from.
From one moment to the next our sense of agency, identity, knowing,
being, and meaning are shaped through our engagement with ourselves
and with the world. It matters not whether the source of the making of our
minds comes from the world out there or from in here. It matters far more
whether we awaken ourselves to see this as we attempt to figure out who
we are, who we want to be and how we may become of service to others.
It’s been a long journey to bring these ideas into writing. Throughout
these years aside from the articulation of these ideas in academic papers,
the most ‘educative’ journey for me has been to teach them to my
University students that grilled me with enough questions to send me
refining them time and again. I’m hardly done refining and I suspect that
this may be a state of being I shall have to learn to live with. The attempt
to offer a structure to our inner curriculum and to reconstruct ‘education’
from the mind is bound to be cumbersome for it eventually results as an
PREFACE xi
***
xii PREFACE
I began writing this book as a visiting scholar of the Mind and Life
Institute in the fall of 2014 in the midst of the inspiring sights of Amherst
during foliage. It was there that the first part of the book was written and it
was there that I was also able to enjoy the wisdom, kindness, and support
of Arthur Zajonc (then head of the Institute) and Andrew Olendzki, as I
discussed some of the ideas you are about to read with them. Following
the time at Amherst, the rest of the writing went on as I phased in and out
from other academic projects and teaching courses.
Behind every word in this book stands a chain of causality that is beyond
my own understanding, but in some cases I can certainly put my finger on
encounters and books that shaped my thinking in various ways. Some of
the people I thank here never heard my name but their work has shaped
my understanding significantly. I’ll mention but a few of them with the
clear omission of many due to scope and space. Iain McGilchrist’s
The Master and His Emissary opened my mind to articulate the idea of
‘education’ as shaping and being shaped by the mind, Tor Norretranders’
The User Illusion taught me the utter limited position in which we stand in
understanding experience, Daniel Siegel’s The Developing Mind and
Richard Davidson’s The Emotional Life of Your Brain have both helped
me articulate and understand the triad of brain, mind, and human rela-
tionships. Jon Kabat-Zinn’s writings on mindfulness helped me articulate
my ideas in communicable ways. I am utterly grateful to Mark Greenberg
who agreed to write the foreword for this book. Thank you Mark for your
friendship and for substantially affecting my thinking on the relations
between ‘education’, social-emotional learning, and contemplative prac-
tice. Deep thanks to Sharon Todd, Robert Roeser, Ofra Mayseless and
Jack Miller for the endorsements on the backcover of this book.
Though this book is by no means about wisdom-traditions in a literal
sense, my readings of Buddhism, Taoism, and yoga and no less all those
who taught me yoga, tai chi, mindfulness, and other types of meditation
stand behind much of what I write. I am also thankful to my own mind-
body that in moments of stillness overcomes its ‘education’ and enables me
to see things from unexpected perspectives. I thank Philip Wexler who
taught me to think like a sociologist, Hanan Alexander who taught me
to think like a philosopher, and Samuel Scolnicov who taught me courage.
I thank the contemplative academic community here in Israel for their
support and wisdom: Ofra Mayseless, Nava Levit-Binnun, Asaf Federman,
Amos Avisar, Eitan Chikli, Amir Freiman, Aviva Berkovich-Ohana, Nimrod
Sheinman, Ricardo Tarrasch, Assaf Sati Elbar. I thank my students for their
PREFACE xiii
unabated critique and dedication, and for helping me make more sense.
I thank Laura Aldridge and the production team at Palgrave Macmillan
who’ve been so helpful throughout the process.
Deep thanks to Daniel Marom for reviewing parts of this book and
proposing critical points, which substantially helped me understand what
it is that I am trying to do here. Deep thanks to Judith Harel whose
advising helped me march on with confidence. I thank my mother and
father, my brother Yaron and my sister Shlomit. You have all been part of
my own ‘education’.
We unfold behind everything we do, but when we actually start noticing
this unfolding as a ‘curriculum’, ‘education’ changes, the mind changes,
life changes, ‘society’ changes. I know that from personal experience. On
that note it is my wife Dganit and my children, Doron, Galia, and Noga
that I need to thank most. I thank them both for enduring the non-
compromising person that I am and for being there to awaken me from
my own sleep-walking whenever I think that the problem isn’t me.
Oren Ergas wishes to thank the Mind and Life Institute (Amherst, MA,
USA) for a visiting scholars’ fellowship and MUDA Institute for
Mindfulness, Science and Society, at IDC (Herzliya, Israel) for an addi-
tional fellowship that together provided partial funding for the writing of
this book.
xv
CONTENTS
xvii
xviii CONTENTS
Epilogue 319
References 321
Index 333
LIST OF FIGURES
xix
LIST OF TABLES
xxi
CHAPTER 1
The fact that ‘education’ has problems is hardly news to anyone, at least
not if one reads the daily papers, raises children of his or her own, or
simply recalls his or her own experiences of being educated. Diagnoses of
these problems span the gamut. Some depict them in pedagogical, curri-
cular, and/or organizational terms. Others see them as economic or social
problems as they highlight inequality, bullying, dropout, substance abuse
etc. It is not that I disagree with these observations. It is rather more of a
feeling that something far more fundamental is missing from our view. It is
not at all surprising that it is missing for I suspect that if I am doing my job
properly as a writer then that something is missing from your view right
now – Your own embodied experience. I’ve tricked you by becoming the
agent of your attention. If your mind attends to these words, it cannot
attend to itself. This is the story of ‘education’ in a nutshell. It is I believe
the biggest problem we face – the expulsion of the mind from ‘education’.
Missing from our diagnostics is the peculiar possibility: that the pro-
blem of education might be ‘education’. We might have gotten stuck in
how we understand ‘education’ as it relates to all those practices that we
associate with it. That’s why the word ‘education’ is going to appear in
parentheses throughout the book just like many other terms like ‘society’,
‘curriculum’, ‘pedagogy’ that we have come to consider as if they are
independent of the mind that perceives and constructs them.
There are numerous manifestations to the problem of education’s
being ‘education’. The one we start with is that somehow much of what
For those that are familiar with philosophers like John Dewey and Alfred
North Whitehead, who viewed all life as education, such claim might not
be considered to be novel. However, what does escape many is a more
radical claim that I’ll be making: your brain-mind-body does not care
much whether the information it perceives arrives from what ‘society’
had thoughtfully placed in a textbook, what the teacher writes on the
board/screen, what scientific research had validated, or whether it comes
from your mind-body itself. The narrative that runs in your mind through-
out your day (e.g., your worries, hopes, dreams, thoughts of your social-
image, body-image), your emotional life, and your bodily sensations are all
subject matter that forms an inner curriculum. This is regardless of how
adequately this inner curriculum reflects reality out there, and regardless of
what kind of state of mind you are in when you experience them. A child
walking to school with the fear of being attacked by the school bully is
‘educated’ in fear as the bully waiting around the corner ‘educates’ himself
in violence. Driving to work and worrying about being fired or planning
your vacation is the subject matter created in your brain-mind that wit-
tingly or unwittingly ‘educates’ your brain-mind then and there.
We are constantly ‘educated’ from within and from without, but the
problem of ‘education’ is that we will hardly think that this is the case. Part
of our ‘education’ has been to shape our minds to believe that ‘education’ is
that thing that ‘society’ does to the mind, as it places the subject matter of
various disciplines in front of it, and if a student’s mind is preoccupied with
his personal worries during a ‘school-lesson’ then the latter are in fact
interfering with the occasion for which ‘society’ had gathered us. I don’t
think so. It might take quite a journey to convince you in this, but though
such thoughts-emotions-sensation have not been ‘willed’ either by ‘society’
or even by us; they are not simply an ‘attentional lapse’ the consequence of
which is ‘missing science’ or ‘missing history’ that the teacher is busy teach-
ing. They are an alternative lesson. At times a good one, at others hardly so.
Who governs this inner curriculum that simply arises in this mind? Is it
4 RECONSTRUCTING ‘EDUCATION’ THROUGH MINDFUL ATTENTION
Our eleventh graders have one difficult problem and a number of easy
problems. The difficult problem concerns how to solve equations with two
variables. The easy problems are how to handle the emotional turmoil
when your father is dying of cancer, the fear of living with an alcoholic
mother, or the horror of escaping the neighborhood bully waiting for you
behind the corner. You see, our curriculum dedicates four hours per week
to the hard problem in primary school, and five in high school. The other
problems must be easy for they get one per week, or an occasional “inter-
vention.” (see Barak 2015, p. 172)
door of attention that is the gateway to our minds. It swings out just as
much as it swings in, yet our minds were mistakenly shaped to associate
‘education’ far more with the former than with the latter.
You and I are born and initiated into a ‘social narrative’ that will create the
feeling that this narrative reflects the way in which this world was made, and
hence it has little to do with our own minds; as if ‘education’ was given to us
on the eighth day of creation and now we need to cope with the consequences
of an endeavor that is not really in our hands. Our general approach reflects a
lack of understanding that whatever we consider to be problematic out there in
the ‘social world’ must have somehow emerged from the nature of our minds
that brought it about. Ignoring the mind as the other half of the ‘curriculum’,
‘education’ becomes a hall of mirrors in which ‘society’ educates the minds to
mirror back its own ways of thinking and practicing ‘education’. The theory
constantly revalidates itself by minds that impose theory through practice.
Very much following the analysis of critical pedagogues and grounded in
Marx’s ‘social’ analysis, ‘education’ becomes an initiation of the young in the
image of the past – a perpetuum mobile sustained by mind and ‘society’. It is a
vicious cycle indeed, and attempting to diagnose a problem within such a self-
justifying system means asking for trouble. Whether you gaze at ‘society’ that
emerges from minds, or whether you gaze at the mind that was shaped in
‘society’s’ image through ‘education’, you are bound to find yourself lost in a
hall of mirrors. There may be a way of escape as I will propose. It involves
stepping away from ‘society’ and ‘mind’ as we know them in order to
complement (not substitute) our paths of knowing and being.
But first, a brief thought-experiment can demonstrate this ‘hall of
mirrors’ formed through ‘education’. It shows both the inevitability of
this process and the problem that it creates. If you would somehow take a
healthy baby that was born in the eleventh century, send it through a time-
tunnel and raise and educate it in the twenty-first century, would this
baby’s mind ‘catch up’ with a millennium of human technology and
knowledge to reflect the minds of adults today? Conversely, send a baby
that was born today through a time-tunnel to be raised and educated in
the eleventh century. Would the mind of that baby grow to reflect the
ways of its era or would it reflect minds of a twenty-first century baby? – all
this is highly speculative of course, but I think it is plausible to claim that
‘education’ will close the time-gap in both cases. Most minds will come to
reflect the norms and ideas of their time and place through ‘education’
whether you think of it in its institutionalized or non-institutionalized and
informal ways. If you want this in a slightly more realistic though unfortunate
1 INTRODUCTION: THE PROBLEM OF EDUCATION IS ‘EDUCATION’. . . . 7
This tells us an incredible story about the mind that can be described based
on two terms with which neuroscience has been busy in the past decade:
plasticity and pruning.
We might think that the sun revolves around the earth as was customary
just a few hundreds of years ago, and we might live in a ‘society’ in which
women do not have the right to vote. Whichever the case the mind will be
made through ‘education’ to become blind to such contingencies. It will be
made to view this as how the world is. Peculiarly, you and I might be
sitting smugly right now thinking how wise we are now to have overcome
those misconceptions about the sun, and no less about women’s rights.
The great fallacy in this may escape our view. Those living a hundred years
from now might view both of us and our ‘wise’ contemporary ‘society’
with a similar kind of smugness that we experience now.
hundred miles to the East or South of you see it.1 That shaping can
include anything from the choice of disciplines that you find on an average
students’ timetable comprising of the public ‘curriculum’ at your home-
town, the skills considered as necessary for contemporary life, as well as
‘social’ norms such as how one is to stand in line in the supermarket and
when it is customary to go to college, get married, and have kids. All these
are ‘housed’ within what Neil Postman (1995) called a ‘narrative’ – a
broad belief system that provides context to our actions and gives them
certain meanings. Some narratives are better than others but that is not the
point I am making. The point is that mutatis mutandis,
our mind can be shaped to see the world based on any narrative but all it gets
is one. That is what I call contingency. However, contingency is not the
problem. It becomes the problem when your mind is ‘educated’ to confuse
it with necessity.
Norms such as having kids at the age of thirty or twenty, having one child,
eight or none, the importance of mathematics and science or the preference
of literature, the desirability of logical thinking over Romantic musings, the
prestige of Harvard compared to some local college, the preference of
becoming a lawyer rather than a carpenter, taking the transportation by
engine cars rather than traveling in a chariot in the twenty-first century as
taken for granted – these do not seem to be present in the mind that is born
into the world. They are the product of ‘education’ that has built those
meanings into that mind so that this ‘educated’ mind now sees things as they
ought to be seen according to the narrative of this ‘society’. The mind comes
to see them as the way the world was made.
The point that I am making then is that our vocabulary of describing
‘education’ smacks of great optimism when we speak of it as a process of
‘cultivation’ and a ‘bringing out’ of potentialities (as the Latin Educare
suggests). What we seem to miss is a different, perhaps more pessimistic
perspective: ‘education’ very much follows the natural process that neu-
roscientists refer to as pruning. It is the sculpting of a brain-mind of a
newborn that seems to be born with infinite potentials into the person that
you are right now. It is not just the positive aspect of cultivation of certain
ways of seeing, but by all means the negative accent of cutting off the many
roads that could have been taken and were not. Truth be told, we are
probably lucky to have cut off many of those roads, but the realization that
things could have been different than they are now is crucial both to the
1 INTRODUCTION: THE PROBLEM OF EDUCATION IS ‘EDUCATION’. . . . 9
kind of contemplative journey that this book hopes to offer you person-
ally, and I believe to the very idea, practice, and research of ‘education’.
Let us not forget what ‘education’ amounts to: we are in a business in
which minds are attempting to determine how to form the process that
makes them. Do we have enough ‘inside information’ about that mind that
we are attempting to shape? Are we sure that students’ timetables and school
and higher education curricula as we know them constitute the best mind-
making processes we can come up with? What makes us so sure that what we
have now needs to be replicated? I seriously believe that exploring our minds
as the other half of the ‘curriculum’ is an extremely fruitful path by which
optimism will return to the starker image that I have begun to sketch. Once
we become more aware of this pruning effect both at the ‘social’ level of
our ‘curricular’ deliberations but also at the level of how our own minds
participate in the process of ‘education’, I think we will position ourselves in
a far more knowledgeable place from which we will be able to engage in the
task of reconstructing ‘education’. The manifestation of the problem of
education as ‘education’ in this case is that we have somehow managed to
construct an incredibly thoughtful operation called ‘education’ that is to
‘make minds’ yet we never quite stop to directly examine the mind that this
operation is to shape.
A reasonable objection to all the above may be that in its better cases,
‘education’ seeks to develop a critical consciousness in tune with the tradi-
tion of ‘liberal education’ and in more current manifestations of critical
pedagogy (Freire 2007; Giroux 2011). Indeed you will find a very Socratic
kind of approach in this book as it will constantly challenge the taken for
granted. Furthermore, I am all for empowering students through the crea-
tion of a critical consciousness that ‘educates’ them to see ‘social construc-
tion’ at work as it creates inequality, gender-issues, marginalization of
ethnical groups, violence, and several other problems that plague contem-
porary ‘society’. But there’s something far more basic at which I am point-
ing. It lies beyond philosophical and ‘social’ critique as we commonly
practice them, for these too are ‘traditions’ that ‘educate’ the mind in certain
ways that risk blinding it to its pruning. I am speaking of the last resort of
agency from which this book will begin its methodical inquiry in the next
chapter – the constructor of all identities that resides closer than our own
eye – Attention. I think it’s time to return to a place that we can all touch –
first person experience, as it emerges from that to which we attend. It’s time to
reconstruct ‘education’ in a way that it will become more credible for right
now even when it has to do with libertarian agendas (e.g., critical pedagogy)
10 RECONSTRUCTING ‘EDUCATION’ THROUGH MINDFUL ATTENTION
in the beginning there was ‘education’ then you and your mind came along.
how we think ‘education’. Our methods prune our minds and shape them.
Subscribing to Albert Einstein’s famous aphorism – we can’t expect to
solve problems with the same kind of mind that brings them about. If we
seriously want to learn something new, we need to embrace a novel way of
understanding. If there is something fundamentally missing from our view
then it is probable that ‘educational’ research as it is currently conducted
will not discover it for that fundamental may be missing from our meth-
odology as well.
Two methodological contexts arise from the above: the first stems from
Thomas Kuhn’s (1970) analysis of scientific progress. Every certain period
various anomalies arise in different fields of scientific inquiry. These are not
explained by means of the established theories and the consensual meth-
ods of inquiry known as the hegemonic paradigm(s). Thus for example,
Newtonian mechanics’ failure to explain the ways in which subatomic
particles move in space, was the bedrock over which the theory of quan-
tum mechanics emerged thus substantially challenging our understandings
of space and time. When paradigms fail to provide frameworks for inquiry
that yield satisfactory explanations the only recourse is to reconstruct the
fundamentals of the paradigms themselves. I believe this description is
directly applicable to the discourse of ‘education’; to the way(s) we think
it, practice it, and study it. It seems to be yielding too many problems, or
accused of not solving them properly. What I believe is necessary is coming
at this entire business from a completely different angle, which brings me
to the second context that flows directly from this kind of approach.2
The second context comes from an unexpected place and points to an
unexpected discipline. It clicked in when I heard a TED (Technology,
Entertainment, Design) interview with entrepreneur Elon Musk. Toward
the end of this interview Musk was asked how is it that he keeps coming up
with incredible ideas such as launching PayPal, initiating projects like the
TESLA electric car, and building rockets that are to take us to outer space.
This is what he answered:
Note.—Only the appropriations from which war expenditures were made are included in the
above.
NATIONAL DEBTS, EXPENDITURE AND
COMMERCE, PER CAPITA.
Country. Annual
Debt per expenditure per Annual imports Annual exports
head. head. per head. per head.
Argentine
Republic $39.07 $12.04 $20.31 $25.66
Austria-
Hungary 5.73 1.63 7.19 5.70
Austria
proper 65.26 9.29
Hungary
proper 17.68 7.53
Belgium 48.08 10.13 53.41 46.06
Bolivia 10.04 2.58 3.30 2.08
Brazil 36.43 6.70 8.71 10.31
Canada 31.16 6.69 25.87 24.94
Chili 24.49 10.66 18.21 17.95
Colombia 5.22 .94 2.35 3.38
Denmark 27.19 6.83 26.31 17.95
Ecuador 20.20 24.36 8.77 4.51
Egypt 85.82 10.42 5.52 12.94
France 127.23 14.07 24.17 26.05
German
Empire .70 3.15 21.54 14.21
Prussia 10.55 6.33
Great Britain
and Ireland 114.62 12.35 59.11 40.59
Greece 27.50 5.35 16.49 10.30
India, British 3.01 1.42 .93 1.48
Italy 71.94 10.12 9.67 8.85
Mexico 42.63 2.68 3.13 3.41
Netherlands 101.21 11.37 71.27 67.70
Norway 7.48 5.91 28.77 18.77
Paraguay 54.72 3.39 2.55 2.74
Peru 79.82 12.62 14.02
Portugal 96.84 6.70 8.60 5.97
Roumania 11.82 3.85 3.19 5.60
Russia 26.33 4.83 4.22 3.23
Servia 3.61 1.43 4.58 4.06
Spain 142.71 7.83 3.96 4.48
Sweden 8.86 4.93 19.39 14.11
Switzerland 2.25 3.08
Turkey 31.70 4.38 2.23 1.59
United States 52.56 6.13 12.64 15.40
Uruguay 98.00 15.28 40.25 38.09
Venezuela 35.11 2.04 6.72 9.52
STATEMENT
Average Values of Gold in United States Paper Currency in the New York
Market from the Suspension to the Resumption of Specie Payments, during the
period of Seventeen Years, from 1862 to 1878, both inclusive—Prepared for the
U. S. Treasury Department by E. B. Elliott.
Table showing the Average Value in Currency of One Hundred Dollars in Gold
in the New York Market, by Months, Quarter-years, Half-years, Calendar
Years, and Fiscal Years, from January 1, 1862, to December 31, 1878, both
inclusive.
PERIODS. 1862. 1863. 1864. 1865. 1866. 1867. 1868. 1869.
January 102.5 145.1 155.5 216.2 140.1 134.6 138.5 135.6
February 103.5 160.5 158.6 205.5 138.4 137.4 141.4 134.4
March 101.8 154.5 162.9 173.8 130.5 135. 139.5 131.3
April 101.5 151.5 172.7 148.5 127.3 135.6 138.7 132.9
May 103.3 148.9 176.3 135.6 131.8 137. 139.6 139.2
June 106.5 144.5 210.7 140.1 148.7 137.5 140.1 138.1
July 115.5 130.6 258.1 142.1 151.6 139.4 142.7 136.1
August 114.5 125.8 254.1 143.5 148.7 109.8 145.5 134.2
September 118.5 134.2 222.5 143.9 145.5 143.4 143.6 136.8
October 128.5 147.7 207.2 145.5 148.3 143.5 137.1 130.2
November 131.1 148. 233.5 147. 143.8 139.6 134.4 126.2
December 132.3 151.1 227.5 146.2 136.7 134.8 135.2 121.5
First quarter-year 102.6 153.4 159. 198.5 136.3 135.7 139.8 133.8
Second quarter-year 103.8 148.3 186.6 141.4 135.9 136.7 139.5 136.7
Third quarter-year 116.2 130.2 244.9 143.2 148.6 141.2 143.9 135.7
Fourth quarter-year 130.6 148.9 222.7 146.2 142.9 139.3 135.6 126.
First half-year 103.2 150.8 172.8 169.9 136.1 136.2 139.6 135.3
Second half-year 123.4 139.6 233.8 144.7 145.8 140.3 139.8 130.8
Calendar year 113.3 145.2 203.3 157.3 140.9 138.2 139.7 133.
Fiscal year ended June
30 137.1 156.2 201.9 140.4 141. 139.9 137.5
PERIODS. 1870. 1871. 1872. 1873. 1874. 1875. 1876. 1877. 1878.
January 121.3 110.7 109.1 112.7 111.4 112.5 112.8 106.3 102.1
February 119.5 111.5 110.3 114.1 112.3 114.5 113.4 105.4 102.
March 112.6 111. 110.1 115.5 112.1 115.5 114.3 104.8 101.2
April 113.1 110.6 111.1 117.8 113.4 114.8 113. 106.2 100.6
May 114.7 111.5 113.7 117.7 112.4 115.8 112.6 106.9 100.7
June 112.9 112.4 113.9 116.5 111.3 117. 112.5 105.4 100.8
July 116.8 112.4 114.3 115.7 110. 114.8 111.9 105.4 100.5
August 117.9 112.4 114.4 115.4 109.7 113.5 111.2 105. 100.6
September 114.8 114.5 113.5 112.7 109.7 115.8 110. 103.3 100.4
October 112.8 113.2 113.2 108.9 110. 116.4 109.7 102.8 100.6
November 111.4 111.2 112.9 108.6 110.9 114.7 109.1 102.8 100.2
December 110.7 109.3 112.2 110. 111.7 113.9 109.8 102.8 100.1
First quarter-year 117.8 111.1 109.8 114.1 111.9 114.2 113.5 105.5 101.7
Second quarter-year 113.6 111.5 112.9 117.3 112.4 115.9 112.7 106.2 100.7
Third quarter-year 116.5 113.1 114.1 114.6 109.8 114.7 111. 104.6 101.5
Fourth quarter-year 111.6 111.2 112.8 109.2 110.9 115. 108.9 102.8 101.3
First half-year 115.7 111.3 111.4 115.7 112.2 115.1 113.1 105.9 101.2
Second half-year 114. 121.1 113.4 111.9 110.3 114.8 109.9 103.7 100.4
Calendar year 114.9 111.7 112.4 113.8 111.2 114.9 111.5 104.8 100.8
Fiscal year ended
June 30 123.3 112.7 111.8 114.6 112. 112.7 113.9 107.9 102.8
CHRONOLOGICAL POLITICS.