Posts Tagged ‘education’

Where are we going ?

Friday, August 27th, 2010

There are several good posts on various blogs today and I thought I would summarize some of them. This is sometimes called a “thumbsucker” column when it appears in the NY Times.

1. Germany is rapidly recovering from the financial crisis. This from, of all people, David Brooks.

During the first half of this year, German and American political leaders engaged in an epic debate. American leaders argued that the economic crisis was so bad, governments should borrow billions to stimulate growth. German leaders argued that a little short-term stimulus was sensible, but anything more was near-sighted. What was needed was not more debt, but measures to balance budgets and restore confidence.

The debate got pointed. American economists accused German policy makers of risking a long depression. The German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, countered, “Governments should not become addicted to borrowing as a quick fix to stimulate demand.”

So, the Germans went one way, we went another. Results ?

The American stimulus package was supposed to create a “summer of recovery,” according to Obama administration officials. Job growth was supposed to be surging at up to 500,000 a month. Instead, the U.S. economy is scuffling along.

The German economy, on the other hand, is growing at a sizzling (and obviously unsustainable) 9 percent annual rate. Unemployment in Germany has come down to pre-crisis levels.

In fact, the second quarter US GDP has now been revised DOWN by 1/3. To 1.6% growth.

As an editorial from the superb online think tank e21 reminds us, the Germans have recently reduced labor market regulation, increased wage flexibility and taken strong measures to balance budgets.

2. Victor Davis Hanson writes excellent columns on his web site but the one today is exceptional. “Decline is a choice.”

In the age of Obama, the notion of not being exceptional or preeminent comes as a relief to millions on the left who pretty much are in sync with the protocols of the United Nations. On the right, there is a sense that Obama is the ultimate expression of downfall; given the wild spending, the iconic efforts abroad at apology, and the rampant entitlements we simply aren’t what we once were. In between, most aren’t quite sure—but sure are worried that we may never climb out of our self-created indebtedness crater, and that the culture’s education, the nation’s borders, and the civilization’s values are eroding.

He makes the point that much of our problems are psychological and, in fact, are the consequences of one generation, the Baby Boomers.

On the plus side, as I mentioned last time, our economy is almost three times larger than China’s. American agriculture is the most productive in the world. There is simply nothing like the farmland in the Great Plains, or the 400 miles of irrigated expanse between Bakersfield and Red Bluff. For all the damage done by the federal government, we remain the most orderly free society on the planet, where merit still to a large degree determines success—not class, race, or tribal affiliation. While our universities in the humanities are increasingly corrupt, their science, engineering, and computer science departments, as well as professional schools in business and medicine, are the best in the world. It is not that Cal Tech, MIT, Harvard or Yale or Stanford are better than counterparts in Germany or Russia or China, but that an entire array such as UCLA, USC, Texas, Ohio State, Duke, and dozens of others is as well.

We have huge reserves of both coal and natural gas, and can quite easily quadruple our nuclear power generation. The U.S. military is not just the most technologically advanced and supplied, but the most experienced in all phases of modern challenges, from air campaigns to counter-insurgency.

I have lost confidence in American arts, in the sense of fiction and poetry, which are now in large part warped by the cult of race/class/gender orthodoxy that brings intertribal awards and recognition, but American scholarship in science, medicine, and the professions remains preeminent.

I agree with all this and have had confirmation with my youngest daughter’s experience at the University of Arizona two years ago. I believe, and she suspected, that her experience, at a cost of $25,000 per year, was useless. She has returned home and is starting junior college in San Diego Monday. She told me what her classes are and they all sound solid and useful.

I could go on, but you get the picture: our parents and grandparents left us a wonderful infrastructure, methodology, and constitutional system. So it is hard for our generation (I was born in 1953) to screw things entirely up, although we have done our best, within a mere twenty years of coming into the responsibility of governance.

Look at the often cited pathologies that are destroying what we inherited, and note how easily they are within our material ability to cure—and yet how psychologically we simply lack the courage to take our medicine.

I agree with his comments and there is an interesting thread in the comments section of the blog. There is a growing backlash against the cultural and political “elite,” including the practices of affirmative action. Racism has been taboo for 40 years. We are now learning that American blacks are the final reservoir of this poison and a backlash may come soon if this continues.

3. The election in Alaska is a microcosm of the coming revolt against the elites. The Alaska Republican primary election was won by a tea party and Sarah Palin backed insurgent. The GOP apparatchiks seem to be trying to steal the election for the incumbent, Lisa Murkowski, an example of nepotism if there ever was one. Sarah Palin began her career by defeating Lisa Murkowski’s father in the election for governor. He appointed his daughter to fill a vacant Senate seat. There is just nothing like starting at the top.

A reliable source unaligned with either GOP senatorial campaign in Alaska, and positioned to know, confirmed for me last night that the Alaskan Republican Party (ARP) stepped up their efforts on behalf of Sen. Lisa Murkowski in the closing days of the election, going so far as to phone bank for her from the Alaska GOP’s headquarters on election day.

There is just no better example of trying to thwart the will of the people. Primary elections should be hands-off for the party. Instead the NRSC seems to be heavily involved in trying to pick candidates. If someone were to write a book on how to fuck up a golden chance to elect lots of Republicans, this should be chapter one.

4. John Boehner gave an excellent speech that may suggest an aggressive GOP agenda. I hope so.

I refer you back to my post on Angelo Codevilla’s essay that I posted on recently. It is amazing to see how quickly his points are being proven true. These are frightening times. I took two friends from England on a tour of California three years ago. Rather than waste time at tourist attractions everyone has seen, I drove them through the Central Valley that Hanson refers to. I wanted them to see the real riches of California. Now, that valley is mostly a dust bowl thanks to the Environmental Protection Agency and its concern over a tiny non-native fish in the Sacramento Delta.

This coming election will be the most important for our future since 1860.

Working with tools.

Sunday, June 27th, 2010

UPDATE: It now appears that a plumber in Kansas has provided a major design improvement to the BP oil well cap. He designed a cap using a flange arrangement similar to that used in high pressure hotel sewage lines. Once again, American ingenuity to the rescue as the tool user saves all the PhDs from their mishap.

I have previously posted my concern about the low status of manual arts in the educational and vocational fields in this country. This also applies to science but to a lesser degree. That previous post was obviously prior to the encounter between Barack Obama and Joe the Plumber.

One major point is the fact that Joe is making $250,000 a year at that point. How many law school graduates made that much in 2008?

Even in the field of innovation, it does not require a PhD to innovate in design or manufacturing. The basic problem, to me, seems to be the lack of manual skills with tools. People who make things, or can fix things, are the bedrock of a society that needs to design and manufacture quality objects. There is even a connection to the ability to do science. I wonder how many engineers cannot take apart and reassemble the things they design or work on. The same applies to surgery. Manual dexterity should be a basic requirement for the surgeon.

Today, there are a lot of unemployed people with useless degrees who would be better off learning plumbing or auto repair. In World War II, we benefited from the technical skills of the American soldiers who had learned to work with tools and many of whom could fix cars. The solution to the hedgerows of Normandy was an American army sergeant who devised a hedgerow cutter for the front of the Sherman tank. His name was Curtis G Culin and he was one of the heroes of World War II.

Dwight D. Eisenhower as President of the United States, in a January 10, 1961, speech to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers:
There was a little sergeant. His name was Culin, and he had an idea. And his idea was that we could fasten knives, great big steel knives in front of these tanks, and as they came along they would cut off these banks right at ground level – they would go through on the level keel – would carry with themselves a little bit of camouflage for a while. And this idea was brought to the captain, to the major, to the colonel, and it got high enough that somebody did something about it — and that was General Bradley — and he did it very quickly. Because this seemed like a crazy idea, they did not even go to the engineers very fast, because they were afraid of the technical advice, and then someone did have a big questions, “Where are you going to find the steel for all this thing?” Well now, happily the Germans tried to keep us from going on the beaches with great steel “chevaux de fries” – big crosses, there were all big bars of steel down on the beach where the Germans left it. And he got it – got these things sharpened up – and it worked fine. The biggest and happiest group I suppose in all the Allied Armies that night were those that knew that this thing worked. And it worked beautifully.

One of the reasons I like Neville Shute’s novels is because he has that theme in several of them. One, titled “Round the Bend” has as its theme the development of a new religion among men who work on airplanes. It is set in Asia and concerns the religions of Asia such as Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism. The chief character is an airplane mechanic who teaches other mechanics that to do a careful, flawless job in working on an airplane is the same as praying. His interpretation of Islam (The novel was written in 1951) becomes extremely popular in the Persian Gulf region as the imams see this as a new view of religion that attracts the young men who have become interested in mechanics and science and have drifted away from traditional life. His new creed is equally popular with Buddhists and Hundus, all of them aircraft mechanics and pilots. The resulting increase in quality of the work is appreciated by the airlines and he becomes a cult figure.

Like many of Shute’s novels, the engineer, even without a degree, is the hero. I wish we had more of this. Shute knew what he was writing about as he was a successful aeronautical engineer who had owned his own company. I titled my other post, The Manual LIfe. I wish it was more appreciated.

Progressive taxes

Tuesday, April 13th, 2010

UPDATE: There is more on this from National Review Online, including a letter complaining that Republicans are stupid because they don’t count FICA as “paying taxes.”

There is an argument made, even by Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, that the FICA payroll tax is regressive. The bottom 50% of American workers pay no income tax. The left then responds that the payroll tax is still paid by that segment of society and that negates the argument of the right. Let’s look at how that plays out in real life.

As you see, the lowest quintile of income group pays a net minus 27% tax rate in the payroll tax. That is, they get 27% more than they pay in during a lifetime of work. Of course, the beneficiaries of the Social Security system have to wait until they are 67 or disabled to collect those benefits. That is a form of forced saving and would work out if Congress had not spent the Social Security Trust Fund on other matters, leaving only IOUs behind to pay the benefits.

The Anglo-Saxon society was built on the Protestant Ethic of deferred gratification. That is why those who endure poverty and hard work to get an education (a real education) or to complete an apprenticeship for a trade, are rewarded later while those who chose big screen TVs and flashy cars often never get ahead. The plan for a satisfying life does not include winning the lottery. This can be difficult to explain to those who have not had a decent introduction to life from caring parents. Even so, some still figure it out. Some of them use the military to get an education when other avenues are closed. Ambition and intelligence will often emerge from unlikely places.

You would think a Nobel laureate could figure this out.

Observations on the recession

Monday, April 12th, 2010

Victor Davis Hanson has a piece today on his observations on the recession. The comments are as good as the essay, itself.

This week I drove on I-5, the 99, and 101. Except for a few stretches through San Jose to Palo Alto, most of the freeways were unchanged in the last 40 years. The California Water Project of the 1960s hasn’t been improved — indeed, it has been curtailed. My local high school looks about the same as it did in 1971. The roads in rural California are in worse condition than forty years ago.

Private houses are, of course, larger and more opulent. But the state seems not to be investing in infrastructure as before, but more in consumption and redistribution. For all the mega-deficits out here, we are not going broke building upon and improving the material world we inherited. The drive from Selma to Palo Alto is identical to the one I made in 1975 — no quicker, not really safer. The comfort and increased safety come from improved cars (seat belts, air bags, better structures), not from government’s efforts to make super freeways and new routes.

I have made this observation for some time. I came to California in 1956 to go to college. I had a very modest scholarship and very little money but I managed fairly well except for the lack of a car. I was struck by several things in my first impressions of California. The highways were the best I had ever seen. At the time, the Harbor Freeway ended at Century Boulevard and the Santa Ana Freeway ended at 17th street. There was no 405 and the Hollywood Freeway ended at Lankersheim Boulevard. I can’t remember if there was any of the San Bernardino Freeway built yet. I don’t think so. The downtown interchange was called the “fourway” because the Harbor connected with the Pasadena and the Hollywood connected with the Santa Ana. Construction continued under Pat Brown until the present configuration was largely complete. Then came Jerry Brown and construction stopped. We were supposed to learn that “Small is beautiful” and the decline of California began there. Now, he is running for Governor again. God help us !

Here follows some other unscientific observations. This is a funny recession. My grandfather’s stories of the Great Depression — 27 relatives in my current farmhouse and barn — were elemental: trying to find enough food to survive, and saving gasoline by shifting to neutral and gliding to stops or on the downhill.

My parents did better than this but my grandparents had a farm and my father had various jobs in Chicago. My mother lived with her sister and brother-in-law (who is my male hero). He sheltered many members of his wife’s family in a big house and supported them all with his job as a master bricklayer in a steel mill. His father had been superintendent of bricklayers in that mill before him. The mill is now closed. My mother worked in a warehouse, technically as a secretary but she had a more responsible job, until she was married and then, after I was in the 8th grade and my sister in the 5th, she went back to work. She did not like to ask my father for money. She worked until she was 77 years old when the company told her she would have to retire as no one knew how old she was and they would have trouble with their insurance if someone was over 65 and working. During the Depression, she also worked as a legal secretary and could type 120 words per minute. I could dictate my high school papers to her at normal conversational speed. She told us that she was subject to income tax but the amount was so small that her employer paid it as a fringe benefit.

The problem I saw this week was rampant obesity, across all age and class lines. If anything, the wealthier in Palo Alto/Stanford eat less (yes, I know the liberal critique that they have capital and education to shop for expensive healthier fruits and vegetables while the poor and neglected must turn to fast food, coke, and pop tarts). No matter — a lot of Americans are eating too much and moving too infrequently — and no one, at least if girth matters, is starving.

My mother walked to work from the train terminus every morning, a distance of about a mile. My father could carry a juke box (his business in the 1940s) up a flight of stairs on his back. He was the strongest man I ever saw. He owned a music company with a partner and he had a story that might have been a joke. They had a pair of piano movers that worked for them. The two consisted of an enormous Pole and a skinny little Indian. The Indian was the man at the bottom carrying the piano up a flight of stairs.

There is a new beggar. I see him on the intersections now on major urban boulevards. They are never illegal aliens, rarely African-Americans, but almost all white males, and of two sorts. One is someone who looks homeless, not crippled but in a walker or wheelchair (yet he gets up occasionally). He has a sign on cardboard with a wrenching narrative (fill in the blanks: veteran, of course; disabled; will work (not) for food, etc.). Choice corners become almost enclaves, as two or three cluster on islands and stoplights, as if certain franchises are choice and more lucrative than others.

I’ve seen a lot of homeless-looking white beggars and quite a few black beggars at freeway off-ramps where there is a stoplight. I haven’t seen the affluent looking ones he mentions but Orange County might be less tolerant of them than Palo Alto. I have listened to conversations in the market. Two very attractive women in their late 30s were talking near me in the meat department. One said “Well, we’re still paying our bills.” There was an open house last weekend, a block from me, that had a sign “bank owned.” I wonder how many others there are in this area. It was the largest model of the style of homes in this neighborhood.

I confess this week to have listened in on many conversations in Palo Alto and at Stanford, read local newspapers, and simply watched people. So I am as worried about the elite upscale yuppie as the poor illegal alien. The former have lost almost all connection with physical labor, the physical world, or the ordeal that civilization endures to elevate us from the savagery of nature.

While many were fit, and seem to work out, bike, ski, and hike, none understood the mechanics that lie beneath the veneer of the good life — the chain-sawing, hammering, drain-unplugging, tractor-driving, irrigating, and welding that allows a pleasant afternoon Greek salad and cappuccino on University Avenue — the disconnect between those Pennsylvania “clingers” and Obama’s arugula-eating crowd.

I have worried about this quite a bit. It goes back a ways. When I applied for a surgical residency, only one professor asked me about whether I used tools or played a musical instrument. That was 40 years ago. I have always had tools around and have made them available to my children. One son has gotten into the use of tools and has borrowed many of mine but I don’t mind. He has a family and a house to maintain. The whole culture of tools is important to me. One of Hanson’s commenters said it well.

This passage reminds me of a book I recently read on the Internet Archive : Mind and hand : manual training, the chief factor in education by Charles Ham. Categorized as a vocational text but it is actually promoting the inclusion of manual training as part of the intellectual development of students. The author does a survey from Egypt to 19th century America discussing how as civilizations became separated from manual labor they have declined. I really recommend chapter 2 on the Majesty of Tools. The guy really raises tools to a higher level. But the curious item is, if you ignore that the author mentions nothing after 1899, it could be discussing today’s society.

For if man without tools is nothing, to be unable to use tools is to be destitute of power; and if with tools he is all, to be able to use tools is to be all-powerful. And this power in the concrete, the power to do some useful thing for man—this is the last analysis of educational truth.

We are now governed by a generation of talkers. They do nothing but talk and, worse, believe that talk will solve problems, even with enemies. Reading and talking are important as it is the way we learn but there are many things that cannot be accomplished except by getting hands dirty. Sometimes that is a metaphor. I didn’t get my hands dirty in surgery but I often came home drenched in blood or had to shower and wash out my underwear after a big trauma case. Not all of life fits between the pages of a book.

Cultural dropouts.

Monday, October 19th, 2009

Victor Davis Hansen has another timely column today. This one is on dropping out of the popular culture. Some of this is age, of course, but one comment really struck me.

Dr. Hanson, you are not alone in your withdrawal from the post-modern.

I do not own a television, no longer read any print journalism, and the radio antenna on my car was snapped off three years ago by vandals and I haven’t bothered to replace it. The only reason I am even vaguely familiar with the current crop of celebrities comes from standing in supermarket checkout lines and glancing at tabloid magazine covers. In the recent Rush Limbaugh-NFL dustup, I was shocked to learn that the Rams aren’t in Los Angeles anymore. The only movie theatre complex in my community went under this summer, and I didn’t know it for months.

I watch old studio system-era movies on DVDs. I plug my iPod to my car stereo as I drive and listen to music no longer welcomed on a radio station’s playlist. I’m reading a lot more these days: histories, novels and poetry.

What makes this all slightly sad, slightly humorous is that I write for the entertainment industry (thankfully not the Hollywood portion of it). Only the fact that the verities of life are eternal even in fiction and that online social networking (Facebook, Twiter, etc al.) allows me direct contact with my actual audience affords me the ability to still function in near-isolation.

I feel like Edward Grey sometimes. The lights seem to be going out all over Western culture, and I wonder if they will be lit again in my lifetime. The boomers’ lifelong goal of completely obliterating their parents’ world is nearing completion.

It may be that people like you and I are doing the right thing by withdrawing. We are the monks cloistering ourselves in our monasteries with our Latin texts ahead of the coming darkness preserving the old knowledge for the better days that will surely come. And unlike those medieval monks, we have the world’s libraries at our fingertips and the samizdat of the web to connect us in our isolation.

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Wow ! I feel almost exactly that way.

Last night, I watched Red Dawn, the new super duper edition. I had always been annoyed at the ending of that movie. After the brothers, Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen, had been killed, the narrator’s voice came on and said “The war ended, as wars always do.” I thought that was a very weak and pusillanimous ending for a war movie. In the Collector’s Edition I watched last night, the ending is different ! The weak comment is gone. I suspect some studio wuss added it after the film was finished. Now it’s gone. Enjoy.

Is this our future ?

Saturday, September 26th, 2009

Theodore Dalrymple, the non de plume of physician Anthony Daniels, has another piece today on the decline of Britain. I have previously commented on the British teenagers’ loss of history and the loss in the entire society, which has a much longer history to remember. He places much of the blame on the educational system.

Although we spend four times as much on education per head as in 1950, the illiteracy rate has not gone down. I used to try to plumb the depths (or shallows) of youthful British ignorance by asking my patients a few simple questions. Fifty percent responded to the question “What is arithmetic?” by answering “What is arithmetic?” It is not that they were good at doing something that they could not name: When I asked one young man, not mentally deficient, to multiply three by four, he replied “We didn’t get that far.”

That’s not very far. We are not much better.

The political system isn’t doing very well, either.

It is doubtful whether any major country has had a more incompetent leader than Gordon Brown for many years. The product of a pleasure-hating Scottish Presbyterian tradition, he behaves as if taxation were a moral good in itself, regardless of the uses to which it is put; he is widely believed to have taken lessons in how to smile, though he has not been an apt pupil, for he now makes disconcertingly odd grimaces at inappropriate moments. He is the only leader known to me who combines dourness with frivolity.

Early in his disastrous career in government he sold the country’s gold reserves at a derisory price, against all advice, driving the price lower by the manner in which he arranged the sale. A convenience-store owner couldn’t, and almost certainly wouldn’t, have done worse.

This sounds familiar. Barack Obama is weak in economics although he has a high opinion of himself in almost every sphere.

For example, he was famously asked by Charles Gibson in one of the debates his policy on capital gains taxes.

GIBSON: And in each instance, when the rate dropped, revenues from the tax increased; the government took in more money. And in the 1980s, when the tax was increased to 28 percent, the revenues went down.

So why raise it at all, especially given the fact that 100 million people in this country own stock and would be affected?

OBAMA: Well, Charlie, what I’ve said is that I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness.

And again:


GIBSON: But history shows that when you drop the capital gains tax, the revenues go up.

OBAMA: Well, that might happen, or it might not.

Yes, stuff happens and there is little reason to expect that Obama knows why.

Then we come to foreign policy. Today the Telegraph, in Britain, published this column on its web site.

Never in the history of the United States has a president worked so actively against the interests of his own people – not even Jimmy Carter.

Obama’s problem is that he does not know who the enemy is. To him, the enemy does not squat in caves in Waziristan, clutching automatic weapons and reciting the more militant verses from the Koran: instead, it sits around at tea parties in Kentucky quoting from the US Constitution. Obama is not at war with terrorists, but with his Republican fellow citizens. He has never abandoned the campaign trail.

I have to agree. His performance at the UN was depressing. I have previously expressed my concerns about this administration and its policy toward Israel.

I would suggest that Obama consider the consequences of convincing Israel that they are alone, or worse, that we sympathize with their enemies. For the consequences, you might read this report by Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

He expects, writes Martin Walker of United Press International,

some 16 million to 28 million Iranians dead within 21 days, and between 200,000 and 800,000 Israelis dead within the same time frame. The total of deaths beyond 21 days could rise very much higher, depending on civil defense and public health facilities, where Israel has a major advantage.

It is theoretically possible that the Israeli state, economy and organized society might just survive such an almost-mortal blow. Iran would not survive as an organized society. “Iranian recovery is not possible in the normal sense of the term,” Cordesman notes. The difference in the death tolls is largely because Israel is believed to have more nuclear weapons of very much higher yield (some of 1 megaton), and Israel is deploying the Arrow advanced anti-missile system in addition to its Patriot batteries. Fewer Iranian weapons would get through.

The report also points out that Israel, backed into a corner, would most likely strike at its other potential enemies, including hostile Arab states. The fallout would probably mean the end of the Age of Petroleum, since the oil fields in the Middle East would be unusable for decades.

I don’t think Obama is equipped to make these judgements. He is starting down a very dangerous road with no evidence that he understands the risks. Neither did Chamberlain.

In 1939, the appeasers had the excuse that World War I was widely believed to have arisen from hasty mobilization and misunderstanding that more time and patient negotiation might have avoided. We now have the experience of that failure of appeasement, especially when dealing with an opponent who lacks historical balance or who has been mislead to believe that he runs no risk of opposition. The president of Iran has shown lack of historical balance and he represents a regime that has as a spiritual tenet that martyrdom is to be desired. Militant Islam has an unreasoning hatred of Jews dating, I believe, back to a rejection of Mohammed as he was founding Islam as a derivation of Judaism. This has now reached a psychotic stage in which a nation state of 66 million is governed by a small clique who believe that a millennium will come about by civil disaster, such as nuclear war. We have never seen as dangerous a delusion in the minds of leaders so close to the possibility of such weapons.

We see western governments that are so inept that they cannot educate the populace and they cannot understand the basic facts of economics or foreign policy.

UPDATE: This discussion of the coming financial meltdown shows just how difficult this problem is. Do not expect to see any logical discussion of this from the left.

What is a basic education ?

Saturday, September 19th, 2009

I have been spending a lot of time with the health reform legislation lately and have begun to wonder what people understand and what the consequences are of failure to understand some basic concepts. I’m not the only one.

What kind of education would one need to make sense of the current health-care debate? As the U.S. rethinks its academic standards and international competitiveness, this is not a bad time to ask what American citizens, voters, and taxpayers need by way of knowledge and skills to form reasonable conclusions about the hottest domestic policy issue of the day.

Today’s elites seem certain that John Q. Public is irremediably ignorant about, and perhaps oblivious to, the health-care debate, and thus susceptible to being misled, brainwashed, or cowed. Some Democrats are convinced that the insurance industry is creating “movements” bent on misleading and confusing people and planting suspicion in their hearts, while at least one GOP congressman and more than a few conservative pundits and talk-show hosts say President Obama is lying. All these folks seem to assume that the masses cannot possibly understand the debate. But must we accept that as a given? What would it take to comprehend the health-care battle?

OK, how do we get that education ? I grew up in the 1940s and 50s, went to Catholic school and still have sharp memories of my early schooling. For example, I was reading (For the 20th time, at least) The King Must Die, by Mary Renault, one of my favorite authors. It brought to my mind that, in elementary school, I learned the fact that King Minos had a great fleet and that Crete had “wooden walls” on the sea. These small items of history were common in elementary education at the time I was a child. I wonder how many children today would know what I was talking about.

I read to my children as they grew up. When they were small, I read “The Lord of the Rings” and “Watership Down,” both fantasy literature. Interestingly enough, children’s literature is now being de-monsterized meaning the scary stories are being removed so that children are not frightened by the stories. I can’t find the link right now where this was discussed but it makes clear that there is a reason why children’s literature has so many frightening stories. Those fears are part of children’s lives and working them out in fiction may be helpful in assisting children to cope with the real events of life. Most fairy tales are actually based on frightening events. Jack and Jill fell down the hill. Hansel and Gretel were abandoned by their parents in the woods. Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella both had wicked stepmothers in an era when the possibility of the death of mothers was very real.

All of my children read although reading seems to increase in attraction as they grow older. Reading for pleasure is an activity of childhood that has been devastated by television. Children who do not read a lot, have difficulty with reading and with reading comprehension. It is a skill that grows with practice. They will learn no history from television. Only reading will bring them into a historical world where things fit into place in the greater scheme of things. It was easier for me because we had no television. In fact, because my father was in the juke box business, he hated television and refused to have one in the house. When I was in eighth grade, I didn’t know who Jackie Gleason was. That was a social handicap. Eventually, a family friend gave us a TV set for Christmas and the barrier was broken. Fortunately, by that time habits of a lifetime were set and I have never been much interested in TV. At one time, with my first wife, I had a set of earphones with a long cord. I would sit and read with the earphones on as she watched TV. I mostly listened to classical music in those days. It goes well with reading.

What do we do about the poor quality of schools today ? I don’t know. Spending lots of money on schools isn’t the answer.
In 1977, when the story begins, Kansas City’s schools were in simply terrible shape. The city, like most others of its size (pop. 460,000), had experienced white flight from the 1950s on, and the school district even more so, even whites resident in the city pulling their kids out of the public schools. By 1977 enrollment was 36,000, three quarters of them racial minorities (which at that point meant mostly African Americans). The voters had not approved a tax increase for the district since 1969. In 1977 litigation commenced, members of the school board, district parents, and some token children suing the state and some federal agencies on the grounds they had permitted racial segregation. Federal judge Russell Clark, a Jimmy Carter appointee, got the case.

The solution seemed obvious.

After eight years of litigation, Clark gave the plaintiffs everything they wanted, and then some. He in fact ordered them to “dream” — to draw up a money-no-object plan for the Kansas City school system.

Dreaming is no problem for educationists. The plaintiffs — education activists and their lawyers — duly dreamt, with an initial price tag of $250 million for their dreams. This was twice the district’s normal annual budget.

It proved to be only a start, however. Over the next twelve years the district spent over 2 billion dollars, most of it from the state of Missouri, the balance from increased local property taxes. Fifteen new schools were built and 54 others renovated.

The results ?

After twelve years, test scores in reading and math had declined, dropout rates had increased, and the system was as segregated as ever, in spite of heroic efforts to lure white students back into the system.

Kansas City did all the things that educators had always said needed to be done to increase student achievement — it reduced class size, decreased teacher workload, increased teacher pay, and dramatically expanded spending per pupil — but none of it worked.

The great C-130-loads of money being air-dropped on the system also brought about waste and corruption on a heroic scale. Theft was rampant. So was overmanning: The project became a huge jobs and patronage program, with the inevitable mismanagement and scandals.

So that’s not the answer. I don’t know what it is, beyond the obvious, but I do know that an educated citizenry is necessary for a democracy to flourish and I think we are in big trouble because we have a lot of citizens who don’t read and know no history. And they vote.

Obama and education

Thursday, October 9th, 2008

The Ayres story is less about Obama’s personal friends and their backgrounds than about his education plans for his presidency. Obama’s web site seems to list his education priorities. It includes child care to the infant level:

Zero to Five Plan: The Obama-Biden comprehensive “Zero to Five” plan will provide critical support to young children and their parents. Unlike other early childhood education plans, the Obama-Biden plan places key emphasis at early care and education for infants, which is essential for children to be ready to enter kindergarten. Obama and Biden will create Early Learning Challenge Grants to promote state “zero to five” efforts and help states move toward voluntary, universal pre-school.

There is research showing damage to small children from very early day care. One thinks of Romanian nurseries filled with near-autistic children deprived of maternal nurturing. It seems that Obama is committed to the use of early day care, even for infants.

They would go back to bilingual education, even though it has been shown to worsen school outcomes.

Support English Language Learners: Obama and Biden support transitional bilingual education and will help Limited English Proficient students get ahead by holding schools accountable for making sure these students complete school.

The rest is mostly the usual ed school blather. What about his real agenda ?

Well, we could listen to his friend Ayres, a “progressive school reformer.”

November 2006 at the World Education Forum in Caracas hosted by dictator Hugo Chavez.
With Chavez at his side, Ayers voiced his support for “the political educational reforms under way here in Venezuela under the leadership of President Chavez. We share the belief that education is the motor-force of revolution. . . . I look forward to seeing how . . . all of you continue to overcome the failures of capitalist education as you seek to create something truly new and deeply humane.”
Ayers told the great humanitarian Chavez: “Teaching invites transformations, it urges revolutions large and small. La educacion es revolucion.” It is that form of socialist revolution that Ayers, and Obama, have worked to bring to America.

Ayres is a major figure in the Daley empire of Chicago.

Chicago’s current mayor, Richard M. Daley, has employed Ayers as a teacher trainer for Chicago’s public schools and consulted him on the city’s education-reform plans.
Just last month, Ayers was elected vice-president for curriculum for the 25,000-member American Educational Research Association. AERA is the nation’s largest organization of education-school professors and researchers.
In a recent interview on Fox News’ “The O’Reilly Factor,” Obama upgraded Ayers’ status from “a guy who lives in my neighborhood” to “somebody who worked on education issues in Chicago that I know.”
Actually, Obama knew him quite well, having worked together on a school “reform” project called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge.
In the 1990s, Ayers was instrumental in starting the Annenberg Challenge, securing a $50 million grant to reform the Chicago Public Schools, part of a national initiative funded by the late Ambassador Walter Annenberg.
Obama was given the Annenberg board chairmanship only months before his first run for office. He ran the fiscal arm that distributed grants to schools and raised matching funds.
Ayers participated in a second entity known as the Chicago School Reform Collaborative, the operational arm that worked with grant recipients.
During Obama’s tenure as Annenberg board chairman, Ayers’ own education projects received substantial funding.
One of Ayers’ descriptions for a course called “Improving Learning Environments” says a prospective K-12 teacher needs to “be aware of the social and moral universe we inhabit and . . . be a teacher capable of hope and struggle, outrage and action, teaching for social justice and liberation.”

Sol Stern has some thoughts.

Obama is a dangerous man and his education background shows his Marxist economics are not necessarily the worst threat.

Obama/Ayres is all coming out now.

Friday, August 22nd, 2008

First, we need to know why Ayres was an Education professor. Now we know. At least we know part of it.

Ayers’s spectacular second act began when he enrolled at Columbia University’s Teachers College in 1984. Then 40, he planned to stay just to get a teaching credential. (He had taught in a “Freedom School” during his pre-underground student radical days.) But he experienced an epiphany in a course taught by Maxine Greene, a leading light of the “critical pedagogy” movement. As Ayers wrote later, he took fire from Greene’s lectures on how the “oppressive hegemony” of the capitalist social order “reproduces” itself through the traditional practice of public schooling—critical pedagogy’s fancy way of saying that the evil corporations exercise thought control through the schools.

What is the purpose of his Education career ? His position as a Professor of Education?

Future teachers signing up for Ayers’s course “On Urban Education” can read these exhortations from the course description on the professor’s website:

“Homelessness, crime, racism, oppression—we have the resources and knowledge to fight and overcome these things.”

“We need to look beyond our isolated situations, to define our problems globally. We cannot be child advocates . . . in Chicago or New York and ignore the web that links us with the children of India or Palestine.”

“In a truly just society there would be a greater sharing of the burden, a fairer distribution of material and human resources.”

For another course, titled “Improving Learning Environments,” Ayers proposes that teachers “be aware of the social and moral universe we inhabit and . . . be a teacher capable of hope and struggle, outrage and action, a teacher teaching for social justice and liberation.”

For students who might get bored with the purely pedagogic approach to liberation, Ayers also offers a course on the real thing, called “Social Conflicts of the 1960’s.” For this class Ayers also posts his introduction to the soon-to-be-published collection of Weather Underground agitprop that he edited with Dohrn—called, with no intended parody, Sing a Battle Song: The Revolutionary Poetry, Statements and Communiqués of the Weather Underground, 1970-1974. “Once things were connected,” Ayers’s introduction recollects, “we saw a system at work, we were radicalized, we named that system—imperialism—and forged an idea of how to overthrow it. We were influenced by Marx, but we were formed more closely and precisely by Che, Ho, Malcolm X, Amílcar Cabral, Mandela—the Third World revolutionaries—and we called ourselves small ‘c’ communists to indicate our rejection of what had become of Marx in the Soviet Block [sic]. . . . We were anti-authoritarian, anti-orthodoxy, communist street fighters.”

How long after Obama’s inauguration do you think it would be before Ayres is named Secretary of Education ?

No wonder the SAT scores have been falling.

How should teachers teach science, for example? According to one of the books, Ayers and Greene approved for publishing,

“The marriages between capitalism and education and capitalism and science have created a foundation for science education that emphasizes corporate values at the expense of social justice and human dignity.” The alternative? “Science pedagogy framed around social justice concerns can become a medium to transform individuals, schools, communities, the environment, and science itself, in ways that promote equity and social justice. Creating a science education that is transformative implies not only how science is a political activity but also the ways in which students might see and use science and science education in ways transformative of the institutional and interpersonal power structures that play a role in their lives.”

And we thought that science was still safe !

Well. don’t lose hope. Next week, the CAC records are supposed to be available.

We”ll see.

Obama voters

Friday, May 23rd, 2008

UPDATE: Here is an Obama supporter, and presumably voter. She must be highly educated and she wants to nationalize the US oil industry. What a brilliant idea ! She must be very, very highly educated. It takes years of Marxist economics to arrive at those brilliant insights !

A few people have noticed something when Obama voters are described. They are all “highly educated”. What does that mean ?

Here is one characteristic:

I stole a friend’s idea and devised “The World War II Test.” I invited the applicants for interviews. These PMI wannabes came off as slick and somewhat rude. I noted something among my subjects, a sense of entitlement, they all, to varying degrees, emitted a message along the lines of “Why are you bothering me with this silly interview? I am obviously brilliant. I have a degree from Columbia. I am not going to spend my whole life as you have in this stupid bureaucracy. I just need this to add to my resume. I am in a hurry.” I hit them with the test, which consisted of about dozen questions about WWII and its aftermath. I recall a few.

He asked them a few questions like “Who were our allies in World War II?” One applicant said “Why are you asking about World War II when the job is about NATO ?

Hmmm…

Now, here is someone   who is not “highly educated” and is probably not an Obama voter.

We do know that there are Obama voters out there from stories like these.

No doubt those people are “highly educated.”

If you wonder who Marcus Luttrell is, this is his story.