Prager rebroadcasts show on Social Reconstructionism

My last post, or post attempt, failed when this show was originally broadcast. Dennis exaggerates the influence of social reconstruction in the schools. Its a significant philosophy of teaching to be sure, but its not dominant. The dominant philosophy of education is progressivism. Progressives and social reconstructionists get along well, as I detail in the above link, the later emerges from the former in the same way that essentialists emerged from perennialists. The real problem, however, is not the schools. Especially after 9-11 the number of teachers displaying and encouraging patriotism clearly outnumbers the social reconstructionists. The problem is textbooks, education departments in colleges, and professional teacher organizations, especially the NEA. The professional organizations and the text books promote a social reconstructionist perspective (the professional orgs as advocates of the glorious future that awaits and the textbooks in order to avoid offending anyone). This reinforces the progressivism and social reconstruction that is promulgated by teacher education. All of this insidiously created ontological commitment from teachers who otherwise would have little interest in social justice and all the rest. It is also organizations outside the school who impose political correctness on the school. Social reconstructionists are their allies in the school, but no one imposes punitive penalties for free thought on themselves, and since teachers normally operate without observation of the work, political correctness can be said to be an externality. This is especially a problem because most teachers lack a formal intellectual training and so lack disciplinary integrity, that is to say a commitment to the teachings of their subject as revealed by a method.

So why am I not affected? First I was an Aristotelian prior to ed school. I know how to reason, I understand the primacy of metaphysics, I have a theory of society and human conduct. Second, I had formal academic training, getting a masters in history before starting teacher training, so I had further developed my reasoning ability, but specifically I studied intellectual history and my undergraduate advisor was a specialist in the conflict between the humanists and the scholastics. Hence, tracing the movement of and analyzing ideas was well developed. As a result, when I was given an idea in teacher ed, I was able to put it in an intellectual framework and make sense of its place in the history of education. Once you know what progressivism and social reconstructionism are, you can elect to embrace, reject, or dabble in their philosophies. Those who lack such a capacity are far more apt to accept the world as its described by a teacher ed program, and is then reinforced by professional organizations.

For example, teacher education wrings its hands about poorly performing students. It speaks about them at great length and with great concern. It has almost nothing to say and no concern about students who are doing well. The teacher college does not recognize the gifted, talented, or exceptional student as a problem to be addressed as though they presented no special challenge to a teacher. Certainly poorly performing students is a problem. But, its not the only problem, its just only problem teacher ed has anything to say anything about. All of its totems and fetishes concern the poorly performing student, motivationally, culturally, cognitively, and so on.

As a final note, Prager comes away looking an awful lot like a Rousseau, and Jean-Jacques is the father of all this wackiness Prager finds so offensive. I propose Prager bush up on his Aristotle and Locke.

College Readiness

The St Louis Dispatch had a story yesterday on readiness for college. The story refers to this report by the Manhattan Institute. The demand in our society is not for plumbers, but for the college educated. There are not enough of them.

Universal Education

There are those who imagine that the traditional liberal education is fine for the wealthy (if they want it) but that the common man and woman benefits from a different kind of education, which despite its theoretical claims amounts to vocational education. This offends me on grounds both egalitarian and meritocratic. As an egalitarian I am offended by the notion that some students cannot profit from knowledge about the natural world and the social world as reflected in math, science, history, and literature. That they should be content with the life of a tradesman. This is especially curious in a world in which mechanization has eliminated so many jobs. Mechanization, as well as self-service and globalization constantly threaten the simple tradesman. Less so the engineer. Indeed the engineer may profit from all of these trends. As a meritocrat I am offended by the notion that the children of tradesmen are themselves best suited for trades and that the professionals of tomorrow will inevitably spring from the children of professionals. This denies the very real possibility that some of tomorrow's professionals will spring from the children of tradesmen if only they are given educational opportunities, rather than guided into vocational instruction. My own parents, professionals with four masters degrees between them, were the children of a janitor and an envelope cutter. This I think is the American experience.

Updated your bejo lately?

If proscriptivists ever replace "blog" with "web journal" they must understand that "web journal" will be contracted into something like "bejo" or something else as irrational as "blog". Like it or lump it sayeth the rabbit.

Max Boot in the NYT

Max Boot has an excellent opinion piece in the Times today. Take a look.

Lileks asks "This Riyadh bombing story would be cause for a brief dank gust of saudenfreude if the damage hadn’t been so horrible. Will the Saudi newsmagazines run covers that say “Why Do They Hate Us” – or, more accurately, “Why Do We Hate Us”? It’s a blue-pill / red-pill moment for the Saudis; it reminds you – if you needed just a jab – that history is moving swiftly around us. And it would seem to be an act of audacious stupidity by Al Qaeda – this isn’t just biting the hand that feeds them. This is biting it, tearing it off, chewing it up, and blowing smoke rings with the bone powder.

"And it makes me wonder: They stick the shiv in the ribs of their richest and most enthusiastic backers.

"What makes them this confident?"

The answer to Lilek's final question is a key one. Al Quaeda doesn't just attack the West, they attack states which are insufficiently Islamic. One thing you can see is that from the POV of Al Quaeda, the Saudis are insufficiently Islamic. Do they think they will shame the Saudis into rejecting the West?

Observation

Those who would criticize privatization in schools totally ignore the fact that public schools are also slaves to the dollars they need to keep operating, and so seek to send parents and legislatures away happy (with or without satisfaction). Focus on test scores, dropout rates, or class size are intended to please the constituents of the public schools to keep tax dollars rolling in and the critics at bay. Government serves customers just as private companies do, they just do it differently. The willingness of schools to sell junk food and candy to students in huge quantities leaves me in no confidence that the public schools are immune from the same kinds of pressures as private schools would be.

One of my regular blog reads has moved

www.matthewstinson.com now replaces A Fearful Symmetry.

Books Arrive

Diane Ravitch's book Left Back: A Century of Battles over school reform has arrived. It looks very good. I'll comment on it as I get more reading done.

Odd Occurance

Going through matchbooks at Lileks.com. Matchbooks with phone numbers for their businesses like MAin 3297 (sic), TEmpleton 8-7987, and ELdorado 5-9858. It put me of a mind for Pennsylvania 6-5000, by the Glenn Miller Orchestra. Suddenly it appeared on MoonTaxi, the internet radio I was playing. Coincidence, or master plan of the Martians?

Dumbing Down Our Kids

Been reading Charles J. Sykes book Dumbing Down Our Kids. Its a stark indictment of our schools. Its specific examples of what is goofy about our schools strike me as the most egregious examples rather than representative ones, but I can attest from within the beast that the differences are only of degree, not of kind. I have since gone ahead and ordered Diane Ravitch's book Left Back. Typical teaching methods are so riddled with utopian fantasy, that I'll have to seriously examine contemporary practice and the long history of educational practice to devise a more reliable classroom practice.

America and Europe

Thomas Friedman has a columnn today on the breech between Old Euope and America (he doesn't use that term). He postulates that we have different goals and that this is the source of our problem. Indeed, but I don't think things are as technocratic as some of the lines in his column suggest. He quotes Carl Bildt, the former Swedish PM, "Every European prime minister wakes up in the morning thinking about how to share sovereignty" and "the U.S. president wakes up thinking about where the next terror attack might come from and how to respond." [the quotes are of TF paraphrasing CB]

Yes, and no. Another line gets closer to the heart of the matter. "Pretending to ease the suffering of the Iraqi people — by calling for the removal of sanctions but keeping Saddam in power so he can buy lots of stuff from Germany and France — is priceless to them. But easing the suffering of the Iraqi people by removing Saddam's whole sick regime is worthless to them." France has shown a certain unwillingness to embrace the globalization the US granted the world in 1944 at Bretton Wood. They resent US interfearance in what was effectively a satalite state, Iraq. Hence the notions of a counterweight to the US.

California Fires

The descriptions of the California fires remind me of the 1993 flooding on the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. (see here too) Each kind of disaster is different (just as each incidents of disaster is different from one another), but cross disaster commonalities do exist. Tornadoes, the more common Missouri disaster, are instantaenous, more like earthquakes. One takes cover and then cleans up. Fires and floods involve armies of defenders going out to meet the disaster, have much longer durations than most other disasters, and produce the long period of displacement that delays clean-up until after the disaster. Tornado and earthquake clean-up generally takes place within 24 hours. According to the National Weather Service, The Missouri River was above flood stage for 62 days in Jefferson City, Mo., where I was living at the time. Grafton, Ill., recorded flooding for 195 days. That's a long time to wait to get back to your home and see what is left. The flood did tend to rise and fall, even while remaining above flood stage, so some cleanup was possible, only to be halted again by rising water.

Swiss Elections indicatates polarization

The Neue Zürcher Zeitung has a story on the elections. The Swiss People’s Party (SVP) is now the leading party, jumping ahead of the Social Democrats. The main losers seem to have been the center right parties, the Christian Democrats and the Radicals. Another big winner was the Green Party. Does this result indicate a more bitter factionalization in Swiss politics, or strategic blundering by the cenetr-right. The Christian Democrats tries to possition itself as less Catholic. The Radicals, a pro-business party, advocated raising the retirement age all the while its party leadership had to re-shuffle because of a business scandal. Utimatly this question will only be answered by the next elections to see whether the center can recapture its possition against the poles.

Matt has the failure analysis

See my brother's blog for keen insight in very few words for the Cubs getting no farther than Central Division.

The Primacy of foreign Policy

I know that I am a distinct minority prioritize foreign policy above economic and social issues, but I am not alone. A really good article from 1996 by Robert Kagan and Bill Kristol makes a strong case not only for the importance of foreign policy, but a neo-conservative one at that. Its certainly an interesting read in this post-9/11, post Gulf War II world. I find that it's advice not only remains sound, but would have made the past several years much easier to navigate had it been better heeded.

Self Esteem: too often misunderstood

I am a strong proponent of Douglas McGregor and Abraham Maslow. Reading McGregor is like reading a revelation dropped down from heaven. He is famous for his Theory Y of management, but he has quite a lot more to offer as well. He takes Maslow very seriously, and so do I, and independently of McGregor. As someone who takes Maslow seriously I find myself in that condition so familiar to intellectual historians: finding error in a practice because its practitioners have substituted a misreading of the master for right practice. Schools today are committed to high self-esteem, often in priority to other things, like performance. While its true that Maslow argued that many Americans were beyond physiological and safety needs and were working through belonging, esteem, and actualization needs, hence the primacy of esteem, it is not true that students (as opposed to Americans as a group) have resolved safety or belonging needs and are actually dealing with esteem needs. If students feel intimidated by bullies, crime, or other dangers they are working on their safety needs and will not benefit from working on esteem. For students in poverty, this is especially likely. Many students will still be wrestling with belonging needs, indeed the teen years are famous for this struggle, regardless of class. Further, in order to mistakenly aid the esteem of the worst performing students, esteem opportunities are withdrawn from the students most liable to benefit from them, those most likely to be class leaders in performance.

Indeed, the old style linking of performance and esteem was more appropriate and beneficial than any of the approaches which have replaced it. Those who perform well deserve esteem and the achievement of success and esteem in tandem is healthy. It encourages further success while satisfying fundamental needs. This is something that someone like Alfie Kohn doesn't get. Withdrawing esteem from those who perform is withholding esteem from those most liable to be working at or near that level of Maslow's hierarchy. Giving esteem to those who lack performance has several ill effects.

When students are given esteem without performance, they are given satisfaction for a need they are not necessarily working on, especially when their performance is undermined by safety, belonging, or even physiological needs (inadequate sleep, hunger, more profound needs) giving them esteem doesn't satisfy them because what they need lays elsewhere. When students can tell that they esteem is not tied to performance they detect its patronizing nature, its falsity, and since undeserved attention is better than no attention they will absorb it, it is not helping them meet their esteem needs. Its like eating non-nutritive foods. It fills the stomach without feeding the body. Since teachers are already selling candy and pop to students, this may not bother them. Students, because of brain development better explained by Piaget, are going to be egocentric. Whether this egocentrism is an obstacle to transcend or develops into the personality flaw known as narcissism depends on how they achieve esteem. If they achieve esteem without merit, they will demand esteem in the future without the expectation of performance. They believe they deserve esteem because they are good not because they have done good. This becomes especially challenging when they do ill and expect esteem from teachers, parents, and other adults because its their expectation regarding esteem. Why act right or avoid wrong action if esteem is forthcoming in any event?

Avoiding these errors would be less pernicious if teachers where not so poorly educated themselves.

Bureaucrats once again defy common sense

German student Ralf Bader graduated at the top of his class at a private high school in England. Education bureaucrats in Baden-Württemberg checked his file and found no exam demonstrating a proficency in English (or any other second language). The fact that he graduated from a British high school at the top of his class with straight A's was not enough to prove his English language proficiency, the officials claimed. Bader took them to court and won. So to simplify this for the bureaucrats, boy goes to school in foriegn country where they use a different language, he gets top marks, hence he probabaly speaks the language pretty well. Go ahead next time and recognize the graduation certificate. This story was in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Luther the liberator

Saw Luther tonight, and was struck by how modern, progressive teachers are in the role of the Catholic Church denying students direct access to knowledge because it will bore them, or some other variation of "they can't handle it", while Luther represents the faith that they can.

My own hostility to progressivism is rooted to the simple fact that I don't worry about the students who are unprepared for school and so find academics difficult. Everyone else is worried about them. As a contrarian, I see the bright and talented students whose school has been dumbed down, and so are performing much worse than they should. Too few teachers are concerned with excellence and the place of our bright and talented students, and the fact that given high standards, the students who lie in between these extremes are capable of the high standards. That, and it will prepare them for college.

One of the things that so disturbs me about progressivism is the sense that students who aren't prepared for school are incapable of making use of the liberal arts. Like the Cardinals from the movie they had no faith in, or feared, the liberating power of knowledge. Rather than making the effort to sell the artes liberales and then teach it, they feed their students pablum. At one point one of the cardinals argues that the scripture was too difficult for most priests, and my own view of teachers is that they are very probabaly not prepared to handle the liberal arts either. So what that leaves us with is high stakes testing to compel a liberal arts curriculum by an obstructionist teaching profession who would rather not teach much of anything.

Democratic Divide

Peter Beinart, whose work in the New Republic I generally like, has an excellent article (subscription required) on how the real divide in the Democratic party isn't ideological, its class. He argues the middle class reformers reject machine politics, favor campaign finance reform, are fiscally conservative, and particularly dovish (though dovishness also correlates well to geography). The working class democrats see machines as their defenders, regard reform with suspicion, receive a disproportionate share of entitlements, and are hawkish (again geography needs to be consulted). Dean is the darling of the middle class reformers and Gephardt is the champion of the working class traditionalists. Kerry has displeased both, and no one else is poised to grab either of these key constituencies.

Looked at this way, Gephardt is the stronger candidate in the national election, since its much more likely that Dean would lose culturally conservative, gun-loving, hawkish labor to Bush than it is than Gephardt would lose the middle class reformers, who would certainly defect to a Republican like McCain, but not Bush.

The thing is, I just don't see Gephardt getting the nomination. Its Dean's to lose, and such a loss might resurrect Kerry. However, nationally, Dean will hemorage culturally conservative, gun-loving, hawkish labor to Bush. How badly will depend upon how well Dean can woo labor. Dean is already shifting his candidacy towards frontrunner geniallity towards fellow dems and moderating certain views. Our system of primary-national election always forces candidates to run away from the center and then back toward it. Both to unify their wing of the electorate as well as appealing to independents. As I say, its Deans to lose.

The one virtuous institution in American society

Dennis Prager had an embeded journalist, Karl Zinsmeister, who has written the book Boots on the Ground on the show today. Once again it reinforced my old solider's notion that the only truly viruous institution in America is the Army. I suppose the other services are also virtuous, but my own affection is for the infantry. Compared to other institutions, the press, the university, the congress, even the church, the Army is most virtuous.

Lies, lies, and more lies

I am sick of the lies comming out of my Geography prof. Tomorrow I act to get some alternative grading. Its bad enough that he lies about population distribution in England. There, he's just wrong, and I don't see any harm beyond the fact that its simply not true. That is bad enough, because error is sufficient to warrent condemnation. But some of his lies are insidious in their subversive intent. This is error in the service of harm. He claims that Soviet indoctrination was very much like American indocrtrination. I suppose that's true, except for the secret police, the gulags, the state control of speech, and the other forms of repression. Then again a dog is very like a fish, except for the fins, scales, gills, and other characteristics of underwater habitation. He argues that cars in 1970 cost $2500 and that similar cars cost $15,000 today and that this is largely the product of our economic disfunction. Never mind that the value of the dollar has changed by a factor of four, so that in real terms that 1970 car costs more like $10,000 today and that the items he did list as differences (mostly safety and convienience features) account for the remaining $5k. Why send students out into the world suspicious of corporations, believeing that their system was corrupted and broken by greed, and that is fundamentally disfunctioinal? Could it be any of a variety of left-wing ideologies? The fact that this professor is a leftie is not the problem. He can embrace anarchy, communism, fasicism, or idiotarianism for all I care. Further, if he can get a faculty to hire him, he should be able to teach from his perspective. But to lie to people to get them to embrace this doctrine is a cancer on the professoriate. I mentioned 3 lies, and this one clearly slides over into incompitance rather than the other. He argued that when we refer to devolution (such as the formation of a Scottish Parliament) that it connects to some evolutionary concept of greater complexity, rather than the more literal sense of falling down.

By the way, this caltalogue of lies are all taken from an hour of class today. He has a previous catalogue of lies, but today was the straw that broke the camel's back.

Talk Radio having a hard time talking about Rush

Hugh Hewitt confined himself to taking callers from people with some experience with addiction, either as addicts or care-givers. Micheal Medved has waded a little more deeply into the stormy waters of Rush's problems, but has balanced the collegial respect with a frank acknowledgement that its not something to just sweep under the rug. Some other hosts, Mike Gallagher for instance, have attacked callers for being disappointed with Rush for failing to live up to his own standards. Its Gallagher's possition that Rush has had a possitive influence and therefore shouldn't be criticized. Presumably there is a balance test here in which Rush's positive influence outweighs the disappointment. That's all well and good for an assesment of Rush the person. But whatever standard we apply has to make sence when we look at other celebrities and non-celebrities. Matthew Perry had a very similar problem, in which a medical condition produced a pain-killer addiction. There is the well publicised problems of Robert Downey Jr and Charlie Sheen. (Sheen's story is second, scroll down.)

Martin Sheen turned his son, Charlie, into the judge overseeing his probation from previous run-ins. The elder Sheen praised the effect of the legal system on putting leverage on people with a problem. Too often, especially where well-liked celebs are concerned, we greet such news with a wink, and that's no sign that anyone needs to get their life in order. The fact that there is going to be some criticism and that Rush's repuation will in part depend on how he deals with this, can play the role of valuable leverage in helping Rush to commit himself to resolving his addiction once and for good. If we are harder or easier on Rush because of politics than we would be on Perry, Downey, Sheen, Darryl Strawberry, or anyone else who becomes addicted (and the difference between becoming addicted because of recreational or pain-management is only a part of the issue, I don't think it makes all the difference) then we're just using our politics as a shield to avoid discussing the actual case at hand.

Personally I have always regarded addiction itself as the real evil, and don't think Rush did anything worse getting addicted and not taking the steps neccesary to fix it before now. Before we assume that Rush is a hypocrite, I'd like to see what he had to say about 1) cases like Matthew Perry in which someone else got addicted to pain meds, and 2) addiction itself, not the recreational use that can be one road to addiction. I think one can support Rush's position and still condemn recreational drug use that leads to addiction and other negative consequences.

As a side note, the comments on John Kerry's web site have been pretty sympathetic. I think that's a good sign that Dems (or at least Kerry supporters) are able to look past the politics to a degree.

I know the future

In a fit of prescience, yesterday I posted about how America borrows the knowledge creation of other countries to deploy for itself, rather than creating nearly as much as it might otherwise appear. Today I look upon the NYTimes and Tom Wolfe re-tells the story of Gropius and Mies van der Rohe arriving in America (also as refuges just like the others) in the 30's and transfering the creative knowledge of their European home here for us to deploy. This story, for those looking for more than the 3 pages on-line at the NYTimes, should look to Wolfe's book From Bauhaus to Your House, in which he related the whole tale, including the fate of actual American knowledge creator, Frank Lloyd Wright . By the way, it is the dominance of the Bauhaus aesthetic which Virgina Postrel attacks in her new book. Its well worth a read, as Wolfe always is.

Quiz was a breeze

By the way, the quiz I took this 9AM was a breeze, despite the presence of plenty of Excel questions I had to reason through. I actually learned some neat tricks for Excel. I am entirely self-taught in Excel, and use it for the most rudamentary functions. The number of advanced OS questions was troublingly small. There was one question that touched on routine maintenence and one on computer security, though one other question did mention a firewall incidentally. Personally I would reduce the number of sophisticated Excel questions and put a bit more emphisis on maintaining and protecting your computer. Obviously this applies to the class I waivered as well as the test. The number of computers brought down by the latest round of viruses because so many had failed to install Microsoft updates was a clear wake up call as well as a slap across the face of a sleeping American computer user.

Does the U.S. create knowledge?

I recently read chapter 7 "Skills" of Lester Thurow's book Building Wealth. (See the Prologue to the book) Thurow talks about knowledge deployment (making good use of knowledge economically by workers in the form of skills) and knowledge creation (inventing new products, proceedures, and ideas) and observes that relative to the size of the country, the US is much better at knowledge deployment than it is at knowledge creation. He observes that German in the first half the the 20th century was the leader in knowledge creation. I point you to the Nobel site. Note how many of the prizes go to Germany. Also note the large number England got. Two of the great discoveries of the 20th century, nuclear and space science, America owes a huge debt to Germany. On the one hand, Jewish scientists fled the Nazi's and brought their nuclear physics to the US, and in the second case, we made off with Germany's rocket scientists after the war. When you figure how many discoveries are derivative of the nuclear and space programs, all of which ultimatly are founded on German educative capital, not American. That we could have the Sputnik crisis in American education when we did, points to the reliance on German, not American know how. Looking at the recent decade of nobel laureates, we have gained a recent boon from the Russian brain drain. Our science relies on the desirability of immigrating to the U.S. The search in Asia for computer science types is well known. Our university system attracts students who didn't come up through the American public school system.

Matt has Wrigley pics

Check out Matt's blog for Wrigley pics from some time in early October. This must the very last games of the regular season. Sister just got back from Chi yesterday (then ran off to KC for a Rennaisance Fair). I might get Matt to put up her pics at his blog and link to them.

Religion Quiz

NRO also included a Religion Quiz. (See down two entries). I took the quiz and scored 100% Mainline to Liberal Protestant, 97% non-theist, 82% Secular Humanist, 77% Mainline to Conservative Protestant, and so on down the list and I bottom out at 33% Orthodox Quaker. I only score 51% with Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox. So either I am an non-theist/Secular Humanist who can pass for a Mainline Protestant or I am a Mainline Protestant who can pass for a non-theist/Secular Humanist. An interesting proposition.

Computer Exam

My mother often said that getting through school is just jumping through hoops. There is much to recomend that theory (it helps that she was smart enough that the academics were not an obstacle to her). Today I take a test that illustrates this principle. Despite the fact that I have two PC's networked together running a host of software, not to mention this blog, my computer sales in Oakbrook Il, my data entry in Chicago, and well over 15 years of PC ownership, I have to take a test to get out of Computer Science 101. Also, I should mention that I already took a higher level class that required this as a prerequisite. We grad students can do that, I took Psych 603 last year having never taken a psych class ever before - got an A, see grad students know how to do school. Its also a testament to a good liberal education. Nevertheless in 90 minutes I take a test to demonstrate I know how to open a file, cut and paste, and presumably avoid formatting my hard-drive inadvertetly. I was just unable to sleep last night so at 4:30 I finally got out of bed put some coffee on and I'll be going in 19 hours without sleep. Like I don't have plenty of experience operating a computer past 16 hours. Frankly I don't know anyone who has significant computer experience who doesn't have plenty of post-16 hours logged. A real test would require we stay up all night and would involve installing a new game that requires exotic drivers to run. Then we write a reveiw in a Unix based word prcocessor. That would seperate the A's from the B's, let me tell you. Seperating the A+'s would require installing some hardware, I suppose. I asked if I could submit a request for a waiver for both the course and the exam which waives the course on Powerpoint, but they want me to take the test. I suppose I need to get over to campus today anyway and print some things out on their fine laser printers.

Philosophy Quiz

I was digging up dirt on Nel Noddings (education author) and her named popped on an a National Review page, so I clicked right to it. Why, it turns out Jonah Goldberg and Rod Dreher took a philosophy quiz, so I did too. Interesting results. Aristotle 100%, Hume 91%, Aquinas 86%, Rand, Nietzsche, Sartre in the 80%'s, Plato 71%, Hobbes 62%, Stoics 57%, Cynics 51%, Noddings 31%, Kant 24%, Prescriptivism 8%. Jonah Goldberg scored high in Aristotle and Aquinas, and low in Sartre, Prescriptivism, and Noddings. Rod Dreher scored high in Augustine and Aquinas, mid-range for Plato and Aristotle, and low for Nietzsche, Noddings, Epicurians, and Hobbes.

Apparently neo-cons are all over Aquinas, and either back him up with Augustine or Aristotle; apparently the Thomist synthesis of Aristotle and Catholicism can still be teased apart. All of us rejected Noddings- surprise. Her book The Challenge to Care in Schools is a prescription for a drift towards totalitarianism, IMO. Social Reconstructionist, indeed. I was surprised how low I scored as a Stoic, but apparently when they conflict with Aristotle, Zeno takes a back seat. Fair enough. The questions which would have boosted my Cynic score I answered to the contrary because of the way they were worded. Personally I am an ascetic, but I don't think its neccesary for ethical living. I recject the accumulation of stuff, but regard it as a choice that's right for me, not an imperative. I subscribe to the Postral thesis on such matters, despite my own personal lack of a designer toilet bowl brush.

Now we just need to get Hugh Hewitt to take the quiz.

Social Conservatives don't appear to get it

Looking at the responce before and after the California recall, and seeing the numbers that Tom McClintok polled, Social Conservatives don't understand that they can't win elections by themselves. I guess (with some evidence) that Social Conservatives number about 1 in 6 Americans, and a Pepperdine prof recently put their numbers at closer to 1 in 8 Californians. You can't win elections with those numbers. You have to attract someone else. The current alignment of party politics makes it much easier for you to attract Republicans who are Fiscally Conservative and Republicans who are foriegn policy Hawks than most other kinds of voters. In some states, like Missouri, its still possible to run as a Socially Conservative Democrat, but this works better in the South and West than it does anywhere else.

Tom McClintok was both a Social and a Fiscal Conservative, and this expands the base of support he can draw from. Arnold Schwarzenegger is a Social Liberal and a Fiscal Conservative. Since Schwarzenegger took moderatly liberal views (yes on abortion, but also yes on parental notification and no on late term abortions; yes on civil unions but no to gay marriage) he put himself in a possition to attract all the voters who were no committed to one of the polar possitions on social issues. Conservatives could see him as better than Davis, and knew that there were lines he wouldn't cross, and liberals could see him as someone who might not advance their agenda, but wouldn't threaten it either.

As a Republican who is socially liberal (in terms of policy), fiscally conservative, and most importantly as far as I am concerned, commited to a strong foriegn policy, I don't like social conservatives. I was poised to vote for Mel Carnahan over John Ashcroft in 2000 for the Missouri Senate seat because of Ashcroft's conservatism. I turned out to be the reverse of many voters, because far from casting a sympathy vote for the deceased Carnahan, I could not vote for someone who could not serve, and certainly didn't want to give the Democratic governor a blank check to name anyone. So I voted for Ashcroft and held my breath. His appointment as AG, and the fact that his tenure has been dominated by security issues rather than social issues has made him perfectly palatable to me, where things could have been far less happy.

I prefer to vote for a candidate who will support strength in the world, because the surest route to peace is strength. Weakness invites attack. If the candiates are equally good, bad, or the office isn't one with any foriegn policy role, I look to the more pro-business candiate. Since social issues come third, I generally only consider them if they are either radically left or right. Personally, I probabaly am fairly socially conservative, but the last thing I want is the government imposing a social policy agenda. I especially recoil from one that has the absolutist authority of revealed religion. Wars have been fought over consubstantiation vs transubstantiation. The Founders wisely sought to remove the state from these debates.

Hence, Social Conservaties must realize they must form a coallition with other voters, and that means comprimise. In traditional races, its easier, because you just need to avoid nominating a candiate who frightens the rest of the coalition. In open multi-candidate elections like the CA recall, its harder because if you are voting for a candiate less likely to form a coaliton than another candidate is, you will lose. Victory goes to the candidate with the biggest tent.

Arnold and harrasment

Susan Estrich has this LA Times commentary on the pre-election stories in the LA Times about Schwarzenegger's alleged behavior. I also saw her on Fox on Saterday. Fox also had an NOW representative in California on. Both agreed in general that Arnold's behavior was bad, acknowledged that people make mistakes, and approved of a quick appology. The NOW rep mentioned she would be voting for Arnold and Estrich lamented that a strong Demacrat like Dianne Feinstein wasn't an option.

I have been displeased with the number of outlets that have reported that Schwarzenegger appologized for what the LA Times reported he had done. Arnold contends that some of the stories are exagerations and at least one is totally false (and a woman from his camp who witnessed the occasion has told her story) and the way he structured his statements about the stories, he said that while these stories are not accurate, he could not claim to be innocent of the general charge of friskiness. I am especially unimpressed by the charges that date to the 70's. A sexual revolution had occured, boundaries were being broken, and a sense of promiscuity was all over. To think that a young man in California should have been playing by the old rules or should have known what the rules would later turn out to be is asking a bit much. Given what is sometimes said about politicians, Arnold's real mistake was that he he was "playful" out in the open with random people, rather than people whose lives he could ruin.

Changing Menu Configurations

I am irked by the way drive through menus move their items around so you can never rely that a given item will remain in the same place over a period of time. I drove out of a resturant today because I could not find what I was looking for in a quick second. I knew where it used to be, wasn't there, must have moved, they lost my business. I just have zero tolerance for playing location games when ordering food. I don't want to figure out where the french fries are.

Substitute Teaching back to normal

The last two weeks in September were really busy, but the pace has fallen back to normal. Normally the sub racket is not very busy during the begining and end of semesters, since teachers have more desire to be there and less cause to be away (both push and pull factors at work). Now that its October, I expect the pace to be pretty quick and increasing slightly as we get on to November. After the first week of December it will basically fall off the table unless there is flu going around.

Matt's Journal has moved

As Matt wrote in his last entry at the old address, its like breaking up moving to a new address and format, but he has done so. The new address, as listed over to the side in "preffered" is also here. Keen followers of this site (as if there were any, ROFL) will notice that I have also added Lilek's Bleat (easy enough to navigate back to the less frequently updated goodies) and Hugh Hewitt's home page.

Clark is a Media phenomenon, nothing else

A Fearful Symmetry puts Gen. Clark in the first rank of Dem candidates. I must disagree. Clark is a media phenomena with no grass roots support. Its an entirely top down candidacy. Kerry and Gephardt attract core constituancies of the Dems, but you have to draw more than a few core groups. Dean is the only one with broad appeal among the Dem base, and because of that and the fact that he's the only one (other than Edwards, I guess) with charisma, Dean will be the nominee. Barring of course a bolt from the blue. Clark's candidacy is to possition him to be a Cheney-like VP/key foriegn policy advisor. There's nothing else to it.

Reflections on The Case Against Standardized Testing

Alfie Kohn's book, The Case Against Standardized Testing opposes choice and judgment in education with the special concern that judgment will promote choosing, and choosing will lead to markets. Kohn also opposes judgment because he believes that differences are false. Kohn is a Marxist who masquerades as someone concerned about standardized testing, but his real concern is that testing will promote market forces in the schools.

Kohn erects a straw man for privatization, attacking the profit motive, even though private schools are longer lived in America than public education. John's hostility to profit is not just that he fears it will crowd out other values in private education, he is hostile to all forms if incentive. His 1993 book, Punished by Rewards, has the subtitle: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes. Indeed, in 2000 and again in 2001 he got an article published advising parents to stop telling thier children "good job". Praise, we find, creates praise seeking behavior. Isn't that the point? Just two weeks ago Education Week published The Folly of Merit Pay. Evidence of the Marxist fetish of labor unmotivated by incentive is well documented. Productivity falls. Lenin's own response to this problem was to reintroduce incentive, Stalin, Mao, and a host of imitators preferred repression. The resurgence of the Liu party in China, and relaxing of the prohibition of private ownership and profit has produced tremendous growth in China, growth long delayed. Kohn hopes to introduce this failed practice into the American schools.

The great danger of the market is not just profit and incentives, since many privatized schools might well remain publicly funded and chartered, funded through public vouchers, or endowed. The great danger is the market itself. The freedom to choose to abandon a school that is failing or one where the school's philosophy was not appreciated by parents. Such an event would make education free in the sense of Austrian economics. (see here and here) School rankings and teacher rankings, something natural in our Consumer Reports society, would promote consumer choice in student placement. If such were the case, the social reconstructionist program Kohn would favor would lose its captive audience. So his opposition to school testing is his Berlin Wall.

Preventing choice requires that Kohn dismiss the possible of judgment. If we have no basis upon which to judge, how can we make an informed decision as consumers? How can we tell whether to cast aside the statist public school system for a market based public system? Kohn argues that judgment is impossible because its technically impossible, that is we can't get accurate enough, and that there really is nothing to judge because we are all the same in quality, though we may possess different strengths and weaknesses. Part of this can be seen as the traditional struggle in America between the meritocracy and the egalitarians. Kohn, however is a radical egalitarian and rejects any concessions to the meritocratic position. He argues that differences between schools, teachers,and students are imagined (or one might presume are the result of capitalist externalities like inequalities in wealth) and therefore judgment which purports to rank, grade, evaluate, or otherwise privledge students is false.

Not content to make the egalitarian case, Kohn also attacks the meritocratic case, by far the bulk of the text, by attacking the mechanism of judgment new to education: standardized testing. Elsewhere he has attacked grades, but John's publishing suggests he would build momentum in attacking testing which could then be applied to grades and all forms of evaluation and incentive.

This then is John's program. He is a radical egalitarian with a hostility to markets and incentives like profit, hence a Marxist, who seeks to preserve the bastion of social reconstructionist and progressive education against essentialists and perennialists by preventing parents and other observers from seeing outcomes of the different approaches to education side by side. No doubt he knows that like residents of East Germany before the Berlin Wall, parents would vote with their feet for a kind of education he rejects.

The New Republic laments the fall of the old elites and the rise of democractic politics

Franklin Foer writes about C. Boyden Gray in the latest issue of the New Republic. He laments the decline of the old country club republican for a republican politics driven by participatory politics, itself driven by the reforms the weakened the role of the party in favor of more voter participation (you know, democracy) and the politicians who capitalized on voter dissatisfaction with what the elites were producing. I'll write this off to a nostaligia for a kinder, gentler Republican party on the part of democrats in general and the writers of TNR in particular. After all, last week's cover story discussed the current Bush hatred of Jonathan Chait. As a center right Republican I share some identifican with Nelson Rockafeller, and I too can pine for the days of Dems like John Kennedy and Harry S Truman. But, I know that those days were the days of elite party control on the one hand, and a strong consensus nationally produced by the Great Depression and the Second World War. When a generation came of age that had experienced neither of those, the consensus began to collapse. Its collapse was aided by a more participatory politics that gave voice to factions of the parties (and other places) that were not in control of the parties and so had little influence until the reforms that weakened the parties in the 50's and 60's. So, this nostalgia, while pleasing to the center left and the center right, is based on form of elitism we probabaly don't want back, and could never get back if we did want it, and by a consensus produced by 12 years of crisis and war. I don't think we want to pay for a new consensus, either.

Curious Coincidence?

After writing this morning on watered down curriculum because of games and films, I spent this afternoon showing videos of Kim Possible and Spounge Bob Squarepants. Granted I was the sub for the recess attendent, and it was raining.

Schools abandon the Block system

While there are still schools happy with the block system, I suspect the pendulum is swinging back towards the 7 period day. The reason can be found in the link I just provided, namely, "Those teachers who haven't changed teaching styles and still rely heavily on lecturing were least happy with the block, as were students in their classes." The 90 minute block system works best when you take a topic and cover it from three directions, using a combination of lecture, activity, and multi-media. That might be 30 minutes of lecture, 30 minutes of video, and group colaboration, or it might mean Adler style socratic method involving 10-15 minutes of lecture followed by 30 minutes of discussion and debate, either covering two topics, or followed by video, computer research, or some other activity.

Instead, Springfield students and administrators are telling me that too many teachers are still teaching as if they had a 50 minute period. Some just stretch the teaching they would do for 50 minutes longer, others just leave the rest of the time for homework. Students with experience in both systems prefer the block system because their is less homework, because teachers routinely don't fill the classroom time with teaching. Administrators argue that they did not go to a block system to create mini-study halls. They point to a lack of change in the test scores of the district indicating no change taking place between block and period. And block systems require a handful more teachers. In periods of financial stress, keeping the block system with no percieved benefit seems like bad judgement.

Opponants of the block point to these issiues:
Longer classes are incompatible with the attention spans of most students (20-50 minute attention spans are commonly cited)
Instead of trying to cover twice as much material in a longer class period, the natural tendency is to water down the material to maintain interest, resorting to movies, games, doing homework in class.
Students may experience a gap of 8 to 13 months before taking the next course in that series
Transfering from a district using block to one using periods or vise versa can be tough.

There are more comlaints at the site linked to but I don't take most of them seriously or regard them as technical issues. Lets look at the four charges above.

Attention span of 20-50 minutes: while this may seem to favor the 50 minute period, it should be remembered that the block is supposed to be 3 units of 30 minutes of different teaching style activites on one to three topics. For example. One day in my own Vietnam unit I lectured for about 20 minutes on problems of mobilization, identifying the draft, the use of reserves, and the expansion of the army. Then I presented a list of all the strategies urged by the services, political leaders, and other influential groups in the conduct of the war. Students were grouped and ask to play the role of presidential advisors choosing a policy for winning the war and being able to defend it. (I always like teaching strategic thinking because it benefits so many areas - financial planning, career planning, business planning, &c.) The last 20 minutes we watched a video segment of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident taped from the History Channel's episode of presidential scandals. In practice, this lesson had 20 minutes of lecture, 40 minutes of group work and presentation, and 20 minutes of video, as well as about 5 minutes of administration before class and 5 minutes of down time afterward during which I took questions on the unit test. The needs of attention for novelty were satisfied by the variation of teaching styles, despite the fact that our topic remained the early phase of the Vietnam War.

This brings up the second charge. Watering down material by adding games and movies. Is that what I described? No, but I am an advocate of block, and hopefully do a good job with the block. So some of this criticism may just be a mischaracterization of what I did as games and movies, when I think its pretty clear that genuine learning took place. I also have the summary reports students handed in advocating their strategy and know that there was higher level thinking applied to strategic consideration of a real historical problem. As a side note, the students favored various combinations of the marine corps approach to winning the war often combined with the Army's special operations counter insurgency doctrine.

However, I give real credibility to the complaint that much material is watered down with games, videos, and by allowing homework to be done in class. I see it and hear about it all the time. While good teachers know how to use the block system and how to keep learning progressing during 80-90 minutes, to many just teach the way they did in the 50 minute period and fill out the other 40 minutes with fluff. In the humanities classes this often means superfluous videos, or videos that could be valuable not used to challenge students to think. Math class is the worst offender in putting homework into the classroom, though all are guilty of it. One of the comlaints not mentioned so far is that some students and some subjects require routine learning. Languages and math (itself a language) are the obvious candidates. Homework should be the opportunity for students to look at their material between classes to get that practice. Part of the purpose of homework is to get students to crack the book at home. The more self-teaching students are the more self-teaching they will do. Abandoning homework for classroom filler turns students into empty vessals which need a teacher to do the filling. There is also the idea that school should be entertaining. If learning can be so, great. But when it cannot, we should not provide empty entertainments because the kids expect it, because we want them to like us, or because we don't know what else to do. Games and videos (as well as the combination of them - the video game) must always be educational first, or they don't belong in the school. Ultimatly this criticism is what is undoing the block schedule in many districts.

Another criticism is that students may have long breaks in which they don't see a subject. One of the ideas behind the block is that it would facilitate inter-disciplinary lerning by encouraging coordination between teachers. I know that a lot of science gets worked into my world history plans and a lot of math into my US history plans. In a block, its easier to spend the time doing a 30 minute section on voting analysis (a new use for percentages!), the business cycle, or demographics. If that math comes after a video of the same topic and is followed by a discussion of the evidence from text, video, and the numbers, its much easier to do it than if you have a 50 minute block. Unfortunatly, the block has done little to foster interdisciplinarity or other kinds of extra-curricular goodies (I like to use art history, for instance).

Transfering is a problem, but its more a problem of variation between districts than it is of the block system. I would actually increase variation in a market based approach to schools which would tend to increase consumer (that is parent) control of the school, which would tend to increase this problem. The solution is for a teacher to spend a little time and devise a program of integration for the new student, so the student can quickly get to a place where the classroom is afterward profitable.

Blackout in Italy

When Goldfinger left Bond after their golf course he said , once is happenstance (refering to Bond's interference with his card game), twice is coincidence (refering to the golf game), but the third time is enemy action.

When the power went out first in the American NE, then in London, I thought little of it, other than the power grid needs to be maintained. But now Italy. Three leading countries that argued for the removal of Saddam. Coincidence or enemy action? It would not be unwarrented to keep this counterintelligence file open and see what leads develope.

Cubs NL Central Champs

Cubs!

Andrew Sullivan on Dennis Prager

Andrew Sullivan, whom I have read since he write the TRB column at the New Republic, is on the Prager show (1-2 am, presumably 10-11am yesterday on KRLA) and its one of the most intelligent and interesting discussions of the question of the proper extent of marriage as I have encountered thus far. For those who have just fallen off the turnip truck, Sullivan is pro, Prager is con.

KIDS crowding out KRLA

My listening to local KIDS has been overtaking So-Cal KRLA. The cause? Summer's over, daytime listening has dropped way off, and KIDS has a familiar line up (Hewitt 5-8, Prager 11-2, Gallagher is on during the day, Medved is replayed on the weekend, and may well be on other times). So, regardless of where I start out after I get back from teaching, I get to KIDS by 7pm (since I get the 3rd hour on the radio right away rather than waiting until 10pm) and when KRLA is playing health and self-help, KIDS is doing a computer show, and then on to Prager. As a side note, I don't see much radio discussion on blogs (though much "what I am reading"). Locality of radio can be an issue here, but not entirely as my listening to KRLA reveals.

Too busy to blog?

Its not that I don't have things to write about, but work plus school has been crowding out the blogging of late. Those ideas will hit the bloggosphere this weekend.

Illegal Operations opens its doors

Matthew Stinson of A Fearful Symmetry has started a new blog on gaming issues. That looks like fun. Check it out here.

Instapundit Predicts the Recall will go ahead

Instapundit writes, "Unless there's some awfully compelling legal principle that's not making it into the press accounts, I predict a reversal on this one. It's just too explosive."

I certainly hope so, or I have suddenly shifted to a much more radical position on whether or not our system is broken. In any event its time to start some serious activity to end legislation from the bench. Legislating is for legislators. Those elected representatives facing recall every couple of years, you know, not the appointed lifers on the bench.

How Conservative do you have to be to react with hostility to school lunches?

Lileks has linked twice to A Small Victory in a previous week (catching up). So I have been reading the whole thing. In this post, a review of another blog appears. John Hawkins complains about school lunches, and Michele Catalano at A Small Victory defends them. A comment on the boards at A Small Victory by Matthew Stinson summarizes his post here.

As mind readers and very close readers of this weblog will have sensed, I am a Hamiltonian. As Hamilton and his successors knew, there are times when it is wiser to pry a few tax dollars from the reluctant grip of Americans. Investing in the human and material capital (and by investing I mean we reasonably expect a return on investment at some point) generally meets the approval of Hamiltonians. That may mean a tarriff to stimulate industry (Hamilton was a tarriff man for these reasons), internal improvements, like canals, to encourage transport and commerce, and school lunches. I have little doubt that I live in a better society because of school lunches, not in some soft compassionate way, but because 1) its a waste of the education funds spent on a student who gains little or no benefit because he is too hungry to learn. I'd rather toss an extra $2 a day on the pile of ed money rather than see the $40 a day already spent go to waste. 2) What social benefits (say in terms of productive labor and future tax paying) can be expected from a well educated youth who was raised in poverty compared to a poorly eduacted youth? What additional costs are incurred by the poorly educated youth in terms of police, court, prison, or even just social services costs that do not accrue to his well educated fellow? Every good Hamiltonian will support any expenditure which saves him money or produces additional money beyond the investment. Hamiltonians will begin to demure as the expected return on the investment falls, though we are not above some consideration of non-fiscal benefits. And we have a phrase to decribe those conservatives who so jealously guard their earnings that they will not: penny wise and pound foolish.

By the way, Hawkins responds to A Small Victory and the comments there and digs a whole for himself even farther down. His mocking sign off, the same as A Small Victory is almost malicious.

As a final note, I am impressed with A Fearful Symmetry and will be making repeat visits.

Metaphysics before everything

I have been having a problem running into people who are putting their aestheics before their metaphysics, and its bothering me. People do this all the time, but I often don't have to see it, so the problem at hand its the running into. I would prefer that people put their metaphysics first all of the time, but I would prefer a lot of things in the way people reason and act.

What am I talking about, you ask? Metaphysics is the part of philosophy where we ask "what is the nature of things" or as Wittgenstien like to put it, "what is the case." I would argue that if what know what is, we develop a critical apparaus with which to examine our world, and when we encounter people with different values and aesthetics, we appreciate the difference, expand our understanding of the world, and happily go on our way. When you encounter someone who has a an explicit cosmology (their world view) and a well articulated ontology (their definitions of the concepts they use) its easy for you to see the world they see. When further, they start with a cosmology, so that its not yet determined by what they want it to be like, its open to new data. So for example, you might encounter someone who has not yet read a book, describe the book, and they would be interested in taking this new information (which may or may not agree with their ideas about things) and examining it, integrating it both by attacking and accepting various parts of it.

On the other hand, consider someone who begins with epistomology (they ask the question how do we know what we know) and then forms a metaphysics. Because they are aware of a lack of certainty of some kinds of knowledge, they will not include this knowledge in their metaphsyics. For example, say a person decides they cannot know the minds of others, they can only know themselves, and then forms a world view based only on themselves. This is narcisism. We may not have the same kind of knowledge about the various parts of the world, but the whole world, even the parts we cannot really understand must be included in our world. Once we have as good a notion of the world as we can get, we can form a philosophy and begin to refine our cosmology with a method. So I can begin not knowing about distant planets or the world beneath the oceans, but I can construct a way of knowing that I regard as reliable and begin to examine these little known places with that method. The same is true if we are talking about the nature of good and evil, as much as a place.

Most vexing of late has been the primacy of axiology (values) especially aesthetics (judgements about beauty and pleasure). Putting any axiology first and then to construct a metaphysics afterword is to decide how you would like the world to be, and then to pretend it really is that way. When we think this way, people who disagree with us are idiots because they disagree with the way the world is. This is the kind of thinking that totally shuts down thought. One decided what is true and then assumes they are right.

So I find myself in the public schools, hallowed halls of learning. I am interested in Virginia Postrel's new book The Substance of Style. I am teaching art. After school I wander across the hall to another art teacher and strike up a conversation about Postrel's book. I am myself still wrestling with the ideas within, and so have no firm judgement about the book, except that it is interesting. It is the aestheic argument, that people are capable of creating a valid aesthic for themselves and that their consumer choices are not decadent or vulgar that makes me think that an art teacher would be interested in this. Instead, I am confused by the responce I get: "Why would anyone make such an argument?" I reply, "Why would anyone make any kind of argument at all?" I see the posing of an argument as an attempt to refine my cosmology by use of a reliable rational and/or emperical method. So I take information, compare it to my experience as a test for validity. If the information differs from my experience, I attempt to either falsify one of them or synthasize them, depending on which seems to best explain the observable world. This teacher did not operate this way, and I was initially confused by it. This teacher had an aesthetics and Postrel's book disagreed with it, so the book was silly. As I mentioned this conversation to other people, they either humored me (because I am interested in the most esoteric things like how we philosophize) or they defended the ascetic aesthetic which Postrel attacks. I found myself replaying the conversation in different forms with different evidence. But what I kept encountering was the idea that we are destroying the planet, that technology is moving too fast, and that America is the worst offender. I think these analyses are wrong, but I am open to evidence to the contrary. The reverse was not true. People have decided that they don't like the way America consumes so it must be harmful. I don't like the way America consumes, so I don't consume that way. I recognize that my preference is a matter of taste. As for harm, I look for evidence in the outside world, not in my sense of what I perfer. I think people are making rational choices based on values different from mine. The evidence suggests that there are benefits and costs to the action of various people, and so I assume that their weight of the costs and benefits is rational unless I have some evidence to suggest otherwise. Overall I see a prosperous, healthy society that constantly improves itself. This only happens because it is acting consistently with reality. Pretending that things are they way they are not produces failure. Looking at the way things work closely, looking for cases that reveal the way things are, suggests to me that Americans are living reasonable and rational lives, and that they make reasonable choices.

What Free Speech?

Virginia Postrel writes, "cable shows don't suffer from the same constraints. Like print, they're free to provide whatever interviews, information, and entertainment, they think will serve their audience, without government editors telling them what to include or omit. That's called freedom of speech and the press."

The old rules made sense when there were two or three channels on TV, and just a handful of radio stations that did news and talk. Now that there is cable and the internet, as well as satalite radio, and talk of new delivery sytems out there, "equal time" makes no sense. When the market has high barriers to entry and few players you have an oligarchy, and its in the public good to keep a close eye on them. When you have substantially lowered the cost of entry and the number of players is huge , you have a free market, and then government has little useful to do, and is best advised to get out of the way.

Dennis Prager woke me up

Hugh Hewitt's first two hours run together on KRLA and KIDS, but KIDS runs his third hour after the second, so I have migrated from internet streaming to radio sometime between the begining of the show and the begining of the third hour. Afterwards, a fine show on computers comes on KIDS, so I left it on when I went to sleep. At 11pm, KIDS runs the Dennis Prager show. I kept waking up and was too interested in Prager's show to get back to sleep. I haven't heard the show since Tuesday (been teaching). So here it is 2am, and I am wide awake. Thanks Dennis.

Alfie Kohn a species of Marxist

I have finished reading Kohn's book, and looked into some of his earlier work. The Case Against Standardized Testing is actually a book which attacks the notion of choice and judgement neccesary to make choices. Kohn doesn't want us testing (or grading) because he doesn't want us to be able to compare students, teachers, or schools. The reason we ultimatly must not compare is because if we were to excercise such judgement we might choose to alter the schools, teachers, or classes for our students. Doing so implies adding market principles to schools, first through vouchers or other forms of choice (charter schools), and ultimatly perhaps privatization. It is privatization that earns Kohn's greatest hostility, because of the corruting influence of profit. Elsewhere, Kohn has attacked the whole idea of incentives, the basis of free market thinking. And so we see that Kohn rejects free market forces like choice and incentive, he attacks profit, and he is a radical egalitarian (another reason not to choose is because choice is false, we are all equal). That makes him a species of Marxist.

Is Testing a Conspiracy?

Reading Alfie Kohn's 2000 book, The Case Against Standardized Testing: Raising Scores ad Ruining the Schools. Pretty easy to see where Kohn comes down on the issue. Why do we test as much as we test? Kohn identifies the following groups - those determined to cast the schools in thw worst possible light as a way of paving the way for privatization", "corporations that manufacture and score the exams", "politicians to show they're concerned about school achievement", and those members of the public who want accountability, measurements, or "tradtional 'back to basics' instruction." The privitizers and corporations are tricking us, and the rest of us are misguided.

His view of the move towards privatization is hostile: "After all if your goal was to serve up schools to the marketplace, where the point of reference is to maximize profit rather than what benifits children, it would be perfectly logical for you to administer a test that many students would fail." Its a capitalist plot. Those who apprently want privatization are a small enough group that they cannot do so legislatively, so they aim to trick everyone else with testing designed to fail. So they are very clever and powerful, but not powerful enough. Sounds like the classic conspiracy. Unfortunatly, a substantial minority of citizens favor privatization of some kind, probabaly a third. So the suggestion that testing is designed to fail to advance the cause of privatization means that this third is more commited to their notions of privatization than they are to the quality of schools of what ever cast they may be. I find this very hard to swallow. Is there someone out there that is so dedicated to market solutions to every problem that they would destroy the schools in order to save them? Certainly someone, somewhere feels this way, but its no where near the numbers that support privatization. This argument is a straw man intended to discredit this substantial minority of Americans. You can find people who want to privatize anything, including the police departments. Somehow we are able to avoid being tricked by their insidious conspiracies. Privatization is a serious issue and should be treated as such.

Its the corporations. The perpetual bugaboo for the Left. Somehow we are made to believe that the corporations have tricked us into purchasing a service we do not need (and without advertising and sexy models) and we can't figure it out. My we are stupid. How did the corporations trick us so? Is there a history of this pernicious influence? Can it be traced, or is it just sufficient to blame the corporations and expect us to uncritically accept the claim. This claim requires that in all the states that use testing government corruption is responsible for the current testing boon, and no one has noticed.

Poiticians want to look good. For whom? On the to next group, members of the public who want accountability, measurements, or "tradtional 'back to basics' instruction." Politicians want what the public demands. With the exception of election law, this is the end of the story. There is the possibility that the public wants wants better schools and the politicians grab onto testing as way to look good quickly, but this argument conflicts with the idea that tests are supposed to make schools look bad. If politcians invented testing to make themselves look good it would be easy to score well. Alfie's whole point is that its hard to score well and that the drive to do so is ruining our schools. So why does he include politcians? He's engaged in conspiratorial thinking and its easy to include politicians in the conspiracy, since they have few defenders as a group. So, we are left with the public, or some portion thereof sufficiently large to spread testing far and wide. So why do they do it? Mostly, Alfie tells us, because they don't know what they are doing.

In fact it works this way. The public demands higher standards and a return to teaching useful knowledge (rather than say, how America is a racist society). The question immediatly follows, how do we know teachers are doing this? Testing is best understood as an institutionalization of parents blaming teachers for low achievement. So a test is designed to measure whether the students are meeting the standards. We are, after all curious. Look at Missouri's standards for Social Studies and ask, should students know this, is it reasonable to expect these concepts be learned? I think its hard to argue that sudents should not or that the concepts are unteachable. Since pundits often shake their heads at studies that show how few of America's students can identify the civil war in even a rough chronology, perhaps they are in on the conspiracy too.

Matthew moves, his story blogged

My brother has moved. His story is on-line. Take a peek. Some scrolling will be helpful to find the whole story. At this time his past three posts have been about the move, I presume more will follow. Getting into the new place, learning a new city. You know the score.

He has yet to post on the drive to collect his U-Haul as he said he would. I collect the mail. I subscribe to a wide variety of magazines. As we wait for Matt to collect his last check, his U-Haul, &c, I read The New Republic on tax policy my sister reads the Fall Season Preview in Entertainment Weekly. This strikes him as both funny and utterly typical.

Navy Wants a Bush Carrier, and why we should never have a USS Clinton

CBS reports that the Navy seeks a Nimitz class carrier named after George H.W. Bush, the 41st President. Bush was a WWII war hero, negotiated the trecherous post-Cold War, lead the first Anti-Saddam Coallition, and was well regarded by the military. He makes a better candidate for a carrier the Ronald Reagan, who none the less strove to build a 600 ship navy.

William Jefferson Clinton had no military service, avoided foriegn policy, showed no backbone in Somolia, and was generally disliked by the military. If we are ever handed a USS Clinton by a democratic administration, I think we should demand equal time and insist on the Richard Nixon School of Journalism at the most liberal university in the Ivy League.

Hamas recognized as terrorist by EU

The Europeans have figured out that Hamas is a terrorist organization. Experts predict that the EU will shortly identify the duck as a variety of bird, and will catagorize the automobile as a type of vehicle.

Perennialists and Essentialists in Education

Having covered Social Reconstructionism a few days ago, I now turn to Perennialism and Essentialism. Depending on how broadly one wanted to group educational theory, Perennialism and Essentialism could be identified as a single theory based on the great books and engaged in transmitting the Western tradition. I, however, will argue that it is more useful to regard them as two related theories, Essentialism being an offspring of Perennialism. The Perennialist tradition goes back to Scholasticism. Its is still with us, though I think its bastions are in academia, Catholic parochial schools, and in the practitioners of the liberal arts who embrace the dead white male. Perennialism is not a theory interested in content, its a process oriented theory. You go through a course of education designed to sharpen and prepare the mind so that no problem, social, political, philosophical, scientific, or what have you, remains elusive to the educated person. Its fundamental purpose is to create critical thinkers who know who to reason reliably, who are familiar with past problems and their solutions as a guide to confronting future problems. Study of the great books, the Western canon, is the most effective way of producing such an education.

Perennialism's basic assumptions were not altered by the rise of Humanism. The Humanists shifted the emphasis in education, but they agreed with the Scholastics in the fundamentals - the purpose of education lay in teaching students how to think. The first great challenges to this notion arrived when education began to shift from an elite endevour to a mass instituition. In Europe and America, advocates for working people saw the Perennialist education as suitable for gentleman (and hence outdated in societies of mass participation, mass governence, and modern character). They advocated a new theory of education we now call vocational education, namely that school should prepare you for a trade (anything from carpentry to phyiscs to adverstising). Here the idea was, and is, that you need not study history, the history of ideas, or how to reason universally. You needed to solve specific problems tied to your profession or craft, and to learn the problems and methods of your profession or craft alone. The ability to sit back and reflect on he nature of things was regarded by the vocational advocates as impractical. From this movement, along with other intellectual challenges to the Western tradition, such as Pragmatism and Socialism, emerges John Dewey. Dewey changed two fundamental things in the school, its model of the classroom and its curriculum. The classroom, in Dewey's view was to be democratic and practical. The hierarchical model of the old (Perennialist) school, Dewey regarded as undemocratic, and its tradition, indoctrination. Rather than viewing the teacher as an expert in the classical texts, someone who would supervise and facilitate learning. Where the Perennialists saw the Western canon as the best pedagogical tool, Dewey favored projects, especially group projects, with a practical application of useful and relevant knowledge aquired by direct experience. Dewey was a leader in educational theory and provided an alternative to Perennialism that included an intellectual challenge to Perennialist assumptions. He taught at both the University of Chicago and Columbia University, where much of American educational theory has been produced. Some of his followers went to to become the Social Reconstructionists. Other followers, who remained closer to Dewey's own approach remained outsiders until the 60's and 70's when it might be possible to say they where the leading theory of education. While Dewey's approach waned in the face of Essentialism, many of its assumptions, especially on the practical and experientian nature of learning, remain part of many teacher's understanding regardeless of their broader theoretical approach.

In responce to the followers of Dewey and the Social Reconstructionists, there arose a reaction that wanted a return to Perennialism, or a modified Perennialism. These are the Essentialists. They come in two varieties. One kind is academic and looks a lot like the Perennialists, except that they are self-consciously engaged in restoring the Western tradition to its proper place, against the threats of its intellectual challengers. The Perennialits today are largely engaged in advocating the Great Books, a rigorous and critical approach to reasoning, and the transmission of the Western tradition. The Essentialists want to do that all the while combating the influence of Dewey and his followers, especially the Social Reconstructionists. As such, they have gotten political. They advocate in the political arena for the codification of an approach that supports the Western tradition. Its very hard to codify critical thinking, so the regulations handed down, mostly by state departments of education, tend to require certain facts or ideas be learned. To verify this learning, Essentialists have embraced an invention never interesting to the Perennialists- standardized testing. Essentialists are the great testing advocates. Its not sufficient to require the Great Books be included in the curiculum because Social Reconstructionists will deconstruct them to make the point they want to anyway. Hence, it is neccesary to make sure ideas taht are part of the Western tradition are transmitted too. Standardized testing in this regard has made considerable advances in the past decade. Once largely confined to multiple choice testing, current testing now asks students to explain their answers, and so hopes to encourage critical thinking as well. Many teachers today are remote from the Perennial tradition and are at a loss to 'teach to the test' because it doesn't require coverage of a discreet body of facts, but wants students to engage in ideas. This is because Essentialists have their roots in the Perennialist interest in knowing how to reason.

There is another group of Essentialists, and these are the non-academic, unintellectual (not neccesarily anti-intellectual, but there is some of that), who have no deep connnection to the Great books, but see that the Social Reconstructionists as well as the the Dewey methods are not transmitting their values, and sometimes seems to reject their values. So they construct a remembered past. They were taught under some variety of Perennial theory, but don't have any working understanding of the theory, its assumptions, or purpose. They want their values and the Western tradition taught. They oppose the values and purposes of the Left in education. So they favor testing, prefer teachers who are authorities in their fields, and who teach the facts, not subjective interpretations. The fact, for example, that Platonists and Aristotelians (you may know them as Rationalsts or Empiricists) will disagree, is an esoteric quibble. They don't want they world turned upside down so that the American people is evil and its enemies are heroes. They don't want traditional social roles inverted. They don't want queer theory in the schools. They want patriotism, they want conservative social values, they want democracy and capitalism taught in the schools. They want they produce of the Western tradition. They are less concerned about how we got here. This second wing of the Essentialists is a large, politicized group of parents who mobilized as a part of the New Right in the 1970's to take American back from the Left, both the Old and New Left. During the 1980's the Essentialists won politically, producing far larger numbers of supporters in American society than any rival theory. While the intellectual leadership of the Essentialists comes from academics or other kinds of intellectuals, such as Allan Bloom and William Bennet, whose programs are largely Perennialist, the success of the Essentialists rests with mobilized middle America. Essentialists of both kinds fear that the other theories of education (mostly Dewey and the Social Reconstructionists, since they are the main alternatives) have diluted the quality of education by focusing on everyday experience or social reconstruction and produced children who can't even read or write. They want to abandon the school as a labratory for democracy or socialism and get 'back to basics'. Teach students to read and write, to have basic competencies in basic knowledge of the language and history, or math and science, and many Essentialists are satsified. They might want excellence, but its excellence in basic skills. Other Essentialists still regard excellence as including critical thinking and a working knowledge of the whole history of the Western tradition, not just its present.

Interestingly, while the broader culture is strongly Essentialist, and a fair (though minority) portion of the academy is Perennialist, these two theories are rare in the public school. They are largely imposed from outside by the political process or social pressure. I have mentioned in earlier posts that teachers tend to run the whole political spectrum, but they don't generally embrace testing, critical thinking of the classical model (debate teachers aside), a canon of great books, or the socratic method. Further, few of them could claim to be authorities in their subject area. The dominant theory held by most teachers is some species of Dewey's philosophy. Its based on the interests of the child (make it relvent to the learner) not on some objective assessment of what the student ought to know. Learning should be a hands on process of experimentation during the course of projects, especially cooperative group projects. And that, as Rouseau supposed, children will learn on their own what they need to know and will develope into the people they need to be. All a teacher has to do is facilitate the process.

Local school officials close barn door after the horses escape

A 6th grade boy was killed in front of his school in a traffic accident. Here is the coverage of the contraversy in the local paper. Notice there is no discussion of the driver's culpability in the death of the 6th grader. What is not mentioned, but was covered on local TV, the boy crossed one way, realized he had forgotten his lunch, turned, got waved across by a west-bound driver, and then got hit by the east bound driver. I drove the area, and the presence of a school and school crossing are clearly marked, a flashing yellow light marks the crosswalk in question, so I cannot see how the driver can get away with anything better then negligent homicide, if not worse (no determination has been published regarding the driver, his speed, when or if he applied his breakes). Some of this can be found on their website. The burden for protecting children belongs to the community obeying laws around school zones and school busses. (See a story yesterday updating us about a death at a school bus from last spring.) The people blaming the school district are enemies of the public good (the best being the enemy of the good).

Blogger loses a long post, ticks me off

Blogger.com just lost a long post on Dennis Prager's hour on social reconstruction. I have no idea whether I'll bother to re-write it. In the mean time, look for alternatives with a greater reliability if you are considering your own blog.

The state department characterizes "old Europe" as the Chocolate Makers

I heard on Hugh Hewitt that the state department characterized France, Germany, Belgium, and Luxemburg as the chocolate makers regarding thier plan to build an autonomous European military command. The story can be found on-line here. The point made on the Hewitt show was that if the state department, whose job it is to play nice, is making fun of you, you must be absurd.

Germany expands presence in Afghanistan

Karl Feldmeyer suggests that Germany is expanding its role in Afghanistan in order to build raproachment with the US without getting involved in Iraq, where Chancellor Schröder made such a fus about during his election campiagn in 2002. Feldmeyer says that Germany has already tried this strategy by expanding its role in Macedonia. He doubts it will work in Afghanistan for the same reasons. He goes on to predict greater American difficulty in Iraq and American comprimise there. He may or may not have a sense of the electoral risks of continuing difficulties in Iraq for the Bush administration, but I think he underestimates the determination of that administration not to abandon its principles in order to curry favor with the voters. Rice, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz have all recently emphisized our long term commitment there.

U.S. Companies in Germany out perform German firms

Andreas Back tells Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, "Another major aspect is the U.S. corporate culture, which usually involves short lines of decision, quick decision-taking, less bureaucracy and a profit- and target-oriented management style. Shareholder value is a more important factor in the management of U.S. companies than in Germany." He goes on to say, "German companies still pursue a far more complex approach where profit is not always the main goal." This is the heart of the matter. Profit will drive innovation and improvement while also being there to pay for it as well. Profit is a push and a pull factor. We seek it, so we innovate, and when we have it we can afford to improve. Spare us from European style socialism. Spare us from any kind of socialism, frankly.

Back: "Many German companies have already introduced a more American management style."
FAZ: "Does this lead to the general conclusion that the U.S. management style also leads to higher profitability?"
Back: "If you want to boil it down to a clear formula and disregard all the nuances, yes, you can say that."

Germany lacks capital surplus to invest in equipment investments

According to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, equipment investments as a share of real gross domestic product, "has declined markedly in Germany over the past 10 years."

"While a ratio of 22.9 percent still ranked Germany in the upper third of EU countries in 1991, Germany lagged all others except Ireland and France in 2002. At 19.7 percent, its investment ratio was also slightly lower than the EU average of 20.4 percent. "

A falling rate of investment in capital means falling rate of increase in worker productivity. Falling worker productivity means slower overall GDP growth. "Experts now estimate the German economy's growth potential at just 1.5 percent, down from 2 percent in the 1980s." By comparison, the "U.S. economy, however, recorded an increase in its investment ratio to 20 percent from 15.5 percent during the 1990s." Also, "Portugal currently boasts the highest absolute investment ratio in Europe, at 26.9 percent." Go Portugal.

Matt's Blog is getting and addy change

My brother's blog is getting an address change because its host site has moved to a new provider. I'll update the address when I find out what it is now.

From Welfare to Work in the German city of Kassel

In this article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, we the see the kind of shift that took place in America in the 1990's. A reform America took in reasonably good economic times was taken because America largely rejected the nanny state. In Germany it is more the result of what could be called socialist exhaustion. When social benefits rise eventually its acts as a drag on the economy. This eventually forces a cut in social benefits because the weighted down economy can't afford them anymore. The Reagan and Thacher revolutions were a responce to the bad economies of the 70's. The Germans largely avoided the weak economy of the 70s, as did the Japanese and both are forced into confronting reform now, two decades later. Unfortunatly its all the harder when the disfunction has become so entrenched.

"The legislation governing welfare is a federal matter in Germany, and while Hesse Premier Roland Koch has argued for a U.S.-style system that would force welfare recipients to return to the workforce within a fixed period or face a loss of benefits, officials in Germany do not yet have this leeway."

Second Week of School slows blogging

Its the second week of school, both teaching as a substitute, my fifth year, and taking classes at night. Both the time required and appropriation of my mental activity slows blogging. It also can change what I would otherwise write about. Expect more on schools, education, and academia in general, because I have got it comming and going.