"Terrorism is just a Tactic"

Unrestricted submarine warfare was just a tactic. Americans had no interest in whether the Kaiser set up a puppet state in Poland, annexed Belgium, or whether the flavor the Reich was not to their liking. American support for war increased as German submarines attacked American shipping. What ultimate goal they purused was not the critical issue. British impressment was sufficient a cause for many Americans to support the War of 1812. Why the British needed these sailors was not the issue, the procedure itself was.

One of the key arguments that the administration put forward for the war on terror, including the attack on Iraq, was that in a era when terrorists were only a plane ride away, it was unaccepable for terrorist supporting states to obtain weapons of mass destruction. This argument states that regardless of their aims, this tactic is unacceptable. We have no problem with this reasoning in law enforcement. If I pursue a lauable goal (feeding my sister's children) through criminal activity (stealing) I am still subject to the law. The ends, as they say, do not justify the means.

The advocates of salafi jihad have three tactics: preaching, political action, and terrorism. Suppose the Salafiyyah pursued only preaching as a tactic. Would we still pursue a war against Islamic extreamism? What about preaching and political action? Indeed, its only the use of the terror tactic that makes them our enemies. We might otherwise regard them as ideological rivals. We might be wary of their thinking. Would we attack them?

However, just as we have begun wars over unacceptable tactics, American frequently fight wars to end war, and so put the ideology central into our war aims. Americans frequently believe or are easily persuaded that bad ideologies are much more liable to using bad tactics. Therefore, Americans pursue root causes to end problems once and for all. If a tactic is so unacceptable that we will go to war to end its use, let's end its use! Set up a democracy and shift that plot of land from the danger column to the friendly column for ever.

Constructivist Setback

The weak constrcutivist position argues that everyone constructs knowledge for themselves. The strong constructivist position goes further and argues that because of this, teaching should be child centered, especially finding what a child's prefered method of learning is (seeing, hearing, touching, moving) and tailoring the lesson to the child. However, via a link at Number 2 Pencil, there is another installment of Ask The Cognative Scientist at the AFT website. Its very interesting, and worth a look-see. The thesis is a blow to the strong constructivist:

"What cognitive science has taught us is that children do differ in their abilities with different modalities, but teaching the child in his best modality doesn’t affect his educational achievement. What does matter is whether the child is taught in the content’s best modality. All students learn more when content drives the choice of modality. "

We might call this the Structuralist theory of knowledge. Content has its own best structure independently of the mind that understands the content. This was the dominant approach to knowledge, which often viewed knowledge as a tree, dividing subjects into specialities based one how they are related. Sciences would be grouped together, because they have common mental tools, for instance. Structuralists, I have have termed them, would argue that it is best to thing about science in a scientific way, rather than in what ever way is most pleasing to the student. The class, the unit, the lesson should all reflect the structure of the subject.

Aristotle proposed that knowledge is a series of catagories, some broad, some specific. This is based on logic. All blue-jays are birds, and inherit the qualities of "bird". So I can imagine a catagory "bird", and "blue-jay" and "that blue jay who nests in my yard" as ever more specific catagories. This is the basis of deduction. It is said that the Syrian philosopher Porphyry famously employed a tree as a metaphore for this process, and it has been used by taxonimists ever since.

Stong constructivism generally makes two kinds of attacks on this kind of approach. Either they deny the metaphysics of it, arguing that the world lacks the order being presented, and that the only order that exists is in the mind; or they they deny the epistomology of it, arguing that we cannot truly know anything and we just construct our own knowledge of things. These ideas stand in strong opposition to realism (Aristotealian philosophy) and empiricism (Lockean epistomology).

Anemona Hartocollis has a long piece on teacher education in the Education Section this Sunday. One curious aspect of the reforms discussed is the notion that student teachers should significantly increase their internship under closer univsersity supervision. It would seem to me that a longer internship makes sense, but why should the emphasis in supervision be the university? Hartocollis writes, "There is consensus that apprenticeship along the lines of medical school - students learn the science of medicine in the classroom, then practice it in a hospital, supervised by faculty doctors - is a better model than traditional student teaching." Labratory schools often have teachers in classrooms who are also faculty at the sponsoring university. That's the only similar situation. Is there another unstated reform here, whereby the university supervisors of student teachers would no longer be retired teachers now at university, but rather there would be supervisors who were faculty at both university and local school? I'm not sure this is neccessary, although I can see the appeal. Overall I would favor more high school-university connections. They are fundamentally disconnected now.

Another problem identified in the article is low teacher pay: "Among the historically intractable problems in retaining teachers are low status and low pay, says Anthony Carnevale, a senior fellow at the National Center on Education and the Economy. Because the public sector will never pay as much as the private, he says, and because unions have resisted extra pay for high-demand skills like math teaching, the gap in ability between teachers and other white-collar professionals will become bigger, not smaller."

However, I think the real reason for low teacher pay is identified by Warren Farrell in his book Why Men Earn More. His thesis revolves around the idea that pay is compensation. People don't need to be compensated for doing things that are themselves rewarding. Teaching is a very attractive job. It comes with all kinds of intrinsic rewards, from working with children, to the family friendly schedule, to its security. As such, there is a large pool of teacher hopefuls. And so with a large supply of potential teachers, pay is low. This can have consequences in terms of who considers teaching, but as long as the pool of hopefuls is large the pay must remain low. The problem, ultimatly is related to grade inflation. All of the pressures in the system conspire to keep standards low. As long as an increase in teacher qualifications does not induce parents to (or the broader community) to pay more for teachers, it is insensible to raise teacher pay. One of the problems of the public schools is that one customer's quality is not the next customer's, so that its hard to get the quality you want, and no one wants to pay for someone else's idea of quality. A free market in education might well solve this problem, after all college tuition, subject to market forces, continues to attract consumers despite rising costs.

The International Movie Industry

David Kipen has an interesting peice in the Atlantic for June on how no one is left producing films for the American market, having been lured away by the much larger international market. Registration or subscription are required (I'm not sure which, I subscribe.)

Neutrality

I contend that the war on terror is a global counter-insurgency. Such efforts have two sides, the hard and soft counter-insurgency. Hard counter-insurgency involves arresting, killing, capturing, or otherwise preventing leaders, cadres, and propagandists from getting their message out, recruiting, or organizing operations. The numbers of such leaders and cadres are inevitably small, and seek to get control of much larger populations. Likewise, attempting to win over these same populations is the effort of the soft counter-insurgency. The billion muslims appear to be more or less neutral in the struggle between Al Qaeda and the West. In democracies we are accustomed to some significant level of popular support for military actions. But not only do the non-democratic states of the Islamic world lack such popular soveriegnty, but Al Qaeda is no state and represents the most radical members of the Salafi Jihad. Four times Al Qaeda has been radicalized by the loss of moderate members who abandon the Jihad. First when the Soviets left Afghanistan volunters went home, their work accomplished. Only the most radical mujahedin and those who were not welcome at home because of their political activities remained. When Al Qaeda moved to Sudan, the movement again lost its least committed members. When Al Qaeda decided to shift from the near enemy to the far enemy, fighters left. And when Al Qaeda returned to Afghanistan, a final portion, again the least committed, left them and did not go to Afghanistan. So this radical movement, built in many ways in the fashion of a Lennist cell, a radical vanguard of revolution disconnected from any population, is at war alone against the Coallition lead by the United States. The prize in this conflict are the people and governments of the Middle East.

John Adams recalled that during the American Revolution, a third supported the revolution, a third supported the crown, and a third was indifferent. Speculating what portion of the Islamic world supports Al Qaeda is guesswork. Many Western observers are disappointed in the limited support which the Muslim world has provided to its cause. It appears that the majority are neutral.

Victory in the war on terror will ultimatly amount to moving this large body of neutrals into the Western camp. The most obvious way to do this is to spread democracy. People undertaking the defense of their democracies will be invested in a way that subjects of Egyptian, Saudi, and other undemocratic regimes are not.

A combination of soft diplomacy, public diplomacy, and a reformist agenda are the soft counter-insurgency which will win the war, a victory made possible by the hard counter-insurgency carried out by the military, special forces, intelligence, and law enforcement. The hard counter-insurgency prevents an Al Qaeda victory and limits their ability to act, while soft counter-insurgency wins for the West.

Multi-Cultural Social Reconstructionist Peace School!

James Lileks has some thoughts on a school of this stripe.

Times Quote of the Day

"We know why these things are done, they're done to scare people and to frighten them, to make them anxious and worried," Mr Blair told a press conference.

Sweden after the Swedish Model

Dennis Prager has had a Liberal (Liberty seeking) member of parliament and a professor of economics from Sweden on his show today. Mauricio Rojas fled Chile after the fall of Allende and made his way to the socialist paradise. He is however not a socialist (equity seeking) today. A member of the Swedish Liberal Party, he is also a senior advisor at a free market think tank, Timbro. He has written a book, Sweden after the Swedish Model. The book can be downloaded from a link at this site. He argues that the Swedish Model, Folkhemmet (folk + home), was an adaptation to rapid industrialization. However, once the process was compete, the growing costs of the system was a burden which threatened Sweden significantly. The resolution to this crisis was to shift from socialism to liberalism.

As I have discussed on this blog, Germany is confronting the same problem, but has proved so far unwilling to facing up to real change. It may prove that the intigration of East Germany will delay this shift by a generation.

More Against the Appeasers

I seem to be collecting links to articles and arguments against those who embrace the "its our fault" theory of terrorism. Here is another fine contribution to my collection. Tony Parkinson writes in the Australian paper The Age.

The "Left-Wing Professor" as Bi-Polar Intellectual

Catching up on my Austin Bay, I find an analysis of a problem I've mentioned recently that really seems to hit the mark. My last several posts include two on academics who seem to wander out of their element and get lost. But Bay discusses Juan Cole who has some grounding in the field. Bay offers a different kind of analysis and I wonder to what extent it applies more broadly. He writes:

"Cole exemplifies the 'left-wing professor' as bi-polar intellectual. When he’s at the professorial pole, he’s a knowledgeable person. Cole understands tribal relationships in Iraq and has a detailed feel for Middle Eastern history. When his “left wing” pole takes control he’s a reactionary defeatist and a sad, antiquated ideologue. His utterly wrong, knee-jerk post about Jenin and 9/11 could be forgiven with a genuine retraction and an apology –yes, everyone makes mistakes– and Cole appears to have issued a “sort of” retraction. However, Cole’s call for “oppo research” on Kramer (really a call for mass personal attacks) is uncivil and inexcuseable. Let’s add intellectually dishonest– and a sure sign of intellectual defeat."

Point of explanation, Cole seems to have argued that the attackresponse1 were in responce to the Jenin incident, despite the fact that Jenin took place at the end of March, 2002. When called on it by Kramer, he called for an investigation of Kramer.

My operating theory up to now has been that academics are accustomed to being the smartest person in the room, and have just assumed that they were qualified to discuss policy, strategy, and the root causes of any conflict regardless of academic specialty. The case of Cole as discussed by Bay offers an alternative theory and it may well apply to others as well.

Bay on the purpose of Terrorism

Austin Bay has a nice piece in the Washington Times on terrorism as a means of warfare. It also includes a good analysis of the motives behind Al Qaeda's use thereof. Its a nice antidote to the "its our fault" crowd.

Speaking of Austin Bay, the current post on his blog about property rights in Africa is also very good.

Its Always Our Fault!

Hugh Hewitt links to an excellent piece by Gerard Baker which demonstrates how effective the "its our fault" argument is, because it lacks any conditions under which it cannot be used. Its important to distinguish the "its out fault" argument from those which acknowledge that American or Western policies have resulted in specific counter-policies. The "its our fault" arguements arise because those who make them are so hostile to the polcies made that they agree with the motivation of the terrorists, if not their means. No doubt those who make such arguments would prefer a world where the Salafi jihadists would engage in dramatic street theater and Imperialism would die away and everyone would live in a utopian enviroment where it would become obvious that the Salafi jihad is really just a social-democratic movement. That's why so many in the "its our fault" camp make such an effort to ignore evidence that the Salafi jihadists are not motivated by the same things that motivate them. The "its our fault" really wants to believe that terrorism is caused by an anti-imperialism and will melt away when the mean old imperialists tend only to their domestic people with social justice, &c, &c, &c.

The Ten Commandments as a Fetish

Very interesting post on the fetishization of a text.

C18-L and Bastile Day

Whereas the interdisciplinary eighteenth century academic mailing list was surly on the 4th, they are downright pleasant on the 14th. Comments do not tend to dismissal, criticism, or irony-seeking, but reflect the best places to be and see the festivities. Warming to the French Revolution seems to me to require a greater effort than the American, given its radicalism and the measures required to defend this radicalism, one must conclude that this change of tone reflects either a radical politics or an anti-Americanism.

I should perhaps also remark on the comments made after the London bombings of the 7th. Academics have a tendency to be educated amatures when they wander outside of their chosen field. Within their field they know the literature, the perspectives and approaches of approaching their topic, and are aware of where the pitfall lay in interpretation and understanding their subject. Suffice it to say that literary scholars (in theory interdisciplinary, in practice literary) are not prepared to perform a serious analysis of the causes of terrorism or the motives of terrorists. The do not know the literature, are unaware of the debates between the perspectives on the subject, and are unaware of the difficulties peculiar to the topic. As such, they are vulnerable to any argument they are disposed to agree with, and perhaps worse, misinterpreting an argument to match their dispositions being entirely unaware of points and evidence proposed even within a peice to the contrary of the argument desired by the amature.

Certainly amatures can have interesting things to say about a subject. General John Abizaid might well have some interesting observations on character in Austen, theme in Defoe, or the popular reception of Addison. But whether he knows what he's talking about or is off the mark is hard to determine unless you know more about the subject than he does. Somehow when it comes to contemporary politics, none of this is thought to apply. Articles are cited (and misinterpreted) and opinions offered without regard for the normal scholarly concerns with expertice.

Worse Than Watergate !?

Chuck Schumer can be seen here with a visual aid at a press conference with the title "Worse than Watergate." Granted the phrase has its origin with Chris Matthews, but who ever has the bad sense to use this phrase demonstrates a stunning ignorance of history. Schumer's venality deminishes the Senate and trivializes what Philip Agee did and leaks of this kind. For Rove to give background on who it was who arranged to sent Wilson to Africa (Wilson claimed it was Cheney, one in a series of truth-challenged statements) and identify someone who was introduced at cocktail parties as a CIA official and who drove to Langely is so trivial that a comparison to using the "plumbers" for any purpose is like comparing the casualties of Iraq to those of Vietnam as if there were some kind of parity.

The WSJ has the real deal here.

Bad News for Liberalism

Daniel Drezner has a link to a TNR article which contends (in the terminology of this blog) that socialists (equity seekers) and conservatives (traditional order seekers) are squeezing out liberals (liberty seekers) as socialists and conservatives, now in greater numbers (thanks to gerrymandering) forge alliances across the populist (William Jennings Bryan) axis, aka the illiberal axis. More and more, I think, the parties will view conservatives or socialists as their base, and attempt to woo liberals over to their side, rather than the more traditional sense that Republicans were a hybrid liberal-conservative party while the Democrats were a liberal-socialist party. Liberals may find more and more that thay lay outside either party. If the country really is more liberal than it is not (its founding is quintessentially liberal) then one of two things will eventually happen. Either a third party will rise up and replace one of the parties, or one of the parties will lurch back toward the liberal pole and establish electoral dominance until the other party does likewise.

Big weekend

My weekend starts in about 30 minutes, much adjusted from my normal schedule, but a wedding and reunion activities await. I will be spending several days at the Lake of the Ozarks, so I will link to Lileks' site and the 1972 add campaign for the area. Some of the sites advertised are the same, most have changed. The giant cat eyed fang-fish are still menacing hapless fishermen.

Hitchens hits the mark again

Christopher Hitchens is right on in his latest "Fighting Words." I seem to remember posting on these lines sometime after the occupation set in and this spring, but I don't recall when nor does searching my site yield much (but my site search doesn't find things I know are on there, like my previous post).

In any event, too much force protection is counter productive. As I though I had written, the purpose of the military is to carry out the political will of the country, and this requires taking risks and sacrifice. See what Hitch has to say.

Academics and the 4th

C18-L, an academic e-mailing list which deals with the eighteenth century in an interdisciplinary fashion has been the site of some very particular kinds of 4th of July messages. Using their search page and the keyword "American", one can get a sense of what at least some academics think of America. Contributions begin with Frederick Douglas', "What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?" Continues to a Johnson quote, "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes." And then from Johnson's Life of Milton, "It has been observed that they who most loudly clamour for liberty do not most liberally grant it." Finally a swipe at Athenian democracy. One listmember did offer this, "Better a flawed liberty than none at all." So one can conclude that the cause of liberty is not entirely foriegn to academics who claim a special interest in the eighteenth century.

These people presume to "teach" young men and women.

Kuhn as esoteric teacher of secrets

I've been seeing Kuhn and his paradigm shift popping up in educational writing a lot recently. I haven't seen it this much since the business gurus got a hold of it in the mid-ninties. Both of them got Kuhn so wrong (or so simplistically a child could have professed the same conclusions) I strongly suspect these education and business experts have never actually read Kuhn.

Here are two examples:
Constructivism, Education, Science, and Technology in the Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology, V. 29(3), Fall 2003
Bersin's essay in the San Diego Union Tribune.

In the first example, Moses A. Boudourides makes a case of special pleading for constructivism, but like so much on constructivism, really just states the commonplace and imagines it to be profound. The author invokes Kuhn in order to invoke the profound by association. Khun is rejecting the positivist view of science, but Boudourides performs a bait and switch and substitutes realism for his bogeyman. Unfortunatly, his constructivism is just a re-statement of the realist critique of positivism. Indeed, if you go to the Radical Academy (a realist archive, resource, and encyclopedia) and search the terms constructivist or constructivism, neither result gets a hit. Realists pay no attention to constructivists, because constructivists have little if anything to say that realists haven't already said. Yet, realists are attacked, though their mouthes are stuffed with positivism. Such authors and perhaps constructivists of all kinds, must attack realism because it deflects the observation that constructivists are just putting the old wine of the realist epistomology into the new ontological bottles with out improving them at all. Indeed seperation of some realist ideas from the rest of the body of realism does a harm, and the attacks on realism as a philosophy is dishonest. What is a choice irony in Boudourides' article is his favorable mentions of real positivists like Wittgenstein. Obviously the constructivists have no idea who their friends and enemies are, nor do they understand Khun. So Boudourides takes Khun's attack on the positive view of science, and re-states it, with the help of positivists, as an attack on realism, when in fact Khun is making a realist argument. A nice little piece by George Hein, the Constructivist Museum, makes a similar mistake, attacking the name of realism, but desribing the ideas of idealism. Indeed, he cites Plato. Hein goes on to confuse Lockean empiricism with a radical deviation, Watsonian behaviorism, but all of this leads me to no greater conclusion than the constructivists don't know their history of ideas. (Or more precisely, they know one fact very well, that in the middle ages there was a notion called realism which is contrasted to nominalism, which holds that when I say green I am refering to a real greenness that exists without objects, perception, or observers, that it is a Platonic Form. But finding people who will argue for Platonic Forms and will argue for medieval philosophical realism, in contrast to most other uses of the term realism to refer to Aristotle's philosphy, and those which are derived from it, expand on it, or otherwise based upon it. Bait and switch!)

The second example, Bersin's essay in the Union-Tribune, seems to suggest that it was Khun who recognized that Copernicus introduced a new way of understanding the heavens, but that would need to be reconciled with De Revolutionibus being placed on the index of forbidden books in 1616 as a result of Galileo's additional argument for the heliocentric theory. Modern science often teaches its own history only in terms of what older scientists got right, rather than what their complete work was. Modern science points to Copernicus' heliocentricism but ignores his continued reliance on epicycles (which last until Kepler can replace them with the ellipse). This is what Kuhn was talking about. The revolution of Copernicus (and how convienient that Kuhn wrote a book specifically treating this subject, beyond his more familiar Structure of Scientific Revolutions with all its talk of paradigm shifts) was not just a shift from geo-centric to helio-centric, but of aristotelian concern with the primacy of observation (does the theory describe the observations) with a neo-platonic concern with aesthetics of symmetry (is the theory elegant), with the fact that the theory overthrown was very well established, so much so that churchmen failed to distinguish Ptolemy from Christian doctrine, Ptolemy being taught to them by the Church in university. Further, the old theory made sence with the classical physics of the day. If the earth is the center of the universe because "earth" is the heaviest of the four elements and has "fallen" to its location, we can now explain why objects fall when released. If the earth is a mere planet which is in motion around a larger object, why do objects fall at all? [Summon Newton, please.] What Kuhn did, indeed the heart of his achievement was not to take notice of the fact that Copernicus had a new theory. That's not only wrong, but so simple minded that everyone knew it then, and children know it now. What Kuhn tells us is that each one of these supporting ideas which are a part of Ptolemaic geo-centricism, the growing unwieldliness of matching the theory to the observations amd the accumulation of epicylces upon epicylces upon epicycles to "save the appearances", requiring, Ockham-like a less complicated theory. He generalizes to say that when science starts having to "save the appearances" by making the theory cumbersome, you have a problem. What happened with Copernicus was that the new theory suddenly through into doubt other theories (why do things fall) which had not been otherwise in need of new theories. That's why its a revolution. No one thing is changed, a whole boat-load of things are ultimatly changed.

I'm a bit on a rail against Kuhn simplifiers and misinterpreters, so I may be a bit hard on old Bersin. As an introduction to a piece on education, Khun is fine, it is the summary of his argument that rubs me the wrong way. Of course just how applicable Kuhn is depends on just how revolutionary Bersin wants to be. Is he changing one thing that's already obvious to experts inside the profession? [Bersin was an outsider when he became superintendent.] Siegfried Engelmann certainly thinks so. (link here, scroll down past the Bersin article). My own sense is that Bersin, who was U.S. attorney of the Southern District of California until 1998, absorbed the earlier Kuhnophilia when it ran through the business world as the latest fad. As such, Bersin might well have been accustomed only to the most superficial interpretation of Kuhn.

Does Bersin call for changes not just from geo-centrism to helio-centrism, but further ground his challenge in terms of all the supporting changes in ideas do that his "revolution" isn't superficial, but creates change all over the system at many, many key points? Bersin challenges a species of superficial change, what GE's Jack Welch called "superficial congeniality." If what Bersin means by this is that education must abandon its faddishness, and focus on maximizing productivity (which I take to mean annual yearly progress) does it therefore follow that we just speak about the priority of productivity and ask of "every program [...] and every reform: does it improve student achievement?" Or does he propose (or will the logic of this thinking produce) radical changes in education which will break the many monopolies which strangle student performance and effective teaching? Will there be competing educational philosophies appealing to parents in an eviroment of real choice, in which the state and the collaition of teacher's colleges and professional organizations will give up their monopolies (or be forced to do so) in the name of student achievment?

I understand other kinds of reforms could be implimented, but his invocation of "harnessing self-interest" is so Smithian, being the formula of the invisible hand, and his mention of "flexibility, competition, incentives, effeciency, and innovation" also spells a regard for capitalism and markets that suggests at least the direction of reform I have proposed.

But so much of the essay sounds like the kind of bussiness Kuhnism which is just empty. I also find so much to disagree with in his analysis. For example, he says that faddism is the paradigm of the schools, but I would contend there is a system of competing, rival paradigms of which none has dominance, so that like some European multi-party parliament, no one can govern without the approval of other factions. This is why every school mission statement sounds like its got something for everyone. A little rigor, a dash self-esteem, a teaspoon of existential development, and sound hard discipline, except when it might injure someone's self-esteem, and so on. Bersin fails to understand that our system "is immune to harnessing self-interest" because our system matured in the 1930's when "self-interest" meant 1929 and the market crash, and technocratic solutions run by a brain trust (read: party apparchniks) would apply the princples of George Counts and his latter day incarnations like Alfie Kohn. Some of what Bersin says suggests he has too much bought into this kind of thinking to imagine he is really prepared for a genuine paradigm shift. I end up expecting what I would expect from those business reformers who spouted Kuhn a decade ago, little if anything. Certainly no revolution. We'll see what happens as Bersin takes over as California's state secretary of education.

Fighting Poverty in Africa

There are plenty of good intentions out there, but I don't expect much in the way of results, no matter what is spent. We've been trying various strategies for improving things in Africa for a long time, but without the desired success. We finally seem to be at a tipping point regarding South American economic growth and prosperity, but there are many more advantages to work with there. I'm certainly willing to try new things, make a big push, and so forth, but I also would hope those who support African assistance would understand that some will be skeptical and might want to allocate resources elsewhere given the track record of aid to Africa.

Computer Fixed

My main computer had gradually gotten eaten up by spyware. I had run some anti-spyware programs, and that stopped pop-ups and some other problems, but Explorer and Outlook were a mess and didn't run properly. My brother, who had clued me in to the earlier spyware clean-up tools told me Microsoft is running a spyware beta, and he's been running it. I tried it and Outlook and IE run like a champ again. Danke Bruder! Its payback for the excellent drain clearing advice I gave him two weeks ago.

Why not a loyal opposition?

Jay Rosen has some interesting thoughts about an exchange between Alan Feuer's alter-ego "T.R." (this reporter) and Bob Franken of CNN. Feuer's book is a remembered tale, not hard journalism. As such, Franken says the story is not wholly accurate, but mostly. He clarifies. The details can be found on Rosen's J-School blog, Press Think. Rosen discusses the skepticism of journalists and the Franken quote (in clarification) that "When I’m reporting, I am a citizen of the world."

I will make several observations from the perspective of my salon: skepticism doesn't mean sustained disbelief in the face of contrary evidence, and the press needs to learn the theory of the loyal opposition.

Journalists seem to frequently mistake skepticism for incredulity. Putting aside philosophical skepticism (which argues that we cannot know anything reliably) journalists seem to argue for a professional skepticism. The most common of these is scienticfic scepticism, which holds that ideas should be regarded as false until subjected to the scientific method, generally by reproducable results. Of course any discipline with a method of seperating truth from falsehood can argue a professional skepticism. Historians have a method for interpreting documents to seperate the true from the false (we might say the reliable from the unreliable, but we agreed to put philosophical skepticism aside). Such a method must be a critical method capable of satisfying skepticism by revealing what is. (Let's also put aside academic skepticism, and acknowledge any work will be open to criticism because the consultation of this or that source will better nuance any work.) Much of journalism seems to proceed without any critical method at all. Some of it consists of reportage, some of punditry, and some retelling of the spin of some interested party. Reportage is fine for the local fire at the lumber mill. Started at 2:50 AM, firemen at the scene at 3:14, three alarm, such and such vehicles present, time spent fighting the fire, any specicial techniques or devices, and so on. Punditry is naught but opinion, sometimes learned, sometimes not. Its never news, its always commentary. Acting as the outlet for someone's spin is just substituting someone else's opinion for your own (or finding someone else to voice your opinion for you.)

One of the criticisms of balanced reporting is that it often relies on nothing more sophisticated than the principles of reportage, tell both sides. Typically this tells us next to nothing. Is either side credible? Can either statement be falsified? If both statements appear true, how can they be reconciled? Suppose one wants to cover the Debra Burlingame criticism of the International Freedom Center at the WTC site. Like most contraversies, its a conflict of values and world-views. We might begin by testing to verify that both sides have a verifiable set of facts, or when discussing each other, have the same set of facts. Once we have that established, we are left with two different sets of values and world-views. One side, the Freedom Center consultants, argue that 9-11 was caused by injustice, and that the cause of injustice is earlier injustice, because as descreibed in Uncle Tom's Cabin, injustice harms both the perpetrator and the victim of injustice. One of the great arguments of the abolitionists was that slavery turns good people into cruel masters by the corruption of power over other people. Critics argue that responsibility need not be so diffuse as this. A specific event has specific as well as general causes. I am assuming that this second argument is the more common and needs less explanation. It sees a proper memorial as focusing just on the WTC events and its immediate causes, and these other, broader causes belong elsewhere or nowhere. Rather than just giving both sides a money quote and calling yourself done, or worse yet, depicting one side as sensible and rational and the other side as crazed lunatics, is terribly unsatisfying, because it explains little or nothing.

As a historian, I assume everyone is rational, until they prove otherwise. So when I see some action that strikes me as odd, my first instinct is to understand what set of ideas the person has organized to result in such a view of things. As such arguments always (or nearly so) come down to a set of assumptions and a method of organizing those assumptions. Thus I have a method that forces me to judge everyone to be sensible people until the prove otherwise (such as "my neighbor's dog told me to kill blondes and their boyfriends.") I don't have to agree with them, only understand that with a certain set of assumptions, their conclusions are reasonable. For example, I contend that farming is difficult on mountainsides because of erosion. If someone believes that the mountain has a spirit, and the spirit kills the crops, its a reasonable explanation of the effects based on an assumed cause (animism). If such a person asks the river spirit for permission to cross the river, they have a world-view that leads to a rational approach to such problems as where to farm and how to avoid drowning. Again, I have my own solutions to these problems which are based on an alternate set of assumptions. This is the difference between "I'm right and you're a reasonable person who is in error," and "What are you, an idiot?"

If journalists are going to be able to cover people in such a way that they recognize themselves rather than the MSM characature of who they are supposed to be, they need a reliable method of discovering what is and what is not. When I was in grad school, we had a required six hours of historiography. In one of the two semesters was an MA student in the J-school who was impressed at how much we spent thinking about our method, various sub-methods, and analyzing and criticizing them. Questions of how we selected good interpretations and good method from those that were poor or mis-applied were important to us as professionals in training. Other contacts I have had with people in J-schools or as practicing journalists confirm this sense that journalists lack a method and don't give it much thought. They offer some good reasons why such a thing is missing, and its hard to argue with the speed of the news cycle in short-circuting any in depth analysis. My own suspition is that if a method were in place it would not slow down the news nearly as fast as it would take veteran journalists to stop and begin applying a method now. Learning would slow things down. Apllication of an already learned method would have a much smaller effect.

Loyal Opposition will have to wait.

Just How Liberal is the EU?

Gerald Braunberger tries to make the case that the EU is not all regulation, but includes a liberal (free markets, less government) componant as well. I'm dubious. Its true that there is a free market principle at work in regards to eliminating barriers to trade between polities, but liberalism seems to end there, and give way to socialism afterwards.

News Outlets Gets Job Numbers Backwards

KTLA's website is typical in reporting in a larger font that only seventy-eight thousand jobs were added in May, and in a smaller font that the unemployment rate is down to 5.1%. As the unemployment rate slips, it simply must get harder and harder to keep the job creation numbers up. This seems to go unmentioned no matter where I see or hear this news reported. Part of the problem is that no one knows where structural unemployment lay, and so we can't tell whether job creation slips because were are approaching structural unemployment, or because of poor economic performance. Putting the news in the organization "job creation low" and "unemployment rate very low" ends up being at the very least a dubious misreading. Try this headline: "Unemployment lowest since September 2001, job creation slows."

Can the rich, famous save Social Security?

So asks USA Today. What fame has to do with it, I cannon guess, except to say that USA Today headline writers assume fame and wealth are coincident. The plan discussed by Dennis Cauchon, who has 982 hits coupled with "social security" at Google, suggesting he's their man on the subject.

The plan discussed proposes that the payroll tax cap be removed and that benefits be capped. Such a tax raises $100 billion dollars a year (according to USA Today, CATO offers a figure of $541 billion over five years which throws in productivity growth and inflation which reflect a higher burden in the later years) but would probably only extend the life of the program's solvency by less than seven years. This is because, an economics professor I had often said, there are more of us on Main Street than there are on Wall Street. The demographic problem is huge, a shift from 3 workers per retiree to 2 workers. Taxing the very wealthy won't fix the problem, just dent it.

My own program to reform social security includes removing the payroll cap, but is also part of a full privatization plan which means that only the employer side of the tax is collected, and is used to pay the transition costs. [My plan is to privatize personal accounts fully, invest the trust fund surplus in the stock market (rather than T-bills where it is now), and removing the cap on the payroll tax.]

The problem with the proposal in USA Today, which the piece clearly acknowledges, is that collecting this $100 billion without paying any benefit in return risks turning the program into a welfare benefit, along with the stigma which the pension/insurance model was supposed to avoid. The article quotes the socialist Economic Policy Institute's Micheal Ettinger in opposition to this plan. It may at first, strike one to question why the socialist would oppose such an obvious income redistribution program, but as EPI writing makes clear, they are aware that anti-poverty programs that get stigmatized, get cut. In America, income redistribution must provide handsome benefits to the middle class. The same is true in Europe, which is also saddled with generous middle-class benefits. Everyone pays, everyone gets, that is the mantra of the modern socialist.

Indeed, its hard to see where support from such a proposal could come from. Advocates for the proposal mentioned claim they cannot find a base of support.

Should the Press Adjust its Role in Wartime?

On O'Reilly's Fox News show, Ellis Henican, in discussing the Newsweek/Koran blunder, reminded O'Reilly that the press has an adversarial reliationship with the government. In wartime, many are troubled by a press which sees itself in such a role. If the press doesn't find a new role for itself, it may just continue to slide into irrelevancy.

Hugh Hewitt: Kool Aid drinker

His claims to being a big tent Republican to the contrary, Hewitt is advocating a purge of Republicans. At the very moment when Republicans should be cementing their majority in the face of divided and wandering Democrats, the Religious Right is demanding the whole cake. Attempts at a purge are going to result in primary fights around the country, and just like the contraversy in Michigan in 2000, McCain was in the right and Bush was over-reaching.

His description of the filibuster as a constitutional horror and a naked power grab is just wishful thinking. I also think Hewitt's reading of the blogoshpere is nothing more than listening to an echo chamber. There are plenty of people who prefer Republicans to Democrats who are plenty dubious about the agenda of the Religious Right, and they blog too. If Hewitt is accurate in so much as the Republican Primary process is captured by the Move-On's and Micheal Moores of the right, I hardly think that's a good thing. It hasn't done the left any good, and its not going to prove to be a winning strategy for Republicans.

Instead of putting forward Republicans who can hold the right as well as capturing moderates, Hewitt is advocating a strategy to push Republicans into the Democratic party. Is Jim Jeffords his philosopher's stone? Where is the Hugh of If Its Not Close, They Can't Cheat?

When it came to Arlen Spector, Hugh was right. On this list of "Seven Republicans", he's wrong.

He's not the only one, of course. Captain Ed had a great post just after the 2004 election called, Learning to be a Majority Party. More recently, his Not One Dime has been an effort to make Republicans more like the Democrats in their fund-raising as well.

The idea of a purge is a bad idea in its own right, but it supports an equally bad idea, stacking the court. The problem with this plan is that its based on a fundamentally misguided principle, that if we control the court, all the excesses of the court will magically go away. Wrong. The best case scenario that follows from a large number of court appointments is that the excesses of the court won't bother a lot of Republicans, because the excesses will be in areas where the party either agrees with the policy, or doesn't care. But that's just imposing bad government on the minority. Why not seek a policy that's good government in general. If as a matter of principle, the court errs when it over-reaches, why not restrict its powers? Ronald Reagan once said, government that has the power to give also has the power to take away. This was an argument for weak government, not merely our government.

Someone called in the final hour of Friday's Bill Bennett show. He read Federalist 66 as arguing that the Senate only had the authority to confirm the nominations of the President. This is true, but it misses the main point of Federalist 66, that the Senate sits as a court of impeachment. Its a lawyers reading, and is present-minded. Hamilton wrote, "It isimagined that [the Senate] would be too indulgent judges of the conduct of men, in whose official creation they had participated. The principle of this objection would condemn a practice, which is to be seen in all the State governments, if not in all the governments with which we are acquainted." Here is the problem, and Hamilton identified it: the reluctance to reign in the judiciary by removing judges.

Republicans have had the advantage in nominations to the court having a sitting President for five years (32.5 years compared to the Democrats 27.5 years) and far from having a slight edge in court rulings, or even an approximate equivilence, the judiciary is out of control and the result is a long train of abuses and usurpations. More nominations won't solve this problem, because its an abuse of office, not ideology. Judges are simply unelected and, without impeachment, unaccountable. Putting our people in the robes doesn't solve the unerlying problem. First, as I just mentioned, the best case is that there errors only offend the left. Second, is that Democrats will continue to get nominations, even if less frequently than Republicans. If Republicans were to get 36 of 60 years, leaving the Dems with 24, is it really likely that we'll get a substantially better judiciary than we did over the past 60 years?

The real problem in the courts is that they have usurped too much power from the legislature. Fix that problem and fix it in law. Putting conservative court justices won't fix the problem, it will just give us conservative legislation from the bench. How about legislation from the legislature?

Because the fundamental problem is not being addressed, the purge being advocated by the self-styled center-right won't fix the problem, but will more likely make it worse. It will throw power into the hands of the Democrats. In the case of court appointments, only the President and the Senate matter, so Republican control in the House is irrelevant (unless they withdraw power from the courts).

Proposal: The courts cannot rule by fiat, but can only send bad law back to the legislature for correction. Let's use old Federalist 66 as a guide. The courts can't make law, they can only accept or reject what the other branches have done. No more Lemon Test, no more Miller Test, no more Plessy v Ferguson's, or Swann v Charlotte-Mecklenburg's.

Funding Formula

Missouri has adopted a new funding formula. The new formula is based on district need rather than its tax base. It starts off equalizing all assumptions about local funding, so that it 1) doesn't give more to already wealthy districts, which is how a matching formula would work; and 2) doesn't penalize districts who raise their taxes by withdrawing state funds in compensation. Instead it assumes a local levy of $3.43, and then adjusts up for urban districts, higher levels of poverty (as measured by free lunches), and higher the average numbers of special ed students.

The formula still tracks by weighted average daily attendance, except, for very small school districts, who will get to use their 04-05 or 05-06 state aid as their base, which is then only adjusted by their attendance percentage, so that small dying districts are maintained, a popular political decision.

The Governor has been out advertising the deal. Word is he was a reluctant participant, but politics is the art of the possible.

Of course lots of folks don't like the fact that there is more money for education in this plan.

Hitchens on Galloway

"Drink-sodden ex-Trotskyist popinjay" on the Soviet-admiring, charity-embezzeling, Saddam apologist. Must read.

Is Star Wars an Art Film?

Boy the critics seem to have a lot of complaints. Sure they are saying nice things about Episode III, but not without slamming I and II. I must say I'm baffled by the complaints. Actually, I do recognize them. They sound like the complaints made about impressionist art.

MSN had a piece on the new records by Moby and Beck. It includes this line on Moby: "A second, mostly inconsequential bonus disc offers ambient soundscapes." I'm not into ambient soundscapes, but there is a whole genre devoted to it, with radio shows, internet sites, and apparently artists like Moby work in the area.

Art is not about satisfying a mass audience, its about satisfying the artist. Entertainment is about satisfying a mass audience. From the beginning of Lucas' work, his early films, his problem with the studios, the whole of his career, the complaints have been the same. He was interviewed on Charlie Rose last year, and they replayed the interview on one of our local PBS outlets. The studio didn't like American Graffiti because it lacked character and plot. Gee no one has ever complained about Lucas' other work lacking character and plot have they? Maybe, just maybe, Lucas, as an artist, isn't interested in character and plot, and his notion of story lies elsewhere. Perhaps in the feeling of a picture and the sense of it from a distance. The things that he is hailed for, his use of music (the studios complained about the music), his technical and visual innovations, and his use of mythology (Campbell has referred to him as his best student) are what he has tried to do. He has consciously rejected an emphasis on the normal narrative devices. Further, he's tried to insulate himself from the pressures that would force him to adapt to the expectations of a mass audience or studio executives.

Complaining about Lucas' very style of making movies is like complaining because you like westerns better and would have preferred Ep II as a western with cowboys and sixguns.

Lucas' films are not entertainment aimed at a mass audience, they are cult films whose cult happens to be very large. People don't dress up as characters of mere entertainments, Star Wars therefore should be considered an art film with a cult following. A very large cult following.

Some additional thoughts on teacher self-regulation

Friday I mentioned Bill Bennett's suggestion that teachers in a building know who the meritorious teachers are. My own sense that teachers would not self-regulate comes from discussions I have had with individuals and groups of teachers in schools and in ed classes. My sense in a discussion of teacher conduct and classroom discipline in a philosophy of ed class was that teachers wanted clear unambiguous rules which might cover every contingency. Bennett was rightly skeptical that this evasion of responsibility could ever be achieved. The very notion that it could is an example of the hold which positivism has on the teaching profession. A case of what Virginia Postrel coins as "the one best way." Positivists believe that by application of a positive method, one best way can be discovered. What Postrel's book, The Future and its Enemies argues, is that no such best way exists.

Tenure is, in its theoretical ends, just such a institution. Its purpose is to remove responsibilty from individuals and transfer it to a system of positive judgement. Rather than giving building administrators or teachers as a body of self-regulators the role of judging their peers' quality on a day by day or year by year basis, tenure abandons judgement.

Certainly its neccesary to protect unpopular ideas, but tenure as its practiced today seems to be a blanket protection for professors and teachers, rather than a protection limited to unpopular ideas. One should further note that by unpopular ideas, what is meant are ideas that meet the normal criteria for scholarly acceptance, being rigorous, methodical, and judged by scholarly peers as scholarly, but are also unpopular. What are not meant are ideas that are unpopular because they are nutty, unscholarly, or politics dressed up as scholarship.

For teachers in public schools, this issue is complicated because where scholars might search for truth regardless of its popularity, many views of the role of school have no place for such contraversy. Teachers are often seen as being objective sources fo facts, or obligated to transmit the views of the community as surrugates for parents. On the other hand, deep in the Western tradition is the notion that education itself has at least a componant of the subversive. Plato's discussion of Socrates reminds us how truth and community can conflict. The Christian Gospels also conclude with such a conflict between truth and community. Neither Socrates nor Jesus had tenure. Are the demands of truth something that society should delay for higher education or adulthood, or is there a place for scholarly contraversy in the high school?

I'm of two minds on this subject and am not able to resolve this issue. If the community establishes a school, whether as a public school, or as a private school, and the parents pay to hire teachers, don't the teachers have an obligation to teach what and how the community decides? Yet how can a teacher claim any authority of learning if he doesn't also owe an obligation to truth?

The right answer probably involves acceptance of the tension between these competing goods, and the search for an Aristolean middle path, avoiding excesses of either obediance to parental will or disputatious truth telling.

Domestic Robots

Chris Anderson tells the story of his domestic robot. Such encounters will undoubtedly become more routine. When do theyt start being called droids?

World View Quiz

You scored as Materialist. Materialism stresses the essence of fundamental particles. Everything that exists is purely physical matter and there is no special force that holds life together. You believe that anything can be explained by breaking it up into its pieces. i.e. the big picture can be understood by its smaller elements. Materialist 100% Existentialist 88% Postmodernist 63% Modernist 56% Cultural Creative 44% Fundamentalist 38% Romanticist 25% Idealist 13% What is Your World View? (corrected...again) created with QuizFarm.com

Good news for the MAP

Education Next compares the results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) to the various state-wide tests. The states were ranked according to how predictive the state-wide tests were of results on the NAEP. Both 4th grade and 8th grade skills were considered. Missouri was ranked third out of forty (ten states have no such tests). The tests in South Carolina, Maine, Missouri, Wyoming, and Massachusetts were recorded as being highly predictive of the national test results.

Realism and Idealism

In the realm of foreign policy, the idealists have the upper hand and are engaging in some triumphalist slamming of the realists. Robert Kaplan has an interesting peice on How We Would Fight China in the Atlantic. I heard him interviewed about the piece on Hugh Hewitt's show, and Bill Bennett had been all over the issue of China, looking at it from a variety of angles. Kaplan's a realist, and a smart one. Idealists generally give him respect and treat his writing seriously, even if Kaplan isn't influencing them very much. If Kaplan was on Bennett, I missed it, but it would be interesting to have heard Bennett's responce to the article given Bennett's concern with China.

Bennett, a species of Neocon and an idealist, rejects the Hamiltonian approach to China that was taken by Bush I and Clinton. He has a great concern with the absence of democratic reform, the political and religious repression, and the juggernaught of an economy China has. Part of Kaplan's strategy is to back away from our exclusive committment to democratization and work with strategic partners to oppose China, rather than drive all non-democratic states into China's arms.

My own sense is that we need accept that both realism and idealism speak essential truths and that the thing to do is know when to use realistic thinking, idealistic thinking, and when to attempt a hybrid. As I have argued before, realism was dominant during the Cold War for a reason. We defined the free world as anyone who was not communist, and so tried to enlist the largest possible coallition with which to resist communism. Looking at China as a global rival, there is a sense to building a big coallition against them rather than pursuing a democratic crusade and alienating Europe (which is realist to the point of cynicism) and other potential partners. However the realists need to understand that idealism and the pursuit of democracy is the most reliable way to flip states from the neutral or enemy columns into the friendly column. Democracy and freedom are powerful ideological forces; much more powerful than any other non-religious ideology, and more powereful than some theisms as well. Realists can't afford to ignore this valuable tool in any contest with China. No other tool, not money, not weapons, not diplomacy is as powerful as free markets and free societies are in combating despotism and rogue states. However, there is one more point to made in favor of the realists. Crusaders have an unlimited capacity to crusade, whether its for smoking bans, right to life, to social security reform. Realists understand that its neccesary to keep one's powder dry in preperation for unexpected conflicts and challenges by rivals. The War on Terror has the capacity to exhaust the people and create the kind of demand for normalcy which can sap any American responce to China. This is the danger of any perpetual war scenario. As conflict with China develops, if Americans have become conflict averse, we'll end up having to allow China to take the Saar, the Rhineland, Austria, Sudetenland, Bohemia, and threaten the Danzig corridor before we act. What the idealists understand that the realists can forget is that foreign polciy requires selling a policy to the people by advocacy rather than leaving it to experts at State and the Pentagon to manage in back channels.

Bearing and burden lead to excess commitment in Vietnam, and exhaustion from World War I lead to isolationism in the face of tyrants in the 30's. To avoid both extreams, the realists and idealists have to both take a role in the foriegn policy development.

Peer Review in High Schools?

Bill Bennett has suggested that because teachers know who the other good teachers are, they are positioned to determine who deserves merit pay. Its true they are positioned to do so, but would they judge their peers on the quality of their teaching, or would other considerations dominate the process?

There are reasons to suppose that they would not. First among the evidence is the report of teachers themselves. I called Morning in America and related my experience discussing this issue in a room full of teachers in a graduate philosophy of education class. Working teachers were unanimously opposed, fearing abuse, favoritism, and payback. Callers to Bennett's show were in the same vein. One caller, perhaps half jokingly, predicted fighting in the parking lot.

As someone with a Lockean turn of mind, I am disturbed by the consensus that teachers cannot be self-governing. Yet there is evidence that this would be so. Self-governance or self-regulation, either as a polity or as a profession, such as doctors and lawyers, requires an established professional ethos. In education, there is nothing but philosophical chaos. The teacher's colleges and the NEA promote a progressive (positivist) philosophy. The state departments of education have a strong component of essentialism (back-to-basics plus testing). Teachers themselves run the gamut, including behaviorists (education by conditioning), existentialists (students create their own reality, or at least meaning), and social reconstructionists (the mission of the school is reform society), as well as the progressives and essentialists. There may even be a classicist or two running around. With such different views on the nature of the student, the role of the teacher, and the mission of the school in each philosophy, and the complicating factor that most teachers don't have a well developed philosophy (indeed in my experience they can't tell one from the other even after you explain it to them) and to tend to be an eclectic mix of habit, learning, and experience, establishing a professional ethos would have to come from outside the profession. Indeed, this is basically the current state of affairs, with progressives pushing their agenda from professional organizations and the teacher's colleges, and the state boards of ed responding to the parents, voters, and taxpayers demanding the back-to-basics curriculum and accountability. However, both forces are mostly stalemated as far as controlling the philosophical agenda. Ultimately, the parents, voters, and taxpayers have the greater power, but its a mostly unmotivated power, roused temporarily by bad news or obvious failure.

Even if the political system were to impose a single hybrid ideology (one must suppose it would look like the mission statements of the better suburban schools: mostly essentialist with some elements of the others) such an act would be outdated even before it was done. In the current era, it seems much more sensible to create a marketplace of competing ideologies rather than impose a uniform ideology by state action. In effect, each school would be formed around its guiding philosophy, which it would market to parents, and govern itself accordingly. Even still, decisions about hiring, merit rewards, and firing would probably reside in with the head of the school, whether the principal or some similar executive position.

Consider similar problems teachers have. Grade inflation, school politics, and the popularity contest phenomenon all undermine confidence that teachers would judge their peers by merit and would avoid an assessment proceedure to reward their friends, help out the sympathetic, punish their rivals, seek across the board pay raises unde the guise of merit increases, favor those of similar politics, or otherwise conflate a merit assessment with other purposes. Without a clear ideology adheared to by those who assess, its hard to imagine that any particular definition of merit would prevail.

Update:
Joanne Jacobs passes on this link to a California paper in which teachers elected everyone "teacher of the year" rather than select one meritorious teacher in protest of the very notion of merit pay.

Case closed.

Locke, Rousseau, and Hobbes still fighting over the nature of mankind

In the Spring 2005 issue of the City Journal, Kay Hymowitz has a piece on the sluggish attainment of Black students. Her conclusion is that class is a strong componant of the problem. The core of her argument is that middle class parents have a mission that provides clear means and ends reagarding learning. I'll place it in the terms of the eighteenth century world of ideas.

John Locke described human beings as capable of forming a social contract in which ultimate soveriegnty lay with the people: "Men being, by nature, all free, equal and independent, no one can be put out of this estate, and subject to the will of another, without his own consent." In the individualistic, democratic, and commercial societies that took Locke to heart, there was a new problem that confronted society. This problem was obvious to and acute in the newly formed American republic. How do you raise virtuous republicans capable of maintaining a free people in their independence?

Middle class families, the commercial class, throughout Western Europe were struggling with this problem and the cultural solution in America and Europe was the Cult of Domesticity. [note: be warry of descriptions of the Cult of Domesticity which often admix other ideas from Victorian societies into their descriptions. They also tend to be written from a modern feminist perspective and ignore men's domesticity.] This idea held that the family was the center of training for civic virtue and that both mothers and fathers had duties to attend to the proper upbringing of children. Women were clearly seen as taking a strong role in this upbringing of children, and indeed early feminists argued that mothers , well educated, had just as vital a role in the preservation of civic virtue as men. Men were summoned to attend to their families and to be good fathers, not just disciplinarians and providers. It was this movement that played a vital role in creating a modern sexual culture that condemned male homosexuality, whoring, and other kinds of infidelity as these activities took men and their affections out of the house. The family was not to be just an economic unit, but an affective enviroment for the raising of children, and consequently a happily married couple. By the end of the eighteenth century you can find many examples of men arguing that true happiness is to be found only among close friends and within the family and explicitly rejecting and active public life.

Hymowitz cites something sociologist Brigitte Berger, the author of The Family in the Modern Age, identifies as a middle class educational "mission" and traces how the nuclear family was employed to achieve this mission. Such a program to educate children for an individualistic, democratic, commercial society, to uphold civic virtue, and in America, preserve the achievments of the Revolution, required not only an affectionate domestic enviroment with attentive mothers and fathers, but a new kind of education. It may not be surprising that the theorist of the liberal social contract, John Locke, is also outlined the program for such education. Locke's ideas are found in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding and in Some Thoughts Concerning Education. Locke regards people as possessing animal instincts, and having different talents, but the larger share of our makeup is based on our experience. Unlike our human inheritance, or particular family inheritance, experience is subject to control and manipulation. So that the enviroment in which is child is raised is important and what a child is exposed to is important.

Hymowitz looks at some critics of what they call "hyperparenting," but she does not locate this theory as a different in kind from the "mission." Locke imagined a capable human who is self-governing and educable. The idea of hyperparenting, imagins a less capable human, at least as a child. Indeed, this model seems to have more in common with Thomas Hobbes Leviathan as the controlling master of the incapable subject. Much of the theory that the state should be an all powerful controling entity was indeed based on the 17th century patriarchal family. (See Filmer) So let us recognize that the notion that parents should govern their children in such a fashion, what in modern use looks to be hyperparenting, is in fact the parent being the Leviathan to their children.

Consider Locke's Section 73 of Some Thoughts Concerning Education.

"None of the things [children] are to learn, should ever be made a burden to them, or imposed on them as a task. Whatever is so proposed presently becomes irksome, the mind takes an aversion to it, though before it were a thing of delight or indifferency. Let a child be ordered to whip his top at a certain time every day, whether he has a mind to it, [...] and see whether he will not soon be weary of any play at this rate."

Locke advocates a skilled tutor who introduces subjects to his student in such a way as to win his excitement and curiousity, to utilize what we call "teachable moments,"and to emphasize character education. In his theory of learning, Locke identifies all knowledge as being reflection on sensory experience. And so we can say of the Lockean model, that parents will seek out useful experiences, read to their children, buy educational toys, and help them develope a couriosity about the world and an interest in learning, as well as an understanding that learning is important. What Berger called the "Mission."

Hymowitz also makes mention of the work of Annette Lareau, an ethnography of class and child rearing. In Unequal Childhoods, Lareau identifies a theory of "natural growth" which she desribes as prevelent among the poor and the working poor. This brings us to Rousseau. Rousseau argued that children were good by nature, and that education was corruption. Therefore, we should let the child express himself, and develop according to his unfolding nature without the interfearance of teachers or parents. Look to his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences to see his rejection of the civil for the natural. He doesn't use the phrase "noble savage" but the term is linked to his name because he does embrace a rejection of the corruption of civilization: "See how luxury, dissolution, and slavery have in every age been the punishment for the arrogant efforts we have made in order to emerge from the happy ignorance where Eternal Wisdom had placed us." See Emile to discover how the purpose of education is the restoration of this "happy ignorance." (Or rather, don't, I advise the gentle reader to avoid Rousseau except as a study of error.)

So we have now identified three theories of childcare and education, corresponding to Hobbes, the hyperparenting leviathan; Locke who proposes that with good education whe shall be self-governing; and Rousseau, who believes children are better left to their own natural development. Lurking in the background is a fourth theorist: Decartes. Here Hobbes saw man's nature as savage (his life therefore nasty, brutish, and short), Rousseau as good and pure, and Locke as a blank slate, Decartes saw man possesing an innate knowledge of God and right and wrong. Decartes is therefore a naturalist, in so much as he regarded the knowledge of God and other ideas to be innate. Yet, unlike Rousseau, Descartes did not believe that goodness itself was innate. The ability to discover this was possible by reflection from first principles according to the practice of rationalism.

Locke rejected Cartesian rationalism and was a leading proponant of empiricism. Empiricism argued that knowledge was aquired more reliably not by reflection and deduction, but by experiment. An experiment is a controlled observation to address a specific question. In fact, Locke's education is an application of empiricism. Students don't recieve a set of thought provoking questions to ponder, the contemplation of which constitute education, but rather Locke begins with guided experience, spontanous opportunities for teaching, and finally, some reflection.

The middle class, with its mission, is predominatly Lockean. What struck me about Hymowitz' article was its connection of poor parents and a Rousseauean theory of learning. "Natural-growth believers are fatalists; they do not see their role as shaping the environment so that Little Princes or Princesses will develop their minds and talents, because they assume that these will unfold as they will. As long as a parent provides love, food, and safety, she is doing her job." The notion of developing the child is Locke. Rousseau can look to the casual observer to be a program of development, but it is in fact a sophistocated neglect. Rousseau places his fictional student Emile in a situation where he breaks a window and then learns that with its loss, he is cold. So we see how Emile's will has not been disciplines so that he goes about breaking things, and that second, he is supposed to learn that a broken window is a state to be corrected. This fantasy imagines that Emile will put together some complex ideas and draw the kind of sophisticated conclusion that leads to Home Depot. Instead, as James Q Wilson has demonstrated, the lesson actually learned re broken windows is that nobody cares about this stuff, and I can break it with out consequences.

Bart Landry suggests in Black Working Wives that Black women rejected the Cult of Domesticity for the virtues of a broader commitment to community, including work and family. But this ideology seems to have missed that the purpose of domesticity was the Lockean mission of educating children. John McWhorter has suggested that Black Americans were denied a sense of a tradition of education by the heritage of slavery, in which 1) slaves were denied education by law, and 2) the seperation of people from culture groups undermined an oral history, so that Blacks were unaware that they had a tradition of learning. (See his Explaining the Black Education Gap in the Summer 2000 issue of The Wilson Quarterly, subscription required)This might explain why Black working wives might have seen no need to embrace "the mission" of domesticity, and settled their ideology on the community. The poor as a class have not embraced the ideologist of the middle class, Locke, in any of his facets. That Blacks should have an additional reason to have failed to embrace Locke, at least his educational theory, and the mission that stems from it, seems well explained by McWhorter. How it manifests is well explained by Annette Lareau.

Too often I find Locke condemned as if he were Hobbes, and Rousseau's ideas praised when the descriptions of the ideas are those compatible with Locke and the others ignored. When I see someone advocating ignoring the teaching of literacy until a child has need of it (Rousseau supposed 12 years of age) then I'll say we have a real Rousseau. In the mean time, let us know Locke and be able to recognize his program for education.

I found Kay Hymowitz' City Journal article via Joanne Jacobs.

Fair Weather Federalism?

I have another word for it: triumphalism. There is a lot of pressure coming from the right to damn the torpedoes and charge into the maelstrom. They argue that victory has its rewards, three branches of government, &c, &c, and go on to demand the full expression of their will, now, I mean right now.

Instapundit links to David Boaz posting at Fox News.

There are two things at work here. One is that Federalism is not really a part of the current Republican agenda, and second, Federalism protects those who don't control the House, Senate, and Executive. If you control the Federal legislature and executive, who needs Federalism? Should the Dems ever find themselves in control of these institutions, Republicans will discover a renewed love for Federalism. But, like the troglodytes who prefered a king to the hard task of governing, will they be able to recover those liberties so easily alienated?

Government Archives Still Primitive

I was trying to find population figures of St Joseph and Kansas City from the mid-19th century. I wanted to find out of St Joseph ever had more population than Kansas City. I could find the addresses of archives to send snail mail to for paper documents, and I found the locations of micro-film sites I could visit. But I didn't need to pour over original documents or seek out patterns from raw data. I just wanted the summative populatuion for either the cities or the counties.

Question: Why did the first railroad in Kansas, the Atchison and Topeka, connect these two cities? Was a link to Atchison (across the Missouri River from St Joseph) better than a link to Kansas City, Kansas (across the River from Kansas City, Missouri)? Popultion was my original interest. Finally I abandon a Census search and just used keywords "1840, city name, population," and found a census figure for Kansas City, 4418, and a rough figure for St Joseph, 6000. That begs the question, how big was Independence. Another line of searches, on rialroads uncovered that the first railroad was built between St Joseph and Hannibal, and only two years later did a link go out between Kansas City and St Louis. Further, the fact that St Louis was trying to be a hub of local resource collection, rather than a point on a larger network (they didn't want to undermine the riverboat traffic) meant that there was not a route from St Louis to other eastern points until later. Meanwhile the line to Hannibal puts it across the river (more or less) from Quincy, a point on the Chicago, Burlinton & Quincy railroad, later Burlington Northern.

So on the one hand, the Kansas railroad could either link to St Joseph, where a railroad had pushed east in 1847, linking with the line out of Hannibal in 1859, the very year that the Atchison & Topeka was founded. A spur connected the St Joseph & Hannibal link the next year. And this link is certainly complete through Quincy as far as Chicago by 1864, but its unclear whether the Kansas railroaders would have known that the Aurora Branch would get to Quincy (they became Chicago, Burlington & Quicny in 1864). On the other hand, the Kansas railroad could link to Kansas City, would not be connected to the St Louis line moving west until 1865. And would terminate in a city, St Louis, where the city fathers wanted to put their eggs in the riverboats.

So this is almost certainly the reason for the line at Atchison, but it would have been nice to find the population data on-line, rather than getting microfilm locations.

Pop Quiz

Mark Goldblatt, who teaches remedial English at a New York University, offers this final quiz for graduating high school seniors. He doesn't seem pleased with the state of grammer knowledge.

IU survey on student engagement

The University of Indiana Bloomington has conducted an extensive survey of nearly one hundred thousand students on their engagement and attitudes about high school.

So far only the highlights appear to have been released.

Quality High Schools

Newsweek has a piece on quality high schools, The 100 Best High Schools in America. However I will quibble with their little historical introduction. Since the advent of the university in the middle ages, students would be tutored in basic literacy then enter the university around 12-14 years old. By the end of the 18th century, so much new learning had taken place, and was available at the university, that it made sense to introduce an intermediate school, between grammar school and college. This was the high school.

Newsweek says, "Ever since, Americans have been trying to figure out exactly what public high schools should do. Should they concentrate on preparing the best and the brightest for college? Should there be more emphasis on vocational training? Should students with different abilities and goals learn in the same classrooms, or should they be segregated into different tracks or even different schools?"

But this is untrue. For their first century, public high schools were preparation for college. Most people stopped after 8th grade armed with a strong literacy (read Civil War letters by soldiers) ready to become citizens in a free republic and economic actors in a market capitalism. Those who went on to high school were preparing for the university. It is with the rise of the progressive education movement before and after WWI that alternate theories and uses for the high school were developed. Debate and disagreement about the purpose of the high school are a feature of the high school's second century. This is even evident by examining the evidence within the article. For example, "The initial graduates were all white males who studied literature, science, math and history." This is college preparation. Its the development of vocational arts, home economics, and health and sexual education that now has crowded out so much of the old curriculum.

Where was his Advisor?

"Scott McConnell says he wasn't warned that ideological conformity was a requirement for successful completion of the graduate program." Joanne Jacobs tells us, "Despite excellent grades and evaluations, he was dropped from the program after he wrote a paper suggesting that corporal punishment might be an effective way to manage a classroom."

More at Cranky Professor

Writing and Scoring Guides

Kimberly Swygert has a post on the SAT essay. The core problem in the post is the difficulty of scoring writing. Indeed, scoring writing is not nearly as transparent as scoring the more objective kinds of test questions. There is a movement to develope better scoring guides, but I think that can only go so far. I think scoring guides only conceal just how subjective writing is. In Bloom's Taxonomy, Evaluation is the highest level, and so must involve cumulative disagreements about choices made at lower levels. Yet, good writers can generally distnguish between low, middle, and high quality writing. Getting more accurate is probabaly an illusion. But is it even neccesary? Further, different instructors will emphasize different writing goals, which is said to undermine validity of the scoring, but is it? In the real world, writing requirements are often specific and sometimes arbitrary. Is learning to please an instructor any different than learning to please and employer? Indeed, it may be a valuable skill. It would be nice to imagine an ideal rhetoric to aspire to, but its also not how the world actually works.

When teaching writing, the scoring guide has some uses, but its not by itself a teaching tool. Much more useful are examples of high quality writing and a process of revision and critique. Students should have access to one to three pieces of quality writing for every piece of writing they make (this ratio can decrease as you move into more and more advanced students) of their own. Revision should go beyond a single re-write to two or three revisions. The skills reqired at the third revision are different from those at then first. All require practice. Students should review each other's writing in a randomly or systematically selected process, so that students recieve a wide critique. With such criteria met, a scoring guide can be useful to guide students to the next step in quality. Without models, revision, and critique, a scoring guide creates a pseudo-objectivity.

Danger Signs

Hugh Hewitt's post early on May 6, reminds me of students who are caught goofing off in chemistry class, and refuse to accept the criticism that they might do harm (break equipment, &c) because they have no such intentions. Good intentions do not guarantee that one will do no harm, nor should they exempt anyone from criticism. There is no doubt that some people who criticize avowed Christian political actors are as much bothered by their Christian conviction as they are by their disagreements over policy. But there does seem to be a creeping defensiveness in Hewitt's dismissals as well as others (Ingraham, Hannity, &c) that all critics of the agenda of Catholic conservatives and evangelicals are anti-Christian. This creates a reason to ignore all critics, and that is a dangerous condition.

Christine Todd Whitman, Arlen Spector, John McCain and others in the Republican party itself have raised concerns at various times and places. But responces seem to range from purging them from the ranks to marginalizing them to just ignoring them. None of these are strategies for electoral victory in 2006 and 2008.

We need to expand the party, not engage in purges to create ideological purity. This means reaching out to centerists. But that doesn't have to mean that the party moves to the left, though it will mean that some on the right will have to put up with a party more to the left then they would like. What the party should do is to reassure moderates and centerists by making appeals that are broad and arguing the case for reforms in social security and tax policy, rather than casting appeals to the already committed and using language that isn't limited in its appeal to the already committed.

This is impossible if a large block of Republicans cut themselves off from ideas held by other than the like-minded, and regard others suspiciously.

Wack-a-mole

I have emerged from hiding just for a moment to post on the computer generated paper getting published at a conference. I will be returning to my undisclosed location where D... C... and I are tied 312-312 in a bridge marathon. Win-lose-or-tie, I'll be back in full text mode again the second week in May.

Speaking of the middle of May, my brother already has his Episode III tickets. Hat tip Sister, who is making the journey out to the other blogging brother.

A reprise of the Social Text affair.

You may fondly recall Alan Sokal's experiement in cultural studies, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" . I know that I do. Sokal wrote a bunch of "fashionable nonsense" and got it published in the 1996 spring/summer issue of "Social Text".

Now CNN is reporting, "two fellow MIT graduate students questioned the standards of some academic conferences, so they wrote a computer program to generate research papers complete with 'context-free grammar,' charts and diagrams."

One of the papers was published.

Arvin Tseng wonders if this means the Turning test has been passed.