Thoughts Aloud

Archive for the ‘Education’ Category

Must see TV:

This is really well done, and I wish all Americans could watch and grasp it. I do wish they had put just a little more emphasis on the advantages of a Republic to protect minority rights from the tyranny of the majority in a mobocracy. The way they collapsed rule by “one” into an effective oligarchy, and summarily dismissed anarchy was elegant. Well worth the ten minutes to watch and pass on to others. ◄Dave►

A lesson never to be forgotten?

Everybody knows you can’t spend yourself rich, anymore than you can drink yourself sober.

They used to sir. Back when common sense still counted. You may have brought the USSR to its knees, old friend; but the Marxists in academia now have our children down on theirs, worshiping the Obamessiah, and cursing you. History belongs not to those who created it; but to those who write the textbooks. Alas, your lifelong totalitarian nemesis owns that franchise, and they have not been kind to you.

They have numbed the minds of your posterity into a nation of helpless sheeple, sir, who haven’t a clue that they are being fleeced. Indeed, they are begging to be shorn… and I don’t know whether I want to be despondent or angry about it. It looks like I am going to have to decide soon, for this trend is unsustainable. ◄Dave►

E-mail of the day:

Remember all the jokes about ‘Little Johnny’? You know, the kid that the teachers are afraid to call on for answers in the class, for fear of what he might say… Well, finally a photo of ‘Little Johnny’ has surfaced. See if you can find him in the picture!

The theme of this picture was, ‘Make a funny face’!

I knew you’d be able to find him. ◄Dave►

When Drudge this morning had the headline, “SALON.COM EDITOR RIPS: The new Great Communicator …isn’t,” I couldn’t resist reading it. It was a frightening trip into an alternative universe. Hard as it is to comprehend, one comes away with the unmistakable impression that this ditzy socialist actually believes the nonsense she is spouting:

Democrats know the Republicans are wrong. Little children know they’re wrong. Cats and dogs know they’re wrong. But somehow this week, unbelievably, Obama and the Democrats seem to be losing the spin war. There are the worrying poll numbers. And there is the Washington Post report that Senate Democrats don’t have the votes to pass a stimulus bill yet, at least not with the 60 votes that would rule out a filibuster. In this economic crisis, with 2.6 million jobs lost last year and thousands more lost in every news cycle, what does it take to create the urgency and responsibility to get this done?

I’d like everyone in charge of selling the stimulus to take a deep breath, and then, in an extended sound bite, articulate the long view (I know, I ask a lot). Along with Reich, Jeff Madrick goes into all the larger issues in greater detail in his excellent book “The Case for Big Government,” and winds up in the same place (even though, remarkably, the book was written before the current economic collapse and attendant debate over what the stimulus should do). I hope Obama and his team are reading Madrick and Reich. Because they’re really just talking common sense: Public spending priorities need to catch up to 21st-century economic life. The long and lamentable Republican revolution of 1980 through 2008 aimed, and partly succeeded, in sending us back to the 19th century — and we are all suffering for it. We will continue to suffer unless Democrats grab the political momentum voters gave them in November.

Of course, the 19th century wasn’t all bad, but in our current political environment, we’ve forgotten what was good: Eventually government (thanks to political, religious and labor agitation) came to see its role as providing K-12 education, building roads, canals, bridges and railroads (after private sector efforts faltered), and the slow budding of certain health and safety regulations. In the 20th century, that public mandate expanded into Social Security, Medicaid, unemployment insurance and other safety net programs, thanks to the New Deal and the Great Society. Today, profound economic change likewise requires new government initiatives, but they are many years overdue, for a lot of depressing political and economic reasons. The years since the early 1970s have been hard for middle- and low-income workers. Real wages became stagnant — the average weekly earnings of non-supervisory workers actually fell between 1973 and 2005. The late ’60s and early ’70s also marked the exodus of manufacturing jobs in the central cities, which William Julius Wilson and others persuasively argue played a huge role in creating the so-called underclass in many once-vital African-American neighborhoods.

Madrick lays out a few new-economy political priorities; you may have more, add them in comments:

Why, when post-secondary education is essential in this economy, are most families on their own when it comes to paying for college? Secondary education is awesome, isn’t it? Can you imagine this country without it? But isn’t it time to think beyond that? Why isn’t K-16 or so an American entitlement?

She was just getting wound up. If you need a window into what the progressives have done to the minds of our youth, just read this remarkable screed for a stunning example of a completely brainwashed mind that is utterly beyond reason. It is breathtaking. ◄Dave►

Jerry Pournelle, the well known sci-fi writer, has an interesting and rather politically incorrect post at The View From Chaos Manor entitled, “The threat to America.” He identifies Bill Gates as a public enemy, contributing to our primary threat, for reasons unrelated to Microsoft:

I won’t go into the main body of what I talked about, but my conclusions were simple: I believe that the worst threat to the United States is our failure adequately to educate the smartest 25% of our students; that there are no hopeful counter trends; and the result will be disaster. Add to that our failure to train or teach skills to the lower half of the population, and the disaster is made worse. These trends have related causes.

The underlying cause is our attempt to provide every public school child with a university prep education. Bill Gates becomes involved because his foundations promote the idea that “every American child deserves a world class university prep education”; and the attempt to do that insures that very few American children will receive a world class university prep education, and most of the smarter children will receive an education that is indifferent at best. The failure of our schools to educate the smart kids will put the United States into a terrible competitive position that will only get worse. We will continue to live off our capital, both intellectual and financial.

The problem here is that I don’t have any startling information: everyone knows the facts here. One fact is that this is not Lake Wobegone. Half of the American children are below average. That means that the only way to make sure that no child is left behind is to see that no child gets ahead.

It is impossible to argue with his logic. I am not sure if he realizes that dumbing our kids down is by design; but if we somehow survive all the more immediate existential threats nipping at our heels, he is absolutely right about the future prognosis for such an undereducated and/or unskilled population. It has come to pass that modern academia themselves are now too dimwitted to even be embarrassed by their inadequacies and failures. ◄Dave►

I tuned in to the Liberty Radio Network (FTL) I mentioned last night and caught an articulate young guy named Wes Bertrand doing an excellent interview discussing home schooling, mentioning Ayn Rand and Maria Montessori. He also mentioned a book he had written entitled, “The Psychology of Liberty,” and read a couple of passages out of it. One caught my attention, which was a quote by John Holt, the originator of the “unschooling” movement that is hot in the home schooling community:

Educator John Holt related some of his thoughts about students in universities and colleges and their extended transition process into the workforce:

Most of them were on campus to get a piece of paper that(they thought) would enable them to do whatever they were going to do next, when they got out of school. Most of them, if given the piece of paper, would leave immediately and do that next thing. Most of them, if they left right away with paper in hand to do that next thing, would do it about as well as they will do it after many more years on this or some other campus. Others of the students are here because they don’t know what to do next, or because they want to put off, for as long as they can, whatever they will do next.

Meanwhile, one might say that all those students are learning something. Perhaps they are. But they will not long remember more than a small part of it, or use or benefit from more than a small part of that. They are learning this stuff to pass exams. Most of them could not pass the same exam even a year later, to say nothing of ten years later. And, if some of what they learn should someday prove useful, they would probably have learned it ten times faster when they needed to use it and thus had a reason for learning
it.

I’d say he nailed it!

I listened to a 2 hour podcast of yesterday’s show, and he was taking calls, doing interviews, and pontificating just as well as the average talk radio host, only it seemed serious and not meant as entertainment like the big guys on AM. I enjoyed and would recommend it.

He has written two books, both are now available as free PDF downloads. I have read the education section of the above mentioned philosophy book, which is very well written; and have downloaded the other entitled, “Complete Liberty,” which is billed as more “plain talk” than the philosophy book, and can also be read on line. They are available on his two websites:
Complete Liberty and Logical Learning. ◄Dave►

E-mail of the day:

According to a news report, a certain private school in Washington was recently faced with a unique problem. A number of 12-14 year-old girls were beginning to use lipstick and would put it on in the bathroom.

That was fine, but after they put on their lipstick, they would press their lips on the mirror leaving dozens of little lip prints.

Every night the maintenance man would remove them, and the next day the girls would put them back. Finally the principal decided that something had to be done.

She called all the girls to the bathroom and met them there with the maintenance man.

She explained that all these lip prints were causing a major problem for the custodian who had to clean the mirrors every night (you can just imagine all the yawns from the little princesses).

To demonstrate how difficult it had been to clean the mirrors, she asked the maintenance man to show the girls how much effort was required.

He took out a long-handled squeegee, dipped it in the toilet, and cleaned the mirror with it.

Since then, there have been no lip prints on the mirror.

There are teachers …….. and then there are educators.

Sorry, I got a chuckle out of it, and needed a break from pondering the unraveling of our society. ◄Dave►

Perhaps I just answered my own question in the last post. I stumbled across a mind blowing report in The Social Contract extensively documenting the cost of the unprecedented growth we are experiencing because of illegal immigration. Entitled, “The Twin Crises: Immigration and Infrastructure,” by Edwin S. Rubenstein, it is a beautifully formatted, fact and reference filled, 87 page PDF file that deserves to be widely read. To encourage you to do so, here is the introduction:

This article highlights the role of immi­gration in depreciating and driving up the cost of maintaining, improving, and expanding infrastructure in the U.S. Fifteen different categories of public infrastructure are covered:

• airports
• bridges
• dams
• drinking water
• energy (national power grid)
• hazardous waste
• hospitals
• navigable waterways
• public parks and recreation
• public schools
• railroads
• border security
• solid waste
• mass transit
• water and sewer systems.

Infrastructure and immigration? That’s an odd couple. Immigration policy has been de­bated for years, but the debate usually focuses on border security, amnesty, and whether il­legal alien workers are really needed to do the jobs that Americans “won’t do.”

Immigration’s impact on public infra­structure is rarely discussed.

Until the past few months, infrastructure policy was itself on the back burner, surfac­ing only when a bridge or levee collapsed, but generally of interest only to civil engineers and policy wonks.

How things change! Today, infrastructure spending is widely seen as a key lifeline for a sinking economy. The lion’s share of Pres­ident-elect Obama’s stimulus package will fund road and mass transit projects, school construction, port expansions, and alternative energy projects.

Yes, our infrastructure is in trouble. The American Society of Civil Engineers’ 2005 Report Card assigned an overall grade of D to the 15 infrastructure categories. Grades were selected on the basis of physical condition and capacity following a traditional grading scale (for example, if 77 percent of our roads are in good condition or better, the roads would be given a grade of C).

But if money were the problem, there would be no problem. Since 1982, capital spending on public infrastructure has in­creased by 2.1 percent per year above the inflation rate. Over this period, governments have spent $3.1 trillion (in today’s dollars) to build transportation infrastructure, and an­other $3.8 trillion to maintain and operate it. Last year, we spent 50 percent more, after ad­justing for inflation, on highway construction than we did a quarter of a century ago. Yet over this period, highway miles increased by only 6 percent, while U.S. population grew by 31 percent—half of it due to immigration.

The “demand” for highway infrastruc­ture, as measured by population growth, grew six times faster than the “supply” of highway infrastructure.

Bottom line: Our infrastructure is “crum­bling” because population growth has over­whelmed the ability of government to produc­tively spend the vast sums it already devotes to infrastructure.

All types of infrastructure are under stress because of immigration.

Public schools are a prime example. Although immigrants account for about 13 percent of the U.S. population, they are 21 percent of the school-age population. In California, a whopping 47 percent of the school-age population consists of immigrants or the children of immigrants. Some Los Angeles schools are so crowded that they have lengthened the time between classes to give students time to make their way through crowded halls. Los Angeles’ school construc­tion program is so massive that the Army Corps of Engineers was called in to manage it.

This is a boom time for hospital construc­tion. Sixty percent of hospitals are either building new facilities or planning to do so. But we have a two-tier hospital system in the U.S. Hospitals in poor areas—that serve primarily uninsured immigrants and Medicaid patients—cannot afford to upgrade their facilities. The uncompensated costs are killing them. In California, 60 emergency departments (EDs) have closed to avoid the uncompensated costs of their largely illegal alien caseloads.

Immigrants may not use any more water than other people. But they dispro­portionately settle in parts of the country where water is in short supply—and their sheer numbers have overwhelmed conserva­tion efforts. Cities like San Antonio, El Paso, and Phoenix could run out of water in 10 to 20 years. San Diego’s water company has resorted to a once-unthinkable option: recy­cling toilet water for drinking.

National parks along the southern border are scarred by thousands of unauthor­ized roads and paths used by illegal aliens crossing into the U.S. Their fires, trash, and vandalism have despoiled thousands of acres of pristine parkland.

The traditional response to these prob­lems was to throw more federal, state, and local tax money into infrastructure. When public support falters, infrastructure users are usually hit with higher tolls, higher transit fares, higher water bills, and other usage-re­lated fees. As a last resort, many governments sell or lease entire highways, water systems, parks, and other infrastructure systems to private companies.

There is no end to the financial chicanery that infrastructure junkies will employ to support their habit. Wall Street veteran Felix Rohatyn recently proposed this “novel solu­tion” to the problem:

Although private investors have successfully built new roads in places such as Poland and Spain, they have not done so exten­sively in the U.S. But a National Infrastructure Bank could redi­rect private efforts away from refinancing old facilities—as in the case of Chicago’s Skyway—to building new ones.

According to our plan, most of the funds the federal government now spends on existing pro­grams (along with many of those program’s experts and facilities) would be transferred to the bank, which could not only finance the projects but also resell the loans it makes to investors in capital markets, much as other assets are rebundled for investors. The receipts from these sales would allow a new round of lending, giving the bank an impact far in excess of its initial capitalization.

That is no solution; it is a recipe for an­other debacle a la sub-prime mortgages.

The prognosis is not good. In August 2008 the Census Bureau projected that U.S. population will be 433 million in 2050—an increase of 135 million, or 44 percent, from current levels. Eighty-two percent of the in­crease will be from new immigrants and their U.S.-born children.

The brutal reality is that no conceivable infrastructure program can keep pace with that kind of population growth. The tradi­tional “supply-side” response to America’s infrastructure shortage—build, build, build—is dead, dead, dead. Demand reduction is the only viable way to close the gap between the supply and demand of public infrastructure.

Immigration reduction must play a role.

Each of the subject areas are then covered in frightening detail. When one adds this infrastructure dimension to the malaise our economy is in, and realizes that the politicians in DC have no intention of tackling the illegal immigration debacle, for the same political reason they can’t address the coming SSI/Medicare entitlement disaster, there really is little hope for our future as a prosperous nation.

We lived in the best of times, folks. It is all downhill from here. Sorry, kids, our generation blew your future already by continuing to elect Progressive politicians who pandered to our foolish need to feel good and compassionate. ◄Dave►

Camille Paglia has become one of my favorite Leftist commentators, because she calls them like she sees them; rather than throwing away her credibility by defending the indefensible, as most of her contemporaries on the Left do nowadays. Her latest column, entitled “Obama’s early stumbles,” is classic Camille addressing many subjects in answer to reader’s e-mails.

On Obama:

However, you are quite right to call the controversy over the indictment of buffoonishly sly Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich a “mess.” That the normally deft Obama team mishandled its rapid response to it was obvious from the get-go. Obama’s first statements about his and his staff’s communications with Blagojevich were inadequate at best and misleading at worst. Then there was a second stage of needless blunders when Obama opposed the tarnished Blagojevich’s perfectly legal appointment of Roland Burris to fill Obama’s vacated Senate seat — a foolishly hard line that the president-elect inevitably had to reverse.

On congress:

On the other hand, I agree with you that Congress has come across lately like a clumsy, flea-bitten bunch of “bozos.” Its poll ratings are lower than stinking swamp mud. I have a soft spot for the nimble Nancy Pelosi, a master of the ladylike stiletto thrust, but Harry Reid is a cadaverous horse’s ass of mammoth proportions. How in the world did that whiny, sniveling incompetent end up as Senate majority leader? Give him the hook! As for the “radical change” that you fear, it’s hard to imagine (short of a crisis-driven imposition of martial law) how that will ever happen in our sluggish, consensus-driven political system.

On Palin:

As I have repeatedly said in this column, I have never had the slightest problem in understanding Sarah Palin’s meaning at any time. On the contrary, I have positively enjoyed her fresh, natural, rapid delivery with its syncopated stops and slides — a fabulous example of which was the way (in her recent interview with John Ziegler) that she used a soft, swooping satiric undertone to zing Katie Couric’s dippy narcissism and to assert her own outrage as a “mama grizzly” at libels against her family.

Ideology-driven attacks on Palin became clotted liberal clichés within 24 hours of her introduction as John McCain’s running mate. What a bunch of tittering lemmings the urban elite have become in this country. From Couric’s vicious manipulations of video clips to Cavett’s bourgeois platitudes, the preemptive strike on Palin as a potential presidential candidate has grossly misfired. Whatever legitimate objections may be raised to Palin on political grounds (explored, for example, by David Talbot in Salon) have been lost in the amoral overkill that has defamed a self-made woman of concrete achievement in the public realm.

On the “Fairness Doctrine”:

Instead of bleating for paternalistic government intervention, liberals should get their own act together. Radio is a populist medium where liberals come across as snide, superior scolds. One can instantly recognize a liberal caller to a conservative show by his or her catty, obnoxious tone. The leading talk radio hosts are personalities and entertainers with huge rhetorical energy and a bluff, engaging manner. Even the seething ranters can be extremely funny. Last summer, for example, I laughed uproariously in my car when WABC’s Mark Levin said furiously about Katie Couric, “What do these people do? Open fortune cookies and read them on air?”

On AGW:

In the 1980s, I was similarly skeptical about media-trumpeted predictions about a world epidemic of heterosexual AIDS. And I remain skeptical about the media’s carelessly undifferentiated use of the term “AIDS” for what is often a complex of wasting diseases in Africa. We should all be concerned about environmental despoliation and pollution, but the global warming crusade has become a hallucinatory cult. Until I see stronger evidence, I will continue to believe that climate change is primarily driven by solar phenomena and that it is normal for the earth to pass through major cooling and warming phases.

On the “gay gene”:

After the American Psychiatric Association, responding to activist pressure, removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders in 1973, psychological inquiries into homosexuality slowly became verboten. To even ask about the origins of homosexuality was automatically dubbed homophobic by gay studies proponents in the ’80s and ’90s. Weirdly, despite the rigid social constructionist bias that permeated the entire left, gay activists in and out of academe now leapt on the slightest evidence that could suggest a biological cause of homosexuality. The very useful Freudian concept of “family romance” (typified by the Oedipus and Electra complexes) is almost completely gone. Yet the intricate family dynamic of every single gay person I’ve ever known seems to have played some kind of role in his or her developing sexual orientation.

On vocational ed vs. college:

Perhaps there’s hope of change because of the tens of thousands of liberal arts graduates with expensive degrees who are finding themselves out of work and depressingly marginalized in a society where the manual trades offer guaranteed employment at relatively high wages. A dose of Buddhism might do people good: Sweeping garden sand into oceanic designs around ornamental rocks is considered a spiritual exercise in Asia. I say that landscaping, construction, carpentry, metalworking and all the other trades should be promoted by primary education as worthy careers for both men and women. The pre-college rat race is a sadomasochistic imposition on the young that robs them of free will and saps their vital energies. When will they rebel?

On humanities professors:

Why are American professors forcing American students to plow through a boneless blob of a book that is predicated on now totally passé French manners and mores? Why is egregious theoretical verbosity being force-fed to cyber-savvy, text-messaging young people who barely read as it is and who still haven’t found their own writing voices? The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind — yes, the big wind of elite school flatulence, which may be the true cause of global warming.

Her columns are only published monthly and I wouldn’t miss one. ◄Dave►

There was an open thread discussing Ayn Rand on the Secular Right Blog this weekend, which attracted a remarkable number of erudite comments in a spirited discussion, which is already over 70 comments. If you are an Ayn Rand fan, you might enjoy perusing them. One of my early contributions was to offer a nexus between Ayn Rand and Maria Montessori, which is worth repeating here:

I particularly agree with the assessment that Rand’s epistemology is as or more relevant to the ills of our society, than her ethics at this point. I have been a devotee of Ayn Rand for over thirty years and an admirer, proponent, and practitioner of Maria Montessori’s Method of education for the past twelve.

Only recently, I discovered that there was a nexus between them. I was aware that many years ago, my partner was the Montessori teacher for the children of Leonard Peikoff and others at the Ayn Rand Institute; but I assumed that was just an accident. Then I stumbled across an article by Michael S. Berliner, Ph.D. entitled “Ayn Rand and Education,” which is remarkable for being 27 years old:

The revolution that Ayn Rand brought to philosophy has profound implications for education.

Since the purpose of education is to develop a certain kind of individual and society, education involves the practical implementation of philosophic ideals. Thus education has a specially close relationship to philosophy. Everything that goes on in a classroom rests on philosophic premises: education derives its goals from ethics, its methodology from epistemology and its administrative policies and political status from social philosophy.

Given the dependency of education on philosophy, it should be no shock that our schools are in chaos; they have derived their guiding principles from various forms of irrationalism, altruism, and collectivism. Only when educators turn to Ayn Rand’s philosophy, will sanity return to our schools. How would her philosophy rescue education?

He then offers eleven points for consideration. Among them:

6. Ayn Rand’s philosophic system can provide a theoretical foundation for the most promising educational method now available: the Montessori method. Despite the success of Montessori schools, there is amazingly little understanding of the reasons for that success. As a consequence, the method is either dismissed as nothing more than a series of clever techniques for teaching specific skills, or attempts are made to ground the method in Maria Montessori’s personal philosophy, a mixture of Catholicism and Indian mysticism.

At present, the supporters of the Montessori method are unable to defend it against either the educational establishment or compromisers from within Montessori ranks. Teachers and parents need to understand the real philosophic meaning of the Montessori method. Ayn Rand’s philosophy makes that understanding possible.

He is right about the confusion in the Montessori ranks, and regrettably I must report that the Montessori Method is being severely corrupted in America, by modern Montessorians’ ill-conceived quest for recognition by mainstream academia, and the attempts to shoehorn the Method into rigid public school curricula. Authentic Montessori programs are still available in the private sector; but the name is in the public domain and anyone can call their school a Montessori school, whether or not it provides an authentic Montessori curriculum. Caveat emptor.

At the end of the article, are some interesting quotes. I liked Peikoff’s:

Assault from the Ivory Tower: The Professors’ War Against America
by Leonard Peikoff

I wish I could tell you that your college years will be a glorious crusade. Actually, they will probably be a miserable experience. If you are a philosophically pro-American student, you have to expect every kind of smear from many of your professors. If you uphold the power of reason, you will be called a fanatic or a dogmatist. If you uphold the right to happiness, you will be called anti-social or even a fascist. If you admire Ayn Rand, you will be called a cultist. You will experience every kind of injustice, and even hatred, and you will be unbelievably bored most of the time, and often you will be alone and lonely. But if you have the courage to venture out into this kind of nightmare, you will not only be acquiring the diploma necessary for your professional future, you will also be helping to save the world, and we are all in your debt.

The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought by Ayn Rand, 206-207

Then, by Ayn Rand herself:

Ayn Rand on Education

The only purpose of education is to teach a student how to live his life — by developing his mind and equipping him to deal with reality. The training he needs is theoretical, i.e., conceptual. He has to be taught to think, to understand, to integrate, to prove. He has to be taught the essentials of the knowledge discovered in the past — and he has to be equipped to acquire further knowledge by his own effort.

“The Comprachicos,” The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, 231.

The academia-jet set coalition is attempting to tame the American character by the deliberate breeding of helplessness and resignation-in those incubators of lethargy known as “Progressive” schools, which are dedicated to the task of crippling a child’s mind by arresting his cognitive development. (See “The Comprachicos” in my book The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution.) It appears, however, that the “progressive” rich will be the first victims of their own special theories: it is the children of the well-to-do who emerge from expensive nursery schools and colleges as hippies, and destroy the remnants of their paralyzed brains by means of drugs.

The middle class has created an antidote which is perhaps the most helpful movement of recent years: the spontaneous, unorganized, grass — roots revival of the Montessori system of education — a system aimed at the development of a child’s cognitive, i.e., rational, faculty.

“Don’t Let It Go,” Philosophy: Who Needs It, 261; pb 214.

Finally, if you are unfamiliar with Montessori philosophy and at all interested in exploring it, I recently published an essay entitled, “Spontaneous Minds,” which covers the way in which the Montessori Method nurtures the spontaneous process children use to create their own minds, by interaction with their environment, during the crucial preschool years. ◄Dave►