Appeal to Authority

I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure. P.J. O'Rourke says End Them, Don't Mend Them, and the article is accompanied by this image:

Some excerpts:

The Digest of Educational Statistics (read by Monday, there will be a quiz) says inflation-adjusted per-pupil spending increased by 49 percent from 1984 to 2004 and by more than 100 percent from 1970 to 2005.

Bell bottoms and Jerry Rubin hair versus piercings and tattoos—are kids getting smarter? No. National Assessment of Educational Progress reading test scores remained essentially the same from 1970 to 2004. SAT scores in 1970 averaged 537 in reading and 512 in math, and 38 years later the scores were 502 and 515. (More kids are taking SATs, but the nitwit factor can be discounted—scores below 400 have decreased slightly.) American College Testing (ACT) composite scores have increased only slightly from 20.6 (out of 36) in 1990 to 21.1 in 2008. And the extraordinary expense of the D.C. public school system produced a 2007 class of eighth graders in which, according to the NAEP, 12 percent of the students were at or above proficiency in reading and 8 percent were at or above proficiency in math. Many of these young people are now entering the work force. Count your change in D.C.

The average IQ in America is—and this can be proven mathematically—average. Logic therefore dictates that National Assessment of Educational Progress eighth grade "at or above proficient" reading and math levels should average 50. This is true in only one of the 50 states. National averages are 29 and 31 percent. Either logic has nothing to do with public education or that NAEP test is a bear. Which I doubt.

--

Massachusetts (fifth in spending per student) and Vermont (first) do lead the reading proficiency list with 43 and 42 percent respectively. But there’s not much to choose between that and 25th-biggest spender Montana’s 39 percent. Montana, in turn, is tied with third-most-expensive New Jersey. And the four states with 37 percent proficiencies on the NAEP are sixth-in-spending hyper-literate Connecticut, 19th-in-spending rube Minnesota, eighth-in-spending canny Yankee Maine, and 43rd-in-spending hayseed South Dakota.

--

Looking at the bottom of the heap is just as confusing. Perhaps it’s possible to spend too little on public education, and 47th-ranked Mississippi is trying to prove it. The District of Columbia aside, Mississippi’s proficiency levels are the worst in the nation—17 percent in reading; 14 percent in math. However, the state that spends the least, Utah, slightly exceeds national averages. Meanwhile the second-worst state, New Mexico, is completely average in its school spending, ranked at 24. Tenth-in-spending Hawaii, with 20 percent in reading and 21 percent in math, is marginally inferior to 31st-in-spending California with 20 and 24 percent. And 49th-in-spending Arizona is a few points better than either.

--

Here’s my proposal: Close all the public schools. Send the kids home. Fire the teachers. Sell the buildings. Raze the U.S. Department of Education, leaving not one brick standing upon another and plow the land where it stood with salt.

"Wait a minute," the earnest liberal says, "we've got swell public schools here in Flourishing Heights. The kids take yoga. We just brought in a law school placement coordinator at the junior high. The gym has solar panels on the roof. Our Girls Ultimate Frisbee team is third in the state. The food in the cafeteria is locally grown. And the vending machines dispense carrots and kiwi juice."

Close them anyway. I've got 11,749 reasons. Or, given the Cato report, call it 15,000. Abandon the schools. Gather the kids together in groups of 15.4. Sit them down at your house, or the Moose Lodge, or the VFW Hall or—gasp—a church. Multiply 15.4 by $15,000. That’s $231,000. Subtract a few grand for snacks and cleaning your carpet. What remains is a pay and benefit package of a quarter of a million dollars. Average 2008 public school classroom teacher salary: $51,391. For a quarter of a million dollars you could hire Aristotle. The kids wouldn't have band practice, but they'd have Aristotle. (Incidentally this worked for Philip of Macedon. His son did very well.)

Money's not the problem. P.J. has much more to say. Please, go read. We don't need Aristotles, but we do need a bunch of E.D. Hirsch, Jr's.

Constructive Criticism

In the comments to Why I Keep Marxadelphia Around, reader and sometimes critic juris_imprudent argued:

Back to Gramsci again Kevin? This fellow will surely go down in history as the most influential man in Western Culture in more than a 1000 years. To a small degree I agree with Markadelphia - this is one of many theories of education. It is a crackpot one no doubt - but then what leftist dogma isn't? But I don't see evidence of growth - hell sixteen (not particularly impressive) schools 40 years after the peak of leftism in the U.S., 20 some years after the fall of communism in the West?

I remember La Raza from when I was in HS in the 70s. It was just as stupid, out of place and non mainstream then. The old radicals carved out a little niche that they still hold onto - big whoop. That does NOT explain the overall decline in education that has taken place since the 50s/early-60s. Nor do I buy into any Gramsci-rooted plot to destroy Western Civ, any more than I buy into Truther, Birther or ChemTrailer folderol.

Everyone has a favorite bogeyman in education. Once it was New Math, then whole language followed by that self-esteem stupidity. A true conservative would argue for the tried and true (all the way back to teaching Latin), but the graduate system of our universities demand new and novel ideas or you just aren't a PhD. So a lot of bad ideas end up getting floated into a lot of areas; education is not immune, and may be more susceptible than others for a number of reasons.

Others rose to my defense, but let me say it myself: Yes, I'm aware that there are many other problems going on in the public education system besides the outright Marxist brainwashing that I illustrated in The George Orwell Daycare Center and Balkanization. I've never denied that, but I've never emphasized it either.

It has been my contention, however, that the root of the decline in America's education establishment does, in fact, go back to the influence of the thoughts that propagated from the Frankfurt School and its disciples. As Unix-Jedi noted one comment further down:

Literacy rates *dropped* after "professional education" took hold. Literacy rates were steady from colonial times up to the 1940s, when they started to drop.
Gee, what changed there?

We had a system that successfully taught literacy and numeracy, and starting sometime in the 1940's our public school system went off the rails. In the 1960's the booster rockets kicked in.

Why?

What influence caused the initial changes that have brought us to where we are today, and why do those in this system fight so hard to prevent fixing the obvious problems?

Continuing my habit of letting other people say things if they can do it better than I, here's Unix-Jedi again:

The educational system as it's currently constituted, with the CLAIMED GOALS IT HAS, has utterly failed. Which means that 1) The stated goals aren't the real goals or 2) it's incapable of meeting the goals. (Conceivably, 3) the goals are unreachable, despite the fact historically they have been met.)

I rule out #3. I'm utterly convinced that at this point #2 is the case, but I'm also convinced that we've reached #2 through decades of effort by a small and ever-changing group of people that embodied #1.

Reader Jason chimed in with this criticism:

I generally like what you have to say, Kevin. But "Gramsci's plan" sounds like fear mongering (almost like the "blood in the streets" fallacies that gun banners used against ccw). I wholeheartedly agree that CP is bad and we should fight against it, but let's not blame all of education's problems on it.

Fair point. It was not my intention to lay all the blame at Gramsci's - one man's - feet, though I acknowledge I can be read that way. I will say again, however, that I do lay the blame for the overwhelming majority of the destruction of America's public education system to the founders of the Frankfurt School and "Critical Theory." It began in the universities, and it has trickled down through them, the Schools of Education, and the state school boards until we have what we've got today.

I do not believe that the people involved think that what they're doing is the deliberate destruction of the public education system, leaving our children illiterate and innumerate. I think the overwhelming majority of them - like Markadelphia, and like Dr. Augustine Romero - believe that what they're doing is truly what's best for the kids in their care.

They're simply unable to recognize that they're wrong. By now, they're the products of their own systems, and in higher academia (as several others have noted) its a self-reinforcing system, continually producing more of the same.

These people end up in charge of the school systems and the systems in charge of the school systems. Teachers who actually teach are, as John Taylor Gatto illustrated, forced out of the system or neutered. Those who contribute to mediocrity (or worse) can't be forced out with high explosives. The rest, as one teacher and fellow blogger put it a while back, are just trying to "save the ones they can."

Markadelphia complains,

These EDU posts, Kevin, serve no purpose nor present any sort of concrete solution whatsoever.

The point of the Education pieces I write is to illustrate that the system is broken beyond repair. It CAN'T. BE. FIXED. It's too entrenched, it's occupied by people who cannot be changed and can't be fired. It's unionized. It's even federally-funded now, and there's an entire Cabinet-level department that since 1980 has spent over $995 billion supposedly to better educate our kids.

Well? Why aren't we getting what we pay for? Are the stated goals the real goals?

I don't think so. Do I think it's all one grand Gramscian conspiracy to destroy Western Civilization? I think at least in part it began that way, but it's taken on a life of its own. Let me rework a classic Demotivator:


How else do you explain, for example, New York's "Rubber Rooms"?

(John Stossel has more on the topic.)

The "concrete solution?" Take off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

And start over from scratch with schools paid for directly by parents. Hell, there's lots of empty commercial office space available, let's take up Tom McClintock's idea! Disconnect school funding from property values, and make education spending tax-deductible. Close the Department of Education and shut down State involvement in education with the exception (grudgingly) of standards testing.

But for $Diety's sake, don't send your kids to public schools if you can help it. They deserve better.

Why I Keep Marxadelphia Around

As I said in Why I Do This,

He's too perfect an example of the Left in this country not to let him illuminate their failings.

This week he provided yet another example.

In the comments to my post Critical Pedagogy, Marxadelphia responded:

It's a good thing I have the day off today. What a load of lying bullshit. And further proof of ridiculous paranoia. As usual, you start with your belief and then succumb to confirmation bias.

--

These EDU posts, Kevin, serve no purpose nor present any sort of concrete solution whatsoever. They don't even accurately address the actual problems. In essence, they sum up an emotional reaction--one that typifies the right these days--comprised solely of hate, anger and fear combined with a complete lack of factual foundation.

OK, two assertions are made here: One, the post linked is "a load of lying bullshit" and my Education posts "don't even accurately address the actual problems."

Let's investigate those claims, shall we?

The linked piece states:

The Critical Pedagogy Movement is coming to a school near you and it means to change the world.
One child at a time.
Most people have never heard the term, ‘Critical Pedagogy’. That is intentional.
Anyone not involved in the educational community would have little reason to be aware of this leftist theory of education. If it were merely a theory however, there would be little reason for concern.
The primary assumption of critical pedagogy is that disparities between individual and social group outcomes in life are due to entrenched societal oppression. So, if anyone or any group has ‘more’ than another it is because they are either oppressing others or benefiting from the ‘oppression of the masses’.
Thus, all whites benefit from an unjust social system and, as a result are inherently guilty of racism.
Advocates implicitly deny any definition of the ‘pursuit of happiness’, which does not result in equality of outcome. That necessarily limits American’s liberty and their pursuit of happiness to the politically correct calculus of Critical Pedagogy theory.
Pedagogy is defined as ‘the art or profession of teaching’. That definition is sometimes shortened by advocates into ‘the teaching’. The theory of critical pedagogy was first fully developed and then popularized in 1968 by the Brazilian educator and influential theorist Paulo Freire. His seminal work, the Pedagogy [The Teaching] of the Oppressed, was highly influential within the US leftist academic community and in 1969 Freire was offered a visiting professorship at Harvard University.
His subsequent work was highly influential with the Bill Ayers of the world. One might think of Paulo Freire as the Saul Alinsky of the US leftist educational community. Critical Pedagogy is the educational arm of the ‘social justice movement’, which is the political arm of “liberation theology”, all of which are aspects of ‘Cultural Marxism’.

OK, there's a pretty firm statement with assertions that a particular person is the focal point in pushing the "Critical Pedagogy" curriculum. A quick Google search on "Critical Pedagogy" brought up a link to the University of Colorado, Denver School of Education and professor Martin Ryder. Among the many links there, directly below one to The Frankfurt School, are several dedicated specifically to Paulo Friere. Nineteen, specifically, more than for any other topic covered on that initial page.

It would appear that the author is on to something, no?

Now, as to the assertion by that author that "The Critical Pedagogy Movement is coming to a school near you and it means to change the world," let's look at a piece I wrote in 2008, Balkanization. That piece was about a particular program that is apparently still running in the Tucson Unified School District schools called "Raza Studies." (The link to the original newspaper stories are broken, so you'll have to take my excerpts at face value.) The story indicates that the program, while "under fire" could grow, and reach younger children.

What is it? It's described as an "ethnic studies" program. "La Raza" in Spanish translates to "The Race" in English.

Raza Studies serves about 500 high school students, who take a four-course block of history, social justice and two Chicano literature classes.

--

It's the end of the school year and Raza Studies students at Tucson High Magnet School are presenting research findings to their principal.

Their PowerPoint presentation is critical of policies toward English learners; some concerns hinge on whether students are funneled to vocational tracks, and some focus on inferior equipment.

Then comes an exploration of classroom décor, with photos of classroom items students consider culturally insensitive.

First up is a baseball poster, which they say should be soccer or rugby to validate other cultures. Next up flashes the Pledge of Allegiance and a patriotic poster featuring the Statue of Liberty, the American flag and an eagle.

"Most of the kids are from a different country, and this is showing them that this is the country that's the greatest and yours doesn't matter," a student maintains.

So they're not teaching math, English, physics, chemistry, anatomy, etc., they're teaching the students to see the world through the lens of oppression, are they not?

Augustine Romero took over as head of ethnic studies two years ago, after running Raza Studies for four years. In his view, the system already divides students by ethnicity.

When he was a senior at Tucson High, his father asked school counselors to make military recruiters stop calling. His counselor couldn't believe Romero planned to go to college.

He proved the counselor wrong, and the 41-year-old just finished his doctorate. "Yes, there are examples of people who have made it, but we've made it by having to work harder than most people because we've had to endure the inequities of the system," he says.

As I said back then, anybody who gets a Ph.D has to work harder than most people, but it would appear that Mr. Romero has an ethnic chip on his shoulder. But here's the kicker:

Romero summons the work of Brazilian educationalist Paulo Freire to explain the premise of the program, hauling out a dog-eared and extensively highlighted copy of "Pedagogy of the Oppressed." He points to a passage: "This, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well."

(My emphasis.) I wonder where Dr. Romero got his Ph.D? Was it one of those schools of Education referred to in Critical Pedagogy, or another? And does it matter?

Here's what a participant in the program, one of the teachers, had to say:

John Ward taught in the department in the 2002-03 school year. Of Latino heritage despite his Anglo-sounding name, Ward was all for more thoroughly integrating the contributions of Mexican-Americans into U.S. history. But once he started teaching, he became concerned about the program's focus on victimization.

"They really wanted to identify the victimizer, which was the dominant group — in this case white America — and they wanted students to have a revolution against upper-class white America," says Ward, who now works as a state auditor.

"They had a clear message that political departments in the U.S. are arms of the dominant culture designed to keep minorities in the ghetto and to keep them downtrodden. They're teaching on the taxpayers' dime that police officers and teachers are trying to keep them down. What a perverse message to teach these kids."

Such messages, he says, won't be found in the program's textbooks, such as "Occupied America."

"The department doesn't look bad on paper. It's what happens verbally that moves the debate from benign to pernicious," Ward says.

The tone worried him: "The students had become very angry by the end of the year. I saw a marked change in them."

Of course this concern was played down by Romero:

Romero says anger is essential for transformation, but insists teachers work to transform that anger into something positive. "For me, there's a real fine line between anger and awareness," he says.

He chalks up the dispute with Ward to politics, saying Ward didn't fit in because he was a conservative while he and the teachers in the department are liberal.

Gee, ya THINK?

Now here's a really interesting part. In a second piece by John Ward himself, we're told:

During the 2002-2003 school year, I taught a U.S. history course with a Mexican-American perspective. The course was part of the Raza/Chicano studies department.

Within one week of the course beginning, I was told that I was a "teacher of record," meaning that I was expected only to assign grades. The Raza studies department staff would teach the class.

I was assigned to be a "teacher of record" because some members of the Raza studies staff lacked teaching certificates. It was a convenient way of circumventing the rules.

I stated that I expected to do more than assign grades. I expected to be involved in teaching the class. The department was less than enthusiastic but agreed.

Immediately it was clear that the class was not a U.S. history course, which the state of Arizona requires for graduation. The class was similar to a sociology course one expects to see at a university.

Where history was missing from the course, it was filled by controversial and biased curriculum.

The basic theme of the curriculum was that Mexican-Americans were and continue to be victims of a racist American society driven by the interests of middle and upper-class whites.

In this narrative, whites are able to maintain their influence only if minorities are held down. Thus, social, political and economic events in America must be understood through this lens.

This biased and sole paradigm justified teaching that our community police officers are an extension of the white power structure and that they are the strongmen used "to keep minorities in their ghettos."

It justified telling the class that there are fewer Mexican-Americans in Tucson Magnet High School's advanced placement courses because their "white teachers" do not believe they are capable and do not want them to get ahead.

Yes, that's right, The MAN wants to keep them DOWN!

Now, let me reiterate my point from Critical Pedagogy: Future teachers are being taught this stuff. They are coming to SCHOOLS NEAR YOU, and bringing it with them. They are INFLICTING IT ON STUDENTS in your school systems - not all schools, and not all students, but it is being spread. It is the outgrowth of the Frankfurt School, and it is part and parcel of Gramsci's plan to destroy Western culture from the inside. And it's working.

So to Marxadelphia's assertion that Critical Pedagogy was "lying bullshit" and "paranoia," I say, "Fuck you and the horse you rode in on."

I suggest, if you wish to read further, that you read the entire Balkanization post, The George Orwell Daycare Center (bring lunch, it's long), and also I Say We Take Off and Nuke the Site from Orbit . . .

Now there's a "concrete solution"!

High Unemployment? With Our Population?

I ran across an interesting article in the online trade magazine Automation.com, Educational System Limiting United States Manufacturing. Some excerpts:

Manufacturing automation has been doing the heavy lifting to improve productivity in the United States while the country’s educational systems continue to have disturbingly low productivity. After talking with management of many manufacturing companies, reviewing surveys and statistics, it is obvious to me that this situation is dramatically out of control.

The educational system in the United States is just not getting the job done. And this is a major constraint on finding people suitable for basic manufacturing jobs let alone people to work with the technology required for manufacturing to be competitive on world markets. Further, this is a severe limitation hampering United States companies from designing leadership automation systems and creating machines. Recent information illustrates that the U.S. education system cannot turn money alone into positive results - with billions of dollars pumped into education over 40 years. The "No Child Left Behind" initiatives are a decade old. An investment of over $80 billion in federal stimulus since 2009 that was intended to lift student performance quickly has resulted in no significant gain.

--

The Manufacturing Institute report, "Boiling point - The skills gap in U.S. manufacturing," says that seventy-four percent of respondents indicated workforce shortages or skills deficiencies are having a significant impact on manufacturers' ability to expand operations or improve productivity. These jobs require the most training, and are traditionally among the hardest manufacturing jobs to fill with existing talent. Survey respondents punctuated the most serious skills deficiencies with existing employees.

• Inadequate problem-solving skills - 52%
• Lack of basic technical training (degree, industry certification or vocational training) - 43%
• Inadequate basic employability skills (attendance timeliness, work ethic, etc.) - 40%
• Inadequate technology/computer skills - 36%
• Inadequate math skills - 30%
• Inadequate reading/writing/communicating skills - 29%

Frankly, I'm surprised that the inadequate math and reading/writing/communication skills are as low down the totem pole as they are. I guess automation has gone a long way towards eliminating these skills as requirements for the workplace.

Drew Greenblatt, President & Owner, Marlin Steel, USA (www.marlinwire.com):

"It is dispiriting what's going on with our system…we have high school graduates that don't know how to read a tape measure, can't do basic math, don't know how to do simple geometry," said Greenblatt. "They don't know what a radius is, what a diameter is…but they have a high school degree. It is unacceptable, we should be furious because we are paying big bucks and not getting the quality."

"I am on the executive board of the National Association of Manufacturers and they are starting a national program called Skills Certification," said Greenblatt. "It is a national certification and if you pass the test it is a portable certificate that shows you have the basic competence to work in a factory. I think that will improve the stock of our employees...right now the diploma from a high school is not worth the paper it's printed on."

I am reminded of the valedictorian's graduation speech I fisked in 2010, wherein she proclaimed that a college degree, not a high-school diploma was the "... paper document that certifies that I am capable of work."

Bearing this in mind, it means that the total output of primary and secondary education in this country is a population unsuited for working in the industrialized world.

I think that may have been the only thing she got right in her whole speech.

The problems with the United States educational system is analogous to a dying business with investors that think throwing money at the problems will fix it. Unfortunately government money seems to mindlessly flow into education programs. I believe there are fundamental structural, process, and management problems with the educational system that need to be sorted out. It is unclear how this can happen with the layers of bureaucracy.

In short, it can't. The layers of bureaucracy aren't interested in fixing the problem.

But they are interested in keeping the money flowing.

It is a sad commentary on the education system when the National Association of Manufacturers resorts to a Skills Certification System since the educational system is ineffective. All we need now is for some educators to get involved and ruin this.

In 1972, the United Negro College Fund coined the phrase, "A mind is a terrible thing to waste." This in a nutshell describes the problem for the majority of U.S. citizens due to the ineffective educational system.

Oh, it's effective. Just not at producing educated people. That's not its job.

Reengineering the U.S. educational system may be the most important challenge for manufacturing and the country. Government and bureaucracy continue to be an obstacle to meaningful change. There seems to be too many sacred cows. I was on a school board a number of years ago that was wresting with teacher quality. With my industry background, I suggested using statistical quality control analysis based on student outcomes. When I explained the concept of to them, I became a persona non grata (unwelcome person)!

Somehow we have to fix this problem or the United States will continue to fall behind the rest of the world.

Nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

UPDATE:  At PJ Media, Has a Century of Progressive Education Turned Us Into Obedient Sheep? with reference to John Taylor Gatto and Ayn Rand's The Comprachicos.

Slacking

I've not been blogging all that much recently, and what I have been doing is "all linky, no thinky" stuff.  There has been, obviously, a lot to write about, but for various reasons I won't go into here, I haven't felt the urge necessary to sit, think, and write.

Sorry about that.  I know that a lot of people come by here looking for free ice cream, and I haven't been delivering.

That doesn't mean, however, that I've not been paying attention. I currently have a list of no less than 31 links to stuff under the heading of "topics for blog posts," and probably half of those are for one single überpost.

Part of me doesn't have the urge, but some other part does.

I've got some errands to run today, and some other things to take care of, but I thought I'd throw up a couple of things just to keep your attention.  First up, the Quote of the Day from 9th Circuit Court of Appeals Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, commenting on the book Schools for Misrule: Legal Academia and an Overlawyered America by Walter Olson:

Every year I hire as law clerks some of the best and brightest law students in the country, and spend a year wringing out of them all the wrong-headed ideas their law professors taught them. Now I know why.

My stack of books hasn't gotten significantly shorter (I keep adding to it), but this one may need to go on it.  If you're interested, here's a podcast with the author of the book.

Second,  the subject of our failed education system comes up again in a piece at Shrinkwrapped, Oh No, Are Kidz Can't Lurn. I've covered this topic before (most recently here) - colleges forced to mandate "remedial" classes for incoming freshmen who are completely unprepared for the academic demands of a university. It used to be that a high school diploma meant you were ready to enter the workforce. Now all it means is that you attended enough classes to not be kicked out for truancy. (Do they still do that? Kick out students for truancy?)

The City University of New York has found that three-quarters of incoming freshmen are unprepared. That's 75% of the successful graduates of primary and secondary school systems.  At least in Arizona it's only a third.

I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit.  Then put Dr. Sugata Mitra in charge of rebuilding.

And finally, a word about "unintended consequences."  Hybrid cars that require batteries made from materials mined in remote locations without environmental restriction; fluorescent lightbulbs that contain toxic mercury, don't last anywhere near as long as advertised, and require hazmat disposal; "low-flow" toilets that use only one gallon per flush, but have to be flushed three or four times if you want the bowl clean for the next use.  Well, the New York Times has discovered the concept now, and in an opinion piece by John Tierney uses "the rebound effect" to lobby for higher taxes rather than "energy efficiency"  mandates.

I think he must be a fan of Cass Sunstein and his "Nudge" theory of behavior modification through taxation. Regardless, it was an interesting thing to see in the NYT, the admission:

"Efficiency mandates have become feel-good mantras that politicians invoke," Mr. (Sam) Kazman (of the Competitive Enterprise Institute) said. "The results of these mandates have ranged from costly fiascos, such as once-dependable top-loading washers that no longer wash, to higher fatalities in cars downsized by fuel-efficiency rules. If the technologies were so good, they wouldn't need to be imposed on us by law."

No matter what laws are enacted, people are going to find ways to use energy more efficiently — that's the story of civilization. But don't count on them using less energy, no matter how dirty their clothes get.

Not quite another QotD, but close.

Quote of the Day - John Taylor Gatto (again)

Found via Borepatch:


Wait.

On second thought, instead of excerpting a snippet, I'm going to repost the whole thing for archival purposes.  It's that damned important.

The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher - By John Taylor Gatto, New York State Teacher of the Year, 1991

Call me Mr. Gatto, please. Twenty-six years ago, having nothing better to do at the time, I tried my hand at schoolteaching. The license I hold certifies that I am an instructor of English language and English literature, but that isn't what I do at all. I don't teach English, I teach school -- and I win awards doing it.

Teaching means different things in different places, but seven lessons are universally taught from Harlem to Hollywood Hills. They constitute a national curriculum you pay for in more ways than you can imagine, so you might as well know what it is. You are at liberty, of course, to regard these lessons any way you like, but believe me when I say I intend no irony in this presentation. These are the things I teach, these are the things you pay me to teach. Make of them what you will.

1. CONFUSION

A lady named Kathy wrote this to me from Dubois, Indiana the other day:

"What big ideas are important to little kids? Well, the biggest idea I think they need is that what they are learning isn't idiosyncratic -- that there is some system to it all and it's not just raining down on them as they helplessly absorb. That's the task, to understand, to make coherent."

Kathy has it wrong. The first lesson I teach is confusion. Everything I teach is out of context. I teach the un-relating of everything. I teach disconnections. I teach too much: the orbiting of planets, the law of large numbers, slavery, adjectives, architectural drawing, dance, gymnasium, choral singing, assemblies, surprise guests, fire drills, computer languages, parents' nights, staff-development days, pull-out programs, guidance with strangers my students may never see again, standardized tests, age-segregation unlike anything seen in the outside world....What do any of these things have to do with each other?

Even in the best schools a close examination of curriculum and its sequences turns up a lack of coherence, full of internal contradictions. Fortunately the children have no words to define the panic and anger they feel at constant violations of natural order and sequence fobbed off on them as quality in education. The logic of the school-mind is that it is better to leave school with a tool kit of superficial jargon derived from economics, sociology, natural science and so on than to leave with one genuine enthusiasm. But quality in education entails learning about something in depth. Confusion is thrust upon kids by too many strange adults, each working alone with only the thinnest relationship with each other, pretending for the most part, to an expertise they do not possess.

Meaning, not disconnected facts, is what sane human beings seek, and education is a set of codes for processing raw facts into meaning. Behind the patchwork quilt of school sequences and the school obsession with facts and theories, the age-old human search lies well concealed. This is harder to see in elementary school where the hierarchy of school experience seems to make better sense because the good-natured simple relationship of "let's do this" and "let's do that" is just assumed to mean something and the clientele has not yet consciously discerned how little substance is behind the play and pretense.

Think of the great natural sequences like learning to walk and learning to talk; following the progression of light from sunrise to sunset; witnessing the ancient procedures of a farmer, a smithy, or a shoemaker; watching your mother prepare a Thanksgiving feast -- all of the parts are in perfect harmony with each other, each action justifies itself and illuminates the past and the future. School sequences aren't like that, not inside a single class and not among the total menu of daily classes. School sequences are crazy. There is no particular reason for any of them, nothing that bears close scrutiny. Few teachers would dare to teach the tools whereby dogmas of a school or a teacher could be criticized since everything must be accepted. School subjects are learned, if they can be learned, like children learn the catechism or memorize the Thirty-nine Articles of Anglicanism.

I teach the un-relating of everything, an infinite fragmentation the opposite of cohesion; what I do is more related to television programming than to making a scheme of order. In a world where home is only a ghost, because both parents work, or because too many moves or too many job changes or too much ambition, or because something else has left everybody too confused to maintain a family relation, I teach you how to accept confusion as your destiny. That's the first lesson I teach.

2. CLASS POSITION

The second lesson I teach is class position. I teach that students must stay in the class where they belong. I don't know who decides my kids belong there but that's not my business. The children are numbered so that if any get away they can be returned to the right class. Over the years the variety of ways children are numbered by schools has increased dramatically, until it is hard to see the human beings plainly under the weight of numbers they carry. Numbering children is a big and very profitable undertaking, though what the strategy is designed to accomplish is elusive. I don't even know why parents would, without a fight, allow it to be done to their kids.

In any case, again, that's not my business. My job is to make them like it, being locked in together with children who bear numbers like their own. Or at the least to endure it like good sports. If I do my job well, the kids can't even imagine themselves somewhere else, because I've shown them how to envy and fear the better classes and how to have contempt for the dumb classes. Under this efficient discipline the class mostly polices itself into good marching order. That's the real lesson of any rigged competition like school. You come to know your place.

In spite of the overall class blueprint, which assumes that ninety-nine percent of the kids are in their class to stay, I nevertheless make a public effort to exhort children to higher levels of test success, hinting at eventual transfer from the lower class as a reward. I frequently insinuate that the day will come when an employer will hire them on the basis of test scores and grades, even though my own experience is that employers are rightly indifferent to such things. I never lie outright, but I've come to see that truth and schoolteaching are, at bottom, incompatible just as Socrates said they were thousands of years ago. The lesson of numbered classes is that everyone has a proper place in the pyramid and that there is no way out of your class except by number magic. Failing that, you must stay where you are put.

3. INDIFFERENCE

The third lesson I teach kids is indifference. I teach children not to care about anything too much, even though they want to make it appear that they do. How I do this is very subtle. I do it by demanding that they become totally involved in my lessons, jumping up and down in their seats with anticipation, competing vigorously with each other for my favor. It's heartwarming when they do that; it impresses everyone, even me. When I'm at my best I plan lessons very carefully in order to produce this show of enthusiasm. But when the bell rings I insist that they stop whatever it is that we've been working on and proceed quickly to the next work station. They must turn on and off like a light switch. Nothing important is ever finished in my class, nor in any other class I know of. Students never have a complete experience except on the installment plan.

Indeed, the lesson of the bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about anything? Years of bells will condition all but the strongest to a world that can no longer offer important work to do. Bells are the secret logic of schooltime; their logic is inexorable. Bells destroy the past and future, converting every interval into a sameness, as the abstraction of a map renders every living mountain and river the same, even though they are not. Bells inoculate each undertaking with indifference.

4. EMOTIONAL DEPENDENCY

The fourth lesson I teach is emotional dependency. By stars and red checks, smiles and frowns, prizes, honors and disgraces I teach kids to surrender their will to the predestined chain of command. Rights may be granted or withheld by any authority without appeal, because rights do not exist inside a school -- not even the right of free speech, as the Supreme Court has ruled -- unless school authorities say they do. As a schoolteacher, I intervene in many personal decisions, issuing a pass for those I deem legitimate, or initiating a disciplinary confrontation for behavior that threatens my control. Individuality is constantly trying to assert itself among children and teenagers, so my judgments come thick and fast. Individuality is a contradiction of class theory, a curse to all systems of classification.

Here are some common ways it shows up: children sneak away for a private moment in the toilet on the pretext of moving their bowels, or they steal a private instant in the hallway on the grounds they need water. I know they don't, but I allow them to deceive me because this conditions them to depend on my favors. Sometimes free will appears right in front of me in children angry, depressed or happy about things outside my ken; rights in such matters cannot be recognized by schoolteachers, only privileges that can be withdrawn, hostages to good behavior.

5. INTELLECTUAL DEPENDENCY

The fifth lesson I teach is intellectual dependency. Good people wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. It is the most important lesson, that we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives. The expert makes all the important choices; only I, the teacher, can determine what you must study, or rather, only the people who pay me can make those decisions which I then enforce. If I'm told that evolution is a fact instead of a theory, I transmit that as ordered, punishing deviants who resist what I have been told to tell them to think. This power to control what children will think lets me separate successful students from failures very easily.

Successful children do the thinking I appoint them with a minimum of resistance and a decent show of enthusiasm. Of the millions of things of value to study, I decide what few we have time for, or actually it is decided by my faceless employers. The choices are theirs, why should I argue? Curiosity has no important place in my work, only conformity.

Bad kids fight this, of course, even though they lack the concepts to know what they are fighting, struggling to make decisions for themselves about what they will learn and when they will learn it. How can we allow that and survive as schoolteachers? Fortunately there are procedures to break the will of those who resist; it is more difficult, naturally, if the kid has respectable parents who come to his aid, but that happens less and less in spite of the bad reputation of schools. No middle-class parents I have ever met actually believe that their kid's school is one of the bad ones. Not one single parent in twenty-six years of teaching. That's amazing and probably the best testimony to what happens to families when mother and father have been well-schooled themselves, learning the seven lessons.

Good people wait for an expert to tell them what to do. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that our entire economy depends upon this lesson being learned. Think of what would fall apart if kids weren't trained to be dependent: the social-service businesses could hardly survive; they would vanish, I think, into the recent historical limbo out of which they arose. Counselors and therapists would look on in horror as the supply of psychic invalids vanished. Commercial entertainment of all sorts, including television, would wither as people learned again how to make their own fun. Restaurants, prepared-food and a whole host of other assorted food services would be drastically down-sized if people returned to making their own meals rather than depending on strangers to plant, pick, chop, and cook for them. Much of modern law, medicine, and engineering would go too, the clothing business and schoolteaching as well, unless a guaranteed supply of helpless people continued to pour out of our schools each year.

Don't be too quick to vote for radical school reform if you want to continue getting a paycheck. We've built a way of life that depends on people doing what they are told because they don't know how to tell themselves what to do. It's one of the biggest lessons I teach.

6. PROVISIONAL SELF-ESTEEM

The sixth lesson I teach is provisional self-esteem. If you've ever tried to wrestle a kid into line whose parents have convinced him to believe they'll love him in spite of anything, you know how impossible it is to make self-confident spirits conform. Our world wouldn't survive a flood of confident people very long, so I teach that your self-respect should depend on expert opinion. My kids are constantly evaluated and judged.

A monthly report, impressive in its provision, is sent into students' homes to signal approval or to mark exactly, down to a single percentage point, how dissatisfied with their children parents should be. The ecology of "good" schooling depends upon perpetuating dissatisfaction just as much as the commercial economy depends on the same fertilizer. Although some people might be surprised how little time or reflection goes into making up these mathematical records, the cumulative weight of the objective-seeming documents establishes a profile that compels children to arrive at certain decisions about themselves and their futures based on the casual judgment of strangers. Self-evaluation, the staple of every major philosophical system that ever appeared on the planet, is never considered a factor. The lesson of report cards, grades, and tests is that children should not trust themselves or their parents but should instead rely on the evaluation of certified officials. People need to be told what they are worth.

7. ONE CAN'T HIDE

The seventh lesson I teach is that one can't hide. I teach children they are always watched, that each is under constant surveillance by myself and my colleagues. There are no private spaces for children, there is no private time. Class change lasts three hundred seconds to keep promiscuous fraternization at low levels. Students are encouraged to tattle on each other or even to tattle on their own parents. Of course, I encourage parents to file their own child's waywardness too. A family trained to snitch on itself isn't likely to conceal any dangerous secrets.

I assign a type of extended schooling called "homework," so that the effect of surveillance, if not that surveillance itself, travels into private households, where students might otherwise use free time to learn something unauthorized from a father or mother, by exploration, or by apprenticing to some wise person in the neighborhood. Disloyalty to the idea of schooling is a Devil always ready to find work for idle hands.

The meaning of constant surveillance and denial of privacy is that no one can be trusted, that privacy is not legitimate. Surveillance is an ancient imperative, espoused by certain influential thinkers, a central prescription set down in The Republic, in The City of God, in the Institutes of the Christian Religion, in New Atlantis, in Leviathan, and in a host of other places. All these childless men who wrote these books discovered the same thing: children must be closely watched if you want to keep a society under tight central control. Children will follow a private drummer if you can't get them into a uniformed marching band.

II

It is the great triumph of compulsory government monopoly mass-schooling that among even the best of my fellow teachers, and among the best of my students' parents, only a small number can imagine a different way to do things. "The kids have to know how to read and write, don't they?" "They have to know how to add and subtract, don't they?" "They have to learn to follow orders if they ever expect to keep a job."

Only a few lifetimes ago things were very different in the United States. Originality and variety were common currency; our freedom from regimentation made us the miracle of the world; social-class boundaries were relatively easy to cross; our citizenry was marvelously confident, inventive, and able to do much for themselves independently, and to think for themselves. We were something special, we Americans, all by ourselves, without government sticking its nose into our lives, without institutions and social agencies telling us how to think and feel. We were something special, as individuals, as Americans.

But we've had a society essentially under central control in the United States since just before the Civil War, and such a society requires compulsory schooling, government monopoly schooling, to maintain itself. Before this development schooling wasn't very important anywhere. We had it, but not too much of it, and only as much as an individual wanted. People learned to read, write, and do arithmetic just fine anyway; there are some studies that suggest literacy at the time of the American Revolution, at least for non-slaves on the Eastern seaboard, was close to total. Thomas Paine's Common Sense sold 600,000 copies to a population of 3,000,000, twenty percent of whom were slaves, and fifty percent indentured servants.

Were the colonists geniuses? No, the truth is that reading, writing, and arithmetic only take about one hundred hours to transmit as long as the audience is eager and willing to learn. The trick is to wait until someone asks and then move fast while the mood is on. Millions of people teach themselves these things, it really isn't very hard. Pick up a fifth-grade math or rhetoric textbook from 1850 and you'll see that the texts were pitched then on what would today be considered college level. The continuing cry for "basic skills" practice is a smoke screen behind which schools preempt the time of children for twelve years and teach them the seven lessons I've just described to you.

The society that has become increasingly under central control since just before the Civil War shows itself in the lives we lead, the clothes we wear, the food we eat, and the green highway signs we drive by from coast to coast, all of which are the products of this control. So, too, I think, are the epidemics of drugs, suicide, divorce, violence, cruelty, and the hardening of class into caste in the United States products of the dehumanization of our lives, the lessening of individual, family, and community importance, a diminishment that proceeds from central control. The character of large compulsory institutions is inevitable; they want more and more until there isn't any more to give. School takes our children away from any possibility of an active role in community life -- in fact it destroys communities by relegating the training of children to the hands of certified experts -- and by doing so it ensures our children cannot grow up fully human. Aristotle taught that without a fully active role in community life one could not hope to become a healthy human being. Surely he was right. Look around you the next time you are near a school or an old people's reservation if you wish a demonstration.

School as it was built is an essential support system for a vision of social engineering that condemns most people to be subordinate stones in a pyramid that narrows as it ascends to a terminal of control. School is an artifice which makes such a pyramidical social order seem inevitable, although such a premise is a fundamental betrayal of the American Revolution. From colonial days through the period of the Republic we had no schools to speak of -- read Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography for an example of a man who had no time to waste in school -- and yet the promise of Democracy was beginning to be realized. We turned our backs on this promise by bringing to life the ancient pharaonic dream of Egypt: compulsory subordination for all. That was the secret Plato reluctantly transmitted in The Republic when Glaucon and Adeimantus exhorted from Socrates the plan for total state control of human life, a plan necessary to maintain a society where some people take more than their share. "I will show you," says Socrates, "how to bring about such a feverish city, but you will not like what I am going to say." And so the blueprint of the seven-lesson school was first sketched.

The current debate about whether we should have a national curriculum is phony. We already have a national curriculum locked up in the seven lessons I have just outlined. Such a curriculum produces physical, moral, and intellectual paralysis, and no curriculum of content will be sufficient to reverse its hideous effects. What is currently under discussion in our national school hysteria about failing academic performance misses the point. Schools teach exactly what they are intended to teach and they do it well: how to be a good Egyptian and remain in your place in the pyramid.

III

None of this is inevitable. None of it is impossible to overthrow. We do have choices in how we bring up young people; there is no one right way. If we broke through the power of the pyramidical illusion we would see that. There is no life-and-death international competition threatening our national existence, difficult as that idea is even to think about, let alone believe, in the face of a continual media barrage of myth to the contrary. In every important material respect our nation is self-sufficient, including in energy. I realize that idea runs counter to the most fashionable thinking of political economists, but the "profound transformation" of our economy these people talk about is neither inevitable nor irreversible. Global economics does not speak to the public need for meaningful work, affordable housing, fulfilling education, adequate medical care, a clean environment, honest and accountable government, social and cultural renewal, or simple justice. All global ambitions are based on a definition of productivity and the good life so alienated from common human reality I am convinced it is wrong and that most people would agree with me if they could perceive an alternative. We might be able to see that if we regained a hold on a philosophy that locates meaning where meaning is genuinely to be found -- in families, in friends, in the passage of seasons, in nature, in simple ceremonies and rituals, in curiosity, generosity, compassion, and service to others, in a decent independence and privacy, in all the free and inexpensive things out of which real families, real friends and real communities are built -- then we would be so self-sufficient we would not even need the material "sufficiency" which our global "experts" are so insistent we be concerned about.

How did these awful places, these "schools", come about? Well, casual schooling has always been with us in a variety of forms, a mildly useful adjunct to growing up. But "modern schooling" as we know it is a by-product of the two "Red Scares" of 1848 and 1919, when powerful interests feared a revolution among our own industrial poor. Partly, too, total schooling came about because old-line American families were appauled by the native cultures of Celtic, Slavic, and Latin immigrants of the 1840s and felt repugnance towards the Catholic religion they brought with them. Certainly a third contributing factor in creating a jail for children called school must have been the consternation with which these same "Americans" regarded the movement of African-Americans through the society in the wake of the Civil War.

Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class position, indifference, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance -- all of these things are prime training for permanent underclasses, people deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And over time this training has shaken loose from its own original logic: to regulate the poor. For since the 1920s the growth of the school bureaucracy, and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling exactly as it is, has enlarged this institution's original grasp to the point that it now seizes the sons and daughters of the middle classes as well.

Is it any wonder Socrates was outraged at the accusation that he took money to teach? Even then, philosophers saw clearly the inevitable direction the professionalization of teaching would take, preempting the teaching function, which belongs to everyone in a healthy community.

With lessons like the ones I teach day after day it should be little wonder we have a real national crisis, the nature of which is very different from that proclaimed by the national media. Young people are indifferent to the adult world and to the future, indifferent to almost everything except the diversion of toys and violence. Rich or poor, schoolchildren who face the twenty-first century cannot concentrate on anything for very long; they have a poor sense of time past and time to come. They are mistrustful of intimacy like the children of divorce they really are (for we have divorced them from significant parental attention); they hate solitude, are cruel, materialistic, dependent, passive, violent, timid in the face of the unexpected, addicted to distraction.

All the peripheral tendencies of childhood are nourished and magnified to a grotesque extent by schooling, which, through its hidden curriculum, prevents effective personality development. Indeed, without exploiting the fearfulness, selfishness, and inexperience of children, our schools could not survive at all, nor could I as a certified schoolteacher. No common school that actually dared to teach the use of critical thinking tools -- like the dialectic, the heuristic, or other devices that free minds should employ -- would last very long before being torn to pieces. School has become the replacement for church in our secular society, and like church it requires that its teachings must be taken on faith.

It is time that we squarely face the fact that institutional schoolteaching is destructive to children. Nobody survives the seven-lesson curriculum completely unscathed, not even the instructors. The method is deeply and profoundly anti-educational. No tinkering will fix it. In one of the great ironies of human affairs, the massive rethinking the schools require would cost so much less than we are spending now that powerful interests cannot afford to let it happen. You must understand that first and foremost the business I am in is a jobs project and an agency for letting contracts. We cannot afford to save money by reducing the scope of our operation or by diversifying the product we offer, even to help children grow up right. That is the iron law of institutional schooling -- it is a business, subject neither to normal accounting procedures nor to the rational scalpel of competition.

Some form of free-market system in public schooling is the likeliest place to look for answers, a free market where family schools and small entrepreneurial schools and religious schools and crafts schools and farm schools exist in profusion to compete with government education. I'm trying to describe a free market in schooling just exactly like the one the country had until the Civil War, one in which students volunteer for the kind of education that suits them, even if that means self-education; it didn't hurt Benjamin Franklin that I can see. These options exist now in miniature, wonderful survivals of a strong and vigorous past, but they are available only to the resourceful, the courageous, the lucky, or the rich. The near impossibility of one of these better roads opening for the shattered families of the poor or for the bewildered host camped on the fringes of the urban middle class suggests that the disaster of seven-lesson schools is going to grow unless we do something bold and decisive with the mess of government monopoly schooling.

After an adult lifetime spent teaching school, I believe the method of mass-schooling is its only real content. Don't be fooled into thinking that good curriculum or good equipment or good teachers are the critical determinants of your son's or daughter's education. All the pathologies we've considered come about in large measure because the lessons of school prevent children from keeping important appointments with themselves and with their families to learn lessons in self-motivation, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity, and love -- and lessons in service to others, too, which are among the key lessons of home and community life.

Thirty years ago [in the early 60s] these things could still be learned in the time left after school. But television has eaten up most of that time, and a combination of television and the stresses peculiar to two-income or single-parent families have swallowed up most of what used to be family time as well. Our kids have no time left to grow up fully human and only thin-soil wastelands to do it in.

A future is rushing down upon our culture which will insist all of us learn the wisdom of non-material experience; a future which will demand as the price of survival that we follow a path of natural life economical in material cost. These lessons cannot be learned in schools as they are. School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I should know.

"I teach school and win awards doing it." The definition of a "primary source."

Nuke the site from orbit.  It's the only way to be sure....

I Say We Take Off and Nuke the Site from Orbit

. . . . It's the only way to be sure.

E.D. Hirsch, Jr. is, according to Wikipedia:

. . . a U.S. educator and academic literary critic. Now retired, he was until recently the University Professor of Education and Humanities and the Linden Kent Memorial Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Virginia. He is best known for his writings about cultural literacy.

It states further:

In 1977 Hirsch published The Philosophy of Composition, an investigation into the question of what makes prose more or less readable. His work on composition led to a major shift in his career. While giving tests of relative readability at two colleges in Virginia, he discovered that while the relative readability of a text was an important factor in determining comprehension, an even more important consideration was background knowledge. Students at the University of Virginia were able to understand a passage on Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee, while students at a community college struggled with it, apparently lacking basic understanding of the American Civil War. This and related discoveries led Hirsch to formulate the concept of cultural literacy — the idea that reading comprehension requires not just formal decoding skills but also wide-ranging background knowledge. He concluded that schools should not be neutral about what is taught but should teach a highly specific curriculum that would allow children to understand things writers take for granted.

Hirsch founded the Core Knowledge Foundation in 1986, and wrote Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs To Know in 1987. He also co-wrote The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy in 1988. Cultural Literacy became a best-seller, but Hirsch's ideas were extremely controversial. Although himself a liberal, he was attacked as a neo-conservative and advocate for a conservative, lily-white curriculum, a promoter of "drill and kill" pedagogy and a reactionary force. His theories have been criticized for not addressing supposed differences in learning styles and for a lack of information about minorities.

Beginning in 1997 Hirsch began publishing books in the Core Knowledge Series. Each book focuses on the content knowledge that should be taught to each particular elementary grade level. There are different books covering kindergarten through sixth grades, plus at least one book outlining an overview of what should be covered in the whole elementary curriculum.

In 1996, Hirsch published The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them. In it, Hirsch proposed that Romanticized, anti-knowledge theories of education prevalent in America are not only the cause of America's lackluster educational performance, but also a cause of widening inequalities in class and race. Hirsch portrays the focus of American educational theory as one which attempts to give students intellectual tools such as "critical thinking skills", but which denigrates teaching any actual content, labeling it "mere rote learning". Hirsch states that it is this attitude which has failed to develop knowledgeable students.

(Bold emphasis is mine.) Professor Hirsch has a new book out, The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools, and was recently interviewed by National Review Online's John J. Miller for NRO's Between the Covers series. I've transcribed some of that interview, which largely echoes the Wikipedia entry, but here goes:

John J. Miller: Professor Hirsch, when it comes to the education of young children, from kindergarten through elementary up through middle school, what is America doing fundamentally wrong?

E.D. Hirsch, Jr.: What they're doing fundamentally wrong is not having a cumulative and sequenced curriculum. That seems unbelievable perhaps to somebody outside the education world, but for the last more than half-century there has been no definite curriculum. There has been no commonality, not just across schools, but within schools. from one classroom to another. Students will be studying different things, and that, I think, has been the chief problem both in the quality of our better students - which is not always very high - and in the great gap that has developed between blacks and Hispanics on one side and whites and Asians on the other.

JJM: Shouldn't you just focus on critical thinking skills as opposed to the memorization of names and dates?

EDH.: Thank you for asking that question. That is the current doctrine of the schools, that schools should be focusing on critical thinking skills rather than mere facts, and that idea that such a thing is possible has been exploded by cognitive science and that's basically the reason - that is the formal isolable skills that are independent of any particular domain - that idea has been shown to be wrong. And if you're operating on a wrong idea, it's a sufficient explanation as to why the school system has not been working.

But the philosophy cannot be wrong! Do it again, only HARDER!

JJM: What should the schools be doing differently?

EDH: Well, just as a general point before I mention that, ideas are so terribly important in this field. (John Maynard) Keynes once said "the world is ruled by little else." It's certainly true in our educational system. You asked what I'd do differently to overcome this incoherence of content. I would have a core curriculum in the early grades, a very specific, very definite core. Shouldn't take up more than fifty percent of the school time, but that would enable a teacher to deal constructively with a new incoming class, because the students would have a basis for the next lesson. Now teacher's jobs - people talk about teacher quality quite a lot - but the job of a teacher gets increasingly difficult, veering on impossibility as you go up the grades in an American school because of this diversity of preparation.

JJM: This core curriculum would consist of what?

EDH: Well, it should consist - first of all it should focus on content areas of the standard academic subjects. Science, history and the arts, and math. But in the language arts section - the arts include literature, of course - the language arts section has been a repository for the early grades of a lot of wasted time, and there I believe that the focus on language should be a focus on knowledge, because that's what cognitive science is saying should be happening now.

JJM: And what are we doing wrong right now? Are teachers just randomly assigning different stories with no particular rationale?

EDH: Yes, that's right. Well, there's no particular rationale for the stories. The rationale is for the idea that they are learning process skills: finding the main idea, questioning the author, learning how to squeeze meaning out of text without having the needed background knowledge and vocabulary to comprehend the text. So obviously to common sense, common sense would say that wouldn't work, and obviously it doesn't work.

And he's quite right about that. The one thing that I've noted about the really bright people on the web today is their wide-ranging knowledge and the amount of reading they've done to achieve it. This is done outside the formal education system - in spite of it, in fact.

Continuing:

JJM: In the 1980's you wrote an influential book called Cultural Literacy. What was that book about, and have Americans become more or less culturally literate since then?

EDH: Well, the trend line . . . We can judge that by the reading scores of twelfth graders in the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and the trend line has been a gentle downward slope, so the implication is that we've become, we share less common knowledge among each other. And that's not surprising given the diversity of inputs since the internet developed.

JJM: And your point would be that the schools need to teach cultural literacy to children so that there are common areas of knowledge that they share as Americans.

EDH: Yes, and though I don't use that term "cultural literacy" because I found it was a hot-button term. I leave out the term "culture" now because we're talking about the "public sphere" is the term I use in this new book which is a more accurate description in a way. Cultures are what our American public sphere holds together, a lot of diverse cultures and points of view, and that was actually the Founders conception. And I like John Ralston's (sp?) description of that; this larger commonality is a social union of social unions. But this wider public sphere is held together by language, and language can only function on the basis of shared knowledge that isn't spoken, just taken for granted. That's the only way communication can occur.

And that "shared knowledge that isn't spoken, just taken for granted" IS CULTURE.

Remember that quote from Jane Jacobs?

People living in vigorous cultures typically treasure those cultures and resist any threat to them. How and why can a people so totally discard a formerly vital culture that it becomes literally lost?

Every culture takes pains to educate its young so that they, in their turn, can practice and transmit it completely. Our civilization, however, is failing to do that. On the contrary, we are systematically training our young not to embrace the culture that brought us greatness.

And a civilization is truly dead, she says, when "even the memory of what has been lost is lost."

That's what Professor Hirsch is describing here, the deliberate, systematic training of our young not to embrace the culture that brought us greatness.

Continuing:

JJM: It sounds like a retreat saying we can no longer speak of "cultural literacy." Of course it was a hot-button issue, but that doesn't mean it was wrong.

EDH: Well, it depends. My general point there is you have to choose words carefully so that people don't make the wrong assumptions. "Cultural literacy," seems, people think of it as "cultural imperialism" which will get in the way of your own familial culture. There is a national culture, but it's a different - in the United States it's a different kind of culture. It's limited, it's tolerant . . . For example in France schoolgirls can't wear headscarves. That's a problem that would never arise significantly in the United States. 'No, no, that's your culture, you can come to school and wear headscarves.' It's a very accommodating public sphere, and if you want to call it a national or federal culture, that's OK, it wouldn't be inaccurate. But I think it's preferable to understand that there is this national or federal dimension in our life that we also share, and you can call it a culture if you like, but you don't have to.

". . . you have to choose words carefully so that people don't make the wrong assumptions." But what if they deliberately make those assumptions? If you challenge their worldview, they must interpret your ideas as an attack and respond accordingly. Note that Hirsch states in the opening paragraph of this interview that for more than half a century there has been no "definite curriculum" taught in the public schools, and as I have quoted John Taylor Gatto, he sets the date for the full-court press of this onslaught to 1965. I put the beginnings of it with John Dewey and the first decades of the 20th Century.

Continuing:

JJM: In this new book, The Making of Americans, you have a line I'd like to read: "One of the greatest disappointments I have felt in the twenty-five years that I have been actively engaged in education reform is the frustration of being warmly welcomed by conservatives but shunned by fellow liberals." Why has this gone on, and isn't it obvious by now that you should join us conservatives on the Right?

EDH: (laughing) Well, in one dimension I have. That is, being a social liberal is not inconsistent with being an educational conservative. And I think myself that's a very cogent position to hold. And I think in fact my complaint about my fellow democrats is that if they have equal justice or equality of opportunity in education as one of their affirmed aims, then they have to be educational conservatives because that's the only way to achieve equal educational opportunity. That's why I'm in the position I'm in.

He's ==><== this close. He can see the logical disconnect, but he cannot make the cognitive leap.

Bill Whittle did an interesting video essay recently that at the end strongly recommended his viewers to watch a three-piece series on YouTube about the Frankfurt School and "the history of political correctness." I'd heard of the Frankfurt School, but these three pieces are quite interesting, particularly when they discuss "critical theory." From Part 1:

When the First World War began in 1914 the worker's loyalty to their country proved stronger than their so-called "class consciousness." They willingly put on their uniforms, French or German, Austrian or Russian or British, and marched off by the millions to fight each other. In 1917 a Marxist revolution did occur in Russia, but it failed to spread to Western Europe, again contradicting orthodox Marxist theory. At the war's end, Marxist theorists had to confront the question, "What had gone wrong?" Antonio Gramsci of Italy and György Lukács of Hungary believed they had the answer. Gramsci and Lukács argued that Western culture had blinded the working class to its true Marxist class interests. Before a Marxist revolution could take place, Western culture had to be destroyed. In 1919 Lukács, who was considered the most brilliant Marxist theorist since Marx himself, asked "Who will save us from Western civilization?"

--

. . . in Germany a new attempt to create a Marxist critique of Western culture was taking shape. There, the wealthy young son of a millionaire grain trader, Felix Weil, wanted to establish a public policy institute, a think-tank to serve as a home for advanced Marxist thought. Modeled on the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow, Weil's think-tank was originally to be named The Institute for Marxism. Martin Jay, chairman of the history department at Berkeley and author of a history of the Frankfurt School, explains why the name was changed to the Institut für Sozialforschung - the Institute for Social Research:

"I think they were very interested in trying to avoid being overly labeled, so it's a fairly bland name, "The Institute for Social Research."

The Institute was affiliated with Frankfurt University in Frankfurt, Germany, and in time became known simply as "The Frankfurt School."

--

Following Lukács' lead, the Frankfurt school would be the vehicle that translated Marxism from economic into cultural terms, giving us what we now know as "political correctness."

And Hirsch, with his educational conservatism, his attempt to pass on to our children our national culture, "that shared knowledge that isn't spoken, just taken for granted," isn't politically correct and thus must be SHUNNED!

Remember back when I posted the 1985 video interview of former Soviet spy Yuri Bezmenov? Bezmenov stated that his job involved the implementation of "Ideological subversion," which he defined as follows (transcribed by Useless Dissident):

(Ideological subversion is) a great brainwashing process, which goes very slow[ly] and is divided [into] four basic stages. The first one being demoralization; it takes from 15-20 years to demoralize a nation. Why that many years? Because this is the minimum number of years which [is required] to educate one generation of students in the country of your enemy, exposed to the ideology of the enemy. In other words, Marxist-Leninist ideology is being pumped into the soft heads of at least three generations of American students, without being challenged, or counter-balanced by the basic values of Americanism (American patriotism).

The result? The result you can see. Most of the people who graduated in the sixties, drop-outs, or half-baked intellectuals, are now occupying the positions of power in the government, civil service, business, mass media, [and the] educational system. You are stuck with them. You cannot get rid of them. They are contaminated; they are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern. You cannot change their mind[s], even if you expose them to authentic information, even if you prove that white is white and black is black, you still cannot change the basic perception and the logic of behavior. In other words, these people... the process of demoralization is complete and irreversible. To [rid] society of these people, you need another twenty or fifteen years to educate a new generation of patriotically-minded and common sense people, who would be acting in favor and in the interests of United States society.

--

The demoralization process in [the] United States is basically completed already. For the last 25 years...(this interview occurred in 1985) actually, it's over-fulfilled because demoralization now reaches such areas where previously not even Comrade Andropov and all his experts would even dream of such a tremendous success. Most of it is done by Americans to Americans, thanks to [a] lack of moral standards.

As I mentioned before, exposure to true information does not matter anymore. A person who was demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell nothing to him. Even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents, with pictures; even if I take him by force to the Soviet Union and show him [a] concentration camp, he will refuse to believe it, until he [receives] a kick in his fan-bottom. When a military boot crashes his... then he will understand. But not before that. That's the [tragedy] of the situation of demoralization.

So basically America is stuck with demoralization and unless... even if you start right now, here, this minute, you start educating [a] new generation of American[s], it will still take you fifteen to twenty years to turn the tide of ideological perception of reality back to normalcy and patriotism.

The conclusion of the NRO interview:

JJM: Are schools of education and the way we train teachers part of the problem here?

EDH: They're the central problem. The reason we're doing the things we do in our schools, and things that have failed like not having a coherent curriculum, are based on ideas. And those ideas are promulgated in schools of education, they're indoctrinated - teachers are indoctrinated with them, and no conflicting or contrary ideas are really entertained or promoted. In fact, other kinds of ideas which would allow for a solid curriculum are seen as immoral, inhumane, teacher-centered rather than child-centered. And yes, I think that the education schools since the, really since the early part of the twentieth century have uniformly worked against a solid curriculum in the early grades, which is the thing mostly needed by our system.

(My emphasis.) And those ideas came from Gramsci and Lukács, and were intended specifically to destroy Western culture.

Like a fish immersed, unable to notice the water in which it swims, Hirsch is unable to see that his fellow liberals cannot accept educational conservatism, because the goal is not to "achieve equal educational opportunity," but instead to demoralize the nation - to, in fact, destroy its culture, not preserve it. The end being chased is not to achieve communication, but to prevent it. As Bezmenov put it: A person who (is) demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell nothing to him.

That's the GOAL.

It's been working for decades, and they're not about to stop now.

UPDATE: Isn't this an interesting coincidence? City Journal has an article out just today on Professor Hirsch, E. D. Hirsch’s Curriculum for Democracy. An excerpt:

Hirsch did his graduate studies at Yale, one of the citadels in the 1950s of the New Criticism, which argued that the intent of an author, the reader’s subjective response, and the text’s historical background were largely irrelevant to a critical analysis of the text itself.

The "New Criticism" being the outcome of the Frankfurt School's "critical theory", described as:

. . . a social theory oriented toward critiquing and changing society as a whole, in contrast to traditional theory oriented only to understanding or explaining it.

Well they've certainly succeeded in that.

Another excerpt:

Hirsch was at the pinnacle of the academic world, in his mid-fifties, when he was struck by an insight into how reading is taught that, he says, "changed my life." He was "feeling guilty" about the department’s inadequate freshman writing course, he recalls. Though UVA's admissions standards were as competitive as the Ivies', the reading and writing skills of many incoming students were poor, sure to handicap them in their future academic work. In trying to figure out how to close this "literacy gap," Hirsch conducted an experiment on reading comprehension, using two groups of college students. Members of the first group possessed broad background knowledge in subjects like history, geography, civics, the arts, and basic science; members of the second, often from disadvantaged homes, lacked such knowledge. The knowledgeable students, it turned out, could far more easily comprehend and analyze difficult college-level texts (both fiction and nonfiction) than their poorly informed brethren could.

So if the problem is that the proletariat is blinded to their Marxist class interests because of the bourgeoisie, and that the world needs to be saved from Western Civilization, wouldn't it be easier to eliminate the bourgeoisie by making them as ignorant and uneducated as the proletariat, thus destroying Western Civilization?

It certainly fits all the available evidence.

Hudson Was Wrong

(If you're just coming to this site and reading top to bottom, skip down one post to figure out what's going on.)

Well about three full days have passed since I asked that important question, and it's drawn a few comments and a bit of attention. So what have I learned?

I've learned that the people who make up my audience are a damned pessimistic bunch, for one. The ratio of comments like this:

"Okay, I'm thoroughly depressed now. Have we passed the point of no return? Are we on the verge of another Dark Age?" - Sarah

"Worse than any other aspect of our situation is the sense of hopelessness that pervades even the most ardent devotees of freedom." - Francis Porretto

"Like you, I am practically out of ideas. Every day we get the choice between slavery and rebellion, and so far, most folks ok with slavery." - Robert

"The main difference between Bush and Kerry, WRT civil liberties, is what size boot they use when tromping in one place, vs. some other." - jed

"Answers? I don't have answers. I think I'm probably in the same boat as most of you. If there was a real fight, I'd fight, but in the meantime, what? Just watch?" - mostlycajun

"At the moment, I don't intend to have children, and I don't have any ideas. About the only thing I'm certain of is now is not the time to give up drinking." - LabRat

"This is why I'm religious: there is no hope for freedom anywhere in the world any longer." - Sydney Carton

"We're on the road to totalitarianism right now, and voting the same people into office is not going to turn us from that path. At best it will slow us down slightly, though I'm no longer convinced of that." - Dennis

"What is the answer? Wait for the collapse of Social Security to bring down the beast and then be ready to fight off every other ...ist to restore this country to the intent of the original founders." - Ken

to comments like this:

"Though it may seem Pollyanna-ish, I believe that we have reached or are nearing the nadir of the current trough, and the upward side of the catenary approaches." - Mark Phillip Alger

"The side for liberty is winning." - Doug

was about, oh, 10:1.

The one thing almost all the pessimists had in common was - no answers. Fûz, author of WeckUpToThees! suggests that we start committing civil disobedience when the campaign finance laws start kicking in, restricting freedom of speech. Not "Big Media" - us. You and me. But then Michael Williams of Master of None points out that we live in a system of lots of laws, but only random enforcement - just enough to put fear into others and keep us in our places. (Think RIAA enforcement.) Fûz might be right - but I doubt it.

The most striking thing I found was apathy. This site has received about 1,400 hits since I posted "An Important Question." It drew 47 comments (not including my replies) from 22 respondents. I posted a link to the essay at AR15.com - surely a hotbed of the perennially pissed-off - which garnered 613 views, but only seventeen responses (two optimistic, the rest pessimistic). That's a signal of apathy, to me anyway. Interested enough to read, but not interested enough to bitch.

And that defines the problem, as I see it. The vast majority are simply apathetic.

ap•a•thy
Function: noun
Etymology: Greek apatheia, from apathEs without feeling, from a- + pathos emotion
1 : lack of feeling or emotion : IMPASSIVENESS
2 : lack of interest or concern : INDIFFERENCE

We are, as a nation, impassive. We are indifferent. As I said in my letter to Rev. Sensing,

The overwhelming majority of the populace, I believe, is ignorant and apathetic. They might sense the loss of their freedoms, dimly, but they don't know and they don't want to know.

We here in the blogosphere who are (supposedly) active and connected, have no consensus other than "Every day we get the choice between slavery and rebellion, and so far, most folks (are) ok with slavery."

Well I'm not, but it does appear that way.

As I wrote a long time ago, I believe that a "right" is what a majority of the population of the society I live in believes it is. This is pragmatically true, as opposed to ideally true. Ideally "rights" are concepts shared by all and revered, but practically that's untrue. You can stand before a magistrate and demand your rights, but in most societies throughout history your understanding of your rights wouldn't keep your head attached to your body, or in the 20th Century stop the bullet that ended your protests. I'm engaged in a discussion right now with Tim Lambert of Deltoid who professes to believe in a "right" to self-defense, while defending a philosophy that allows complete disarmament of the law abiding populace against agressors. Tim is hardly an exception in this world, now or historically.

A respect for rights isn't natural, it's learned - and when we stop teaching our children about our rights, a reverence for them; when we neglect to educate the incoming generation as to what those rights are and why they're important and why they should be defended even against the seemingly most minor infringement, then apathy becomes entropy and our rights dissolve toward chaos. When we give the rights the Founders believed to be essential only lip service, suddenly we get all kinds of new "rights." A "right" to abortion. (Don't write letters.) A "right" to "freedom from gun violence." A "right" to gay marriage. A "right" to government provided health care. A "right" to... well you get the idea. And all those "rights" are eventually given equal weight - essentially none at all when the rubber meets the road.

In 1776 a group of men, excellently educated (whether self-taught or formally) and with a new but common understanding of the rights of humanity, decided they'd had enough and stood up to be counted. They pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor and took up arms against an overwhelming enemy. These few men led many more who were angry but not so committed. Another Mencken quote (the man had so many): "It doesn't take a majority to make a rebellion; it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound cause." We can't define a cause, though. Nor an enemy. "We have met the enemy and he is us." - Walt Kelly.

Francis Porretto also said this:

Violent revolution is a nasty prospect. Alongside the unpleasantness of it, there is also this: most revolutions in history have intensified tyranny, rather than ameliorated it. Alternatives are certainly welcome.

Civil disobedience is less nasty for everyone but the disobedient. Though most people don't have the courage for it regardless of how valid it appears, in every generation there are a few who'll put their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor on the line to defend some principle of justice. But successful civil disobedience has a list of necessary preconditions that can be hard to meet. The carnage among the courageous few is enough to make one think...and back away.

I'm beginning to repeat myself, I think.

Commenter Brian wrote:

I'm coming to the conclusion that it's better to live outlaw like I did when I was a kid than to bother acting like I'm a citizen. The law seems to do nothing beneficial, and I've always been willing to break it.
--
There's no need to respect the laws that don't respect you, or fear the gov- just embrace freedom and accept that you COULD be imprisoned or killed, but you'll live freer than almost anyone before that happens. It's worth it, to me.

That echoes Francis in his next paragraph:

There is a third way, and it can be applied to many of the usurpations of power that occur in American society: passive resistance, sometimes also called passive non-compliance. It is much less risky to its practitioners than civil disobedience, and it doesn't usually set the streets awash with blood. More, it has a good record of success, although when it wins, it doesn't always win everything one has hoped for.

Francis then goes on to expound on what it takes to make passive resistance a successful strategy for manipulation of the government. But Brian, I think, has the right of it - screw strategy. Embrace freedom and accept that you could be imprisoned or killed and live free while you can. Teach your children about those ideal rights, and live them. Don't respect those laws that don't respect you, and be willing to pay the consequences of violating them if you get caught.

So my life, my fortune, and my sacred honor stand ready to be sacrificed in the defense of my rights and the rights of those I love as I understand them. I am a citizen of this nation as much or as little as it protects and defends those rights under which it was founded, not as they are (mis)understood today. I will obey those laws with which I agree, follow those laws I am unwilling to suffer the penalty for, and I will disobey those laws I find egregious. This may mean that, at some time in the future, the State may decide to "selectively enforce" itself on me to make an example. At that time and at that place I will decide how to respond, for that choice is mine and always will be. In the mean time, I will agitate for those rights, making sure those in power remember that they swore oaths to defend them whether they understood them or not. I will continue trying to educate others so that they, too, understand what it is they are losing, what they are allowing others to throw away, and so they will hopefully not choose slavery.

That's what I owe my grandchildren.

Hudson was wrong, the game wasn't over. He died anyway - but he died fighting, not lying down, defending himself and his people. Like Hicks said, sometimes I want to take off and nuke the place from orbit - it's the only way to be sure - but I'm just a grunt and don't get to make those decisions.

UPDATE 4/8 9:30AM: The Geek responds.

UPDATE, 10:25: From the comments, Dano writes:

I'm not sure I agree with your "apathy" conclusion, Kevin -- at least, not as applied to the readers of your post(s). The nation, overall, being apathetic ("fat, dumb and happy" comes to mind) I'll go along with. You asked for "ideas" and as I'm in the Pessimistic Camp, I haven't got any. Rather than comment and say "I don't know what to do," I merely read. It's going to get worse before it gets better (if it does) and I don't expect to see it get better in my lifetime. I'd love to be wrong.

My response:

Dano:

Read the Geek's piece linked at the bottom of the post. I stand by the apathy conclusion. Being pessimistic and using that as an excuse to just stand by and watch as the structure collapses is apathy. "I can't do anything!" is not an excuse not to try.

Stand up. Be heard. Make your opinions known. Write your congresscritters. Write letters to the editors when peices are published you don't agree with, and when they publish stuff you do. Call or write your TV news outlets when they do something objectionable or praiseworthy. Start a blog.

If we're going down anyway, let's all go down fighting every inch of the way. Fvck 'em - WE'RE AMERICANS! We don't back away from a fight.

And who knows?

The horse might learn to sing.