Continuity

Indexed is a charming little webcomic that's almost always good for a quick morning chortle.  It's a lot of fun to see the way she plays with graphs to tell stories, but it does often betray a somewhat blinkered lefty view of the world, though in a way that's not at all off-putting.  Today's comic is a particularly good example.

The commenters spot the problem right away. Do you?

On Education, and Essentials Thereof

I spent the past long weekend visiting a dear friend, an old Army buddy from all the way back in Basic training, Empty-Handed Army, as well as his lovely and perceptive wife.  We three spent nearly the whole waking portion of three days in deep discussion of a huge variety of topics, usually approaching them from a philosophical angle well outside my own comfort zone of practical applications and real-world historical proofs.  The topic of education popped up again and again, mirroring and developing conversations I'd had with friends during my past month on leave.  What are the goals of modern education?  Who ought to be seeking higher education?  How much does public policy contribute to educational success?  Previous conversations with a wide variety of educators -- Masters of Education students, inner-city "alternative" school teachers, radical unschooling homeschoolers --  all came back to the same point:  the overwhelming contributor to education success is cultural while public policy plays an important but fundamentally marginal role.  I was reminded of all of this by a reader comment shared by Jay Nordlinger:

If you asked a thousand people at random about their favorite teacher, how many would bring up how well the teacher employed education software, or whether she had a master’s degree from an ed school, or whether she took the class on fancy field trips, etc.?

To which Nordlinger follows up a quote from Dr. Gerrit Jan van Heuven Goedhart, a former UN High Commissioner for Refugees:

Many years ago I participated in a discussion on the problem of international education. After many experts had presented their complicated theories, an old headmaster of a certain school got up and quietly said: “There is only one system of education, through love and one’s own example.”

Nordlinger responds, "I don’t think I have ever read anything truer on the subject of education."  I can only agree.  The children of the radical unschoolers I know are well-adjusted and whip-smart.  I have no doubt at all that my other friend's inner-city alternative school students would end up the same if they were brought up in a similar loving environment with good examples, no matter what the outward form of their schooling.  Public education policy cannot solve cultural failings that are antithetical to education.  Meanwhile, a functioning culture can mold successful youngsters even in the most dismal of school settings (cough cough Asians cough).  All of our arguments over education policy that are based on the presumption that the right policy will produce success are just wasted breath.

On Working With Your Hands

I'm thankful to have come from part of the country and a family where nobody would have imagined the need to write a defense of craftsmanship. But for all my readers who've been raised and educated to be "knowledge workers" with no thought to the alternative, Matthew Crawford outlines "The Case for Working With Your Hands" in NYT Magazine, an abridgment of his philosophical treatise "Shop Class as Soulcraft" in The New Atlantis, which has now been expanded into a book.

American culture as a whole idealizes the thought of being one's own boss, and yet does not encourage promising young people to enter the only sector of the economy where this goal is not only realistic, but relatively commonplace: the skilled trades. Crawford's focus is on the mechanical trades, but the requirements of creativity and problem-solving and the rewards of concrete satisfaction and connection to the community are just as real for pastry chefs, florists, and cobblers (they still exist) as they are for plumbers, electricians, and auto mechanics.

My goal is nothing less than the "miracle" of small-scale self-employment.

Milwaukee School Choice Targeted for Destruction

Milwaukee's school choice program has been proving critics wrong for 20 years, and as a successful test case has inspired similar programs around the country. It must therefore be destroyed, as Madison is now seeking to do.

Headline: Ambiguity Vanquished!

Closely related to the Science News Cycle is the policy research cycle. Consider this headline:

Study: Public Schools Just As

Good as Private Schools

Wow, thanks Research! Way to smack down all those voucher waving moonbats! Oh, wait it only studied math skills? Only through 5th grade? And only over several years? How many is several exactly? 5? 3? Well, we know it's valid, right, because it's fully corroborated by "other, yet-unpublished studies of the same data, which produced similar findings".

Bluuhhh. Of the small number of people who actually order a copy of this study, precisely 11 will have the statistical acumen to judge the researchers' techniques of "controlling for demographic differences". For that matter, what was the testing standard? People complain about "teaching to the test", here the danger is testing to what's been taught. The best private schools in the world would fare poorly if the test looks just like the public school's curriculum.

But none of that's worth blunting such a beautiful headline.

Why, Sir, Why?

I've written before about the administration's shameful preemptive cancellation of the DC Opportunity Scholarship program.

Now, ReasonTV drives home what this means to struggling DC families.

Kids and the Environment

Nowhere in American society is "green" orthodoxy pushed more stridently than in our schools. Green activists have admitted that indoctrinating children to hector their parents about environmental issues is a key plank in their plan to mold an envirorthodox society. We see the result now in a survey that shows a third of American preteens fear an "environmental apocalypse" and over half believe they will grow up to a world less healthy than they enjoy now. (I'm sure the parents of the remaining sixth will be getting concerned phone calls any day now). The survey's a bit hard to read much into, as the article on TreeHugger.com doesn't break down the actual questions or responses. It's still clear that America's youngsters are fully indoctrinated into the Left-environmentalist dogma that we're on a downward ecological spiral. The irony, of course, is that the environment of North America and Europe has been getting cleaner and healthier for decades, and even carbon emissions per person have been more or less level. There's a simple reason, too: we've gotten richer. John Tierney argues in the New York Times that in light of the historical evidence showing that societies inevitably get greener as they get richer, the best thing we can do for the world is to help poor countries develop faster. I couldn't agree more. Nations pass through stages of development that simply cannot be skipped. One of those stages is pretty dirty, and half the world's population is at or just about to enter that stage. Nothing is going to keep them from digging up and using the cheap energy at their disposal. Even if it were feasible -- and it isn't -- deceiving or strongarming the world's poor into pursuing some rich man's vision of "green development" will only trap them longer in poverty and its attendant environmental consequences.

For the Children

Yes, it's for the sake of the children that Education Secretary Arne Duncan has axed the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program, just weeks after this year's cohort had been informed of their acceptance into the program, and well after the deadlines to apply to D.C.'s better charter schools or for transfers out of the district. See, since Congress will be debating the program sometime within the next year, it's not in the students' best interest to let them into a program that might get cut for next year. Of course, in geopolitics this is what we call creating "facts on the ground". I fully understand that as a successful voucher program in our nation's worst education district, and right under the government's nose, this program absolutely had to be killed. But when you're throwing 200 students to the wolves to reward Big Education for their unwavering support, spare me the pretense that you're doing it for the students' sake.

Straw Men and Chimney-Sweeps

Sometimes I wonder what we could accomplish in the realm of education in this country if we could all actually debate each other rather than our own strawmen. For instance, I'm sure Matthew Yglesias and I could have a great conversation about education policy, once I managed to convince him my ideas weren't all just a secret plot to turn poor kids into chimney-sweeps.

Advice For Young People

John Derbyshire shares practical wisdom for today's youth, specifically for "academically non-brilliant young from un-wealthy families":

If you have a high threshold of boredom and cherish financial security above all else, get a government job — any one will do. Master a few bureacratic survival tactics — avoiding responsibility, advancing by stealth, etc. Settle back. Life's a couch.

If you're more adventurous and independent, learn a useful skill that you can parlay into a small business and take with you to another country if you get the travel bug, or if the U.S.A. folds. Stay clear of the college racket and the student-loan sharks. Keep fit. Life's an adventure playground.

Don't get me wrong, I loved college and it was great for me, but I won't deny that it's basically a racket.  Seriously, how much of a typical humanities program is spent reading a book and then discussing it with a group of people?  You can do that for free, it's called a "book club".  And at a real book club there's a higher likelihood that the others had actually read what they're opining about.  I'd probably be evaluating the value of my college experience very differently if I were still paying off my loans, instead of handing them over to the American taxpayer.  (Thanks guys!)

Recruiting

I've spent the last week on a short-term recruiting gig, visiting high school classes in several cities in the western half of North Carolina, from classy Smoky Mountain resort cities to economically hopeless Appalachian towns. The full-time recruiters I worked with said that they look at a high school class with the knowledge that about 70% are already disqualified for various reasons, and of those who aren't, only about a third will get a qualifying score on the ASVAB. With that in mind, it was heartbreaking to hear teachers so enthusiastic for their students to enlist, admitting to us privately that the military was the only path they could see for their students to make anything of themselves. "Half these kids think they're going to college," one of them confided in me. "Nine out of ten of those will drop out in their first year." Interacting with high-schoolers these days isn't exactly an encouraging experience.

The Death of Federalism

How much does it say about the death of federalism in America that it should seem perfectly normal that we know far more about national races in far-off Washington than about the candidates for positions in our own hometowns. This card from PostSecret says it all:

We don't care about local elections because they just don't matter very much to most of us. Can the anti-federalist ratchet ever be turned back? Is it even possible to devolve power back to the state and local level? It's not very hopeful. Look at No Child Left Behind: everyone agrees it hasn't entirely worked, but nobody's suggested returning its power to the states. You can bet that either a McCain or an Obama administration's "reform" of NCLB would aggregate more power to Washington to regulate education, not less.

Stepping Back from the Fray

In this season of partisan fervor, Stefan McDaniel at First Things reminds us (by reference to Somalia) to be thankful that we live in a "nation where political reprisals take the form of unkind advertisements, and where the pirates illegally download Rocky III." Amen.

On Education: Prerequisite Reading

As I continue my own reading and musing on the topic of education, I'd like to suggest the essays of Paul Graham, particularly Why Nerds Are Unpopular. I recommend reading the whole thing, but the gist of it is that the society American students have created for themselves has profoundly twisted ideals, especially for an institution supposedly preparing students for the "real world". In adult society, the phrase "popularity contest" is used derisively to characterize a decision-making process that has lost all reference to valid criteria, and yet we seem to have no problem that the social climate of our institutions of secondary education consists of little else, and little curiosity as to why this should be the case. Intelligent students with real-world ambitions end up behaving much as an adult would if dropped into the same situation: they get what they can out of it academically, make no great effort to fit in, and pay the price for it socially. A few great quotes:

If you leave a bunch of eleven-year-olds to their own devices, what you get is Lord of the Flies. Like a lot of American kids, I read this book in school. Presumably it was not a coincidence. Presumably someone wanted to point out to us that we were savages, and that we had made ourselves a cruel and stupid world. This was too subtle for me. While the book seemed entirely believable, I didn't get the additional message. I wish they had just told us outright that we were savages and our world was stupid.

Public school teachers are in much the same position as prison wardens. Wardens' main concern is to keep the prisoners on the premises. They also need to keep them fed, and as far as possible prevent them from killing one another. Beyond that, they want to have as little to do with the prisoners as possible, so they leave them to create whatever social organization they want. From what I've read, the society that the prisoners create is warped, savage, and pervasive, and it is no fun to be at the bottom of it. In outline, it was the same at the schools I went to.

A lot of people seem to think it's good for smart kids to be thrown together with "normal" kids at this stage of their lives. Perhaps. But in at least some cases the reason the nerds don't fit in really is that everyone else is crazy. I remember sitting in the audience at a "pep rally" at my high school, watching as the cheerleaders threw an effigy of an opposing player into the audience to be torn to pieces. I felt like an explorer witnessing some bizarre tribal ritual.

Officially the purpose of schools is to teach kids. In fact their primary purpose is to keep kids locked up in one place for a big chunk of the day so adults can get things done. And I have no problem with this: in a specialized industrial society, it would be a disaster to have kids running around loose. What bothers me is not that the kids are kept in prisons, but that (a) they aren't told about it, and (b) the prisons are run mostly by the inmates.

Okay, that's quite a few quotes. Read the whole thing. There'll be a quiz.

Hollywood Comes to St. Olaf

My alma mater will be part of the backdrop for the new Coen brothers movie, A Serious Man. Set in the Twin Cities suburbs, the story focuses on a middle-American college professor in the middle part of the 20th century. The directors needed some classrooms that fit the image of mid-60's academia and found a fit in the fortuitously vacant Science Center at St. Olaf, which has just been replaced with the opening of the New Science Center Regents' Hall (that'll take a few years to sink in, after everyone calling it the New Science Center for the last half-decade of planning and construction).

On Education: A Good Place to Start

As I said in my previous post, I'm not yet prepared to dive fully into fever swamps of education policy in America. But here's a place we can all start: parental involvement. Daniel Akst shares some good common sense in today's Wall Street Journal, namely, that high-performing students tend to have encouraging, involved parents who focus on education as a collective goal of the whole family. He also scratches the surface of a deep cultural problem that I believe will continue to undermine American education for the foreseeable future, namely the indifference and opposition of many parents toward education. We all complain that many parents don't value education, but nobody seems to acknowledge that many parents actively undermine education. They disparage the curriculum, subvert students' respect for their teachers, and lobby for easier workloads and lower standards. Teachers who try to combat these tendencies are seen as engaging in a power struggle against the families. And there most certainly are some educators who are trying to subvert the influence of families on young students, which just feeds the perception of education as a struggle between opposing camps, instead of the partnership it ought to be.

On Education

I've been formally requested, now, to write a piece (or what will probably amount to several pieces) on education. Problem is, I've got to figure out exactly where I stand myself. I've got some reading to do, see. But one thing I am convinced of, however, is that the whole culture of mass education in America is misguided at best. I definitely agree that college is not for everyone. Thing is, I'm pretty sure high school isn't for everyone, either. Or oughtn't be. But I've got some reading and pondering to do before I can get my thoughts into a coherent order on this remarkably convoluted subject.

Amatuer Surgeons and Professional Educators

The indomitable, unmatchable, and utterly irreplaceable Thomas Sowell weighs in today with a typically pithy piece on the failure of central planning of economies. This sort of thing is Conservatism 101, but he illustrates it with an example I thought much of my readership might appreciate:

When amateurs outperform professionals, there is something wrong with that profession. If ordinary people, with no medical training, could perform surgery in their kitchens with steak knives, and get results that were better than those of surgeons in hospital operating rooms, the whole medical profession would be discredited.

Yet it is common for ordinary parents, with no training in education, to homeschool their children and consistently produce better academic results than those of children educated by teachers with Master’s degrees and in schools spending upwards of $10,000 a year per student — which is to say, more than a million dollars to educate ten kids from K through 12. Nevertheless, we continue to take seriously the pretensions of educators who fail to educate, but who put on airs of having “professional” expertise beyond the understanding of mere parents.

Paleofuturist Education

Paleo-Future has a great piece for all my home/un-schooling readers, quoting the San Antonio Light of July 8, 1937:

A Columbia university educator, addressing students at the University of California at Los Angeles, predicted that "by the year 2000, we won't send children to school until they are 10 years old." He said that "while they are young, we will keep them busy building healthy bodies in the fresh air". Evidently, he doesn't know the mammas. They want to get their children into school as early as possible. One of the reasons for the development of the kindergarten is to hasten the time when even devoted mothers can get a little freedom from the demands of their children. But the year 2000 is a long way in the future.

The "mammas" have prevailed in public education, even beyond the year 2000, with government daycare school starting earlier and earlier with 4-year-old kindergarten and Head Start and the like. Telling how well the writer predicted that, actually. Wish the piece gave the name of the Columbia educator, because the whole "building healthy bodies in the fresh air" sounds like a great educational philosophy to me.