I’d love to engage in a discussion with you — and interested others — about the appropriate role of government in education.
The Federalist Papers made it clear, to me at least, that our founding fathers believed that the government, our federal government in particular, should have nothing to do with educating the populace.
The government providing public education? How did THAT happen?
I realize it sounds a bit radical now, but I believe that any discussion of what is right and wrong about public education today must begin with a healthy debate about whether the federal government should be involved in public education at all.
The new British Conservative & Liberal-Democrat Cabinet
I can’t remember a more momentous week in British politics. It seemed silly to comment as events unfolded so swiftly – one would have risked being out of date before finishing the article – but it is perhaps time to summarize what has happened:
The outcome was in retrospect the best possible, even if none of the parties might think of it that way.
We have a stable government locked into a coalition that commands a large majority in the House of Commons and a considerable majority of the popular vote. Nobody can deny this coalition “the right to govern”, whichever way you regard the statistics.
The country’s finances are in a terrible mess and a stable government was essential to put things right and recover confidence.
Yes, there will be strains and stresses in each party, but both have now invested so much in this that neither can afford to rock the boat and risk another general election to let Labour back in under a new and more charismatic leader.
Both parties have shown a spirit of compromise and both have had to ditch some of their cherished (and more wacky) policies.
“First Past the Post” has taken a lot of stick and it seems the time of electoral reform has arrived. The Lib-Dems have a firm commitment to a referendum on the Alternative Vote (not optimal, but an improvement) plus other essential elements – long-delayed by the previous Labour dinosaur – such as fixed term parliaments, a redistribution of votes per constituency and a reduced number of MPs.
The country has seemed fragmented and divided in recent years, with much bitterness and a sense of drift and failure. The coalition has brought fresh hope, though it is born in very difficult times. But as a coalition it is perhaps better-placed than one single party to make the very difficult decisions needed. A single party would have had to make the same decisions but with the risk of losing a vote in the HOC and a lurch to the other side to start all over again.
The wretched previous government is gone. The most pleasing aspect of this is that those architects of spin and PR, the unelected Lord Mandelson and the unelectable Alistair Campbell, have seen their stars not only wane but disappear into a black hole. Their last-ditch attempt to stagger on in a Lib-Lab coalition was effectively torpedoed by their own back-benchers and party Grandees, who found the whole process undignified. It is indeed the end of Noo Labour, and few will regret its passing.
Last but not least, the Labour Party survives, whereas there was a time when it seemed it might be humiliated and destroyed. The extent of the defeat could not be spun – even if Mandelson et al had a go at it – but it survives as an essential part of the British political scene. Moreover, though Brown rightly had to go, he was not humiliated either and was able to depart with grace and dignity. One is far from sad to see him retire to the back benches, but the bad feeling that anything worse might have produced has been avoided.
The change has been momentous. Politics is unpredictable, so who can tell if this bold experiment will work. But “Who dares, Wins”, and they should have the best wishes of all who love their country.
I plan to have my final post on education finished very soon. However, with my last week of finals and papers at the undergraduate level (which is finally over!) constantly hoarding my time, I have not yet quite been able to truly decide on which side I plan to end up.
My instinct tells me that the costs of the US schooling system far outweigh its benefits, but I feel I must be sure that this is truly a case that can be supported with logic and not simply my own biases coming through.
However, while I continue to ponder, I thought that readers might find this video interesting. It’s a different take on the nature of institutionalized schooling than is often seen. It’s on the longer side — approximately 20 minutes long — but I definitely think it is worth a watch for anyone pursuing a clear and well thought-out perspective on education, and it’s actually quite humorous and entertaining.
The video is of a presentation by Sir Ken Robinson, an internationally recognized leader in the development of innovation and human resources. His thesis statement is as follows:
My contention is that creativity is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.
I hope the Learning From Dogs community enjoys this video. Upon my return from celebrating my college graduation in Charleston, I plan to present my final finding on whether the costs or the benefits of schooling in the United States outweighs the other.
Came across a relatively new Blog with the title The Fourteenth Banker. Caught my eye because of the similarity to the book written by Simon Johnson and James Kwak of Baseline Scenario fame. Here’s an extract from the ‘About’ piece of this new Blog.
In response to the comments of folks in the Congress and oversight regimes, I have created this blog as a home for bankers who need to speak out and do not have a central clearinghouse or a safe place to do so. Big banks now treat their employees like property, bought and owned. Typically employees must subject themselves to all sorts of potential sanctions, forfeitures of compensation, clawbacks and even lawsuits if they speak in ways we often have thought were protected speech. I am not talking about revealing confidential customer or proprietary information, I am talking about simply commenting on a company, management philosophy, making general observations or raising concerns. It makes one appreciate unions even if not historically supportive of unions. At least management and labor can have a debate. Not so in today’s large banks. Gag orders are written in the most intimidating way, included in Codes of Ethics, attached to incentive plans, posted on the company home pages. We should ask ourselves, what is the big secret?
Do support the Blog by calling by. Here’s a taste of what they are writing about:
This can only be called what it is. Delusion. Delusion about self, society, morality, values and anything else you can name. These are symptoms of a grave illness which is too common among those in power. In fact, the illness may be the requisite to power.
Maybe, just maybe, this is going to be real change!
I’m writing this at 9.30 pm US Mountain Time on the 6th, the equivalent of 5.30am British Summer Time on the 7th May. I’ve been watching the excellent live election broadcast online from the BBC.
There is no clear leading party at this time but the Conservatives appear to heading possibly to lead a minority Government.
It’s been the most puzzling set of results in my lifetime but maybe it’s showing that the British public have voted against one-party politics and voted for consensus.
Because the sorts of problems that are ahead for Britain (and so many other countries) require a new form of Government, a Government that truly puts the country first and not the Party!
Fascinating times. Let’s see what the next few days, weeks and months will bring.
Freedom as something one must endeavor to gain and maintain!
The power of a cup of tea!
There is a quiet self-contradiction developing in the Tea Party movement that needs addressing, for it is a contradiction that, if left uncorrected, could turn a force with truly revolutionary potential into one more element of an oligarchic political stasis.
This movement, which as a culture attempts in many ways to be an imitation of the founders, is steering away from its origins and failing to take hold of perhaps the single most important insight of the entire American Revolution – that national change is the result of local change, not its cause.
It was not homesickness that led Thomas Jefferson to return to his home state of Virginia and decline a re-election to
Thomas Jeffersen
Congress after penning the Declaration of Independence. At the forefront in Jefferson’s mind on July 5, 1776, was not the welfare of the new nation as a whole, but rather the welfare of his home state of Virginia.
For Jefferson, Virginia was not simply one part of the ultimate goal of the United States, but in fact an ultimate goal in itself. It was at the local level that Jefferson knew provisions for the future freedom of his fellow Virginians had to be made.
Voltairine de Cleyre, an anarchist who lived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, greatly admired the founding generation and Jefferson in particular.
In her essay “Anarchism and American Traditions,” she wrote that one of the greatest traits of the American revolutionaries was their recognition “that the little must precede the great; that the local must be the basis of the general; that there can be a free federation only when there are free communities to federate; that the spirit of the latter is carried into the councils of the former.”
“Anarchism” today is often employed as a pejorative term rather than as a description of the political and economic philosophy taken seriously by such great minds as J.R.R. Tolkien, Henry David Thoreau, Thomas Jefferson and William Lloyd Garrison. In fact, de Cleyre’s political philosophy had many similarities with modern libertarianism and traditional conservatism.
Due to my work I am one of the lucky people who has the opportunity to stay for short periods in various cities around the globe, and mostly the Hotels we stay in are the best around, and depending where we are, the flavour is often special.
I remember a stay in the Hilton Amsterdam where John Lennon had stayed, and had a week in bed to “Give Peace a Chance”, but a recent stay in the Marriott Eastside Hotel, New York caught my eye.
Georgia O'Keefe, 1918 photograph by Alfred Stieglitz
Georgia O`Keeffe lived here for 10 years!
I remember, she was the lady who painted the large scale flowers, and in particular “The Petunia”, and when she painted that particular piece, she was living in a suite on the 32nd floor of the very hotel I was staying in.
Georgia O`Keeffe was born in 1887 in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. She studied art in Chicago, and New York, and became an Art Teacher at Columbia College, South Carolina.
One of her friends had shown some of her works to Alfred Stieglitz the photographer. She came to New York, and there the two eventually married, and moved later into the Shelton Hotel, Lexington Avenue, which is now called the Marriott Hotel, Eastside.
The Petunia picture was painted in 1924, and was one of a large number of her works that were exhibited in 1925.
Her husband Alfred Steiglitz died in 1946, after which she moved to an isolated ranch in New Mexico, but she continued to produce great works. Paintings of Desert Cliffs, Animal Bones, and Flowers are among the worlds most admired works of art, and she continued to draw, paint and sculpt until her death in 1986, aged 98.
Petunia - 1925
I rather liked a comment she made at the age of 90.
“Success takes more than talent. It takes a kind of nerve.”
Author Update – the Learning from Dogs author team are delighted to welcome Elliot to their ranks.
On April 1st I set the scene for the essays that I wanted to write for Learning from Dogs as follows:
I often ask myself just how effective the modern US schooling system is as a tool of education, and whether or not its costs outweigh its benefits. I hope to have at least a rough answer to this question in the final post of this series.
I intend to examine three topics:
– In what ways does the modern schooling system function as a positive tool for education?
– What costs involved in modern schooling hinder its ability as an educative tool, and even make it a negative influence on students?
– Considering the analyses put forth in the first two posts, do the costs or benefits or this system outweigh the other? On the whole, are school and education complements or antagonists?
The author
On April 15th, I looked at the positive aspects of the American educational system. Now I look at the other side of the coin, so to speak.
Intellectual failure
While in my last post I attempted to put a positive spin on the United States education system, I must here admit that I personally tend to view it in a much more negative light. There are several reasons for this, three of which I will try to elaborate on here.
My first major concern about education in the United States is its lack of critical thinking skills, which produces students who do not know how to question the “system” for what is truly is, but rather constantly take the context of things presented as fact (the two-party political system is a perfect example of this.)
I am not necessarily arguing that the specific curriculum is being chosen to suit this purpose, though I think this argument could be made (it would, however, require quite a bit of research.)
Rather, consider the required courses – very rarely do you see courses on economics or logic. While some schools offer these as electives, they are almost never required. This is quite sad, as a sound ability to question the established authorities and the nature of the world as a whole requires a strong background in these two fields in particular.
The history of economics is a history of government policies that have failed because of their disregard for this very topic.
The economist Ludwig von Mises wrote that “the unpopularity of economics is the result of its analysis of the effects of privileges. It is impossible to invalidate the economists’ demonstration that all privileges hurt the interests of the rest of the nation or at least a great part of it.”
A second negative aspect of the American education system is what it does to the human mind. It essentially takes the mind and makes it into a factory that is able to take in information and then spit it back out. I think there is a direct relationship between the formerly mentioned lack of classes on logic and economics and this production of human beings who are essentially taught to be cogs in a machine.
Economically, the schooling system can, in this light, be seen as a massive subsidy to corporations, who are handed people already trained in how to listen then do and repeat.
Finally, I must admit that I am skeptical as to the true purpose of compulsory education. I have rarely in history seen it as a tool for true learning, as it seems to tend to rather be a system of control. I see no reason why our school system would be any different.
J T Gatto's book
John Taylor Gatto, a former school teacher and avid critic of mandatory schooling, has written that the purpose of modern schooling is a combination of six different functions:
The adaptive function – Establish a fixed reaction to authority.
The integrating function – People taught to conform are predictable, and are easier to use in a large labor force.
The directive function – School determines each student’s social role.The differentiating function – Children are trained as far as they need to go according to their prescribed social role
The selective function – Tag the unfit with poor grades and disciplinary actions clearly enough that their peers will see them as unsuitable for reproduction, helping along natural selection.
The propaedeutic function – A small fraction is quietly taught how to manage the rest.
I am not sure if I completely agree with Gatto, but he makes some interesting points. In my final article, I’ll attempt to weight the costs against the benefits, and see which comes out on top.
…. is how Gavin Hewitt recently headed up a post on his BBC Europe blog. The headline caught my eye and then when I read the full article it seemed as yet another piece of western civilisation was sliding into chaos. Maybe it’s my age!
Gavin Hewitt
Gavin Hewitt is the BBC’s Europe Editor and as you can see from his bio, Gavin is a very experienced reporter. Here’s how this Eurozone article starts:
Friday [April 23rd, Ed] will be remembered as the day the euro needed rescuing. Sure it is Greece that has asked to be bailed out but it was still a day that the architects of the single currency had never envisaged. For when it came to it, there were no plans to save a euro member in trouble.
You see what I mean about grabbing one’s attention!
In fact the article is so powerful that I am going to run the risk of incurring the wrath of the BBC’s legal department by republishing it in full.
Learning from Dogs 