115 Comments

1. Skookumchuk:

Two observations.

First, there is nothing so beguiling as the discovery of a truth that has been suppressed. At some point, at least a few of these students will grow up to be people who dedicate themselves to debunking this crap.

Second, when reading stuff like this I sometimes think of the fire chief in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, who is in charge of a squad that burns books. In the movie, the fire chief asks Montag, the doubting fireman who is the books protagonist, if he is ever curious as to what the books have to say. They say only nonsense, says the fire chief. His next line, as he angrily overturns a shelf of books hidden in a clandestine library, is something like “In one century, they say that a man has free will. In the next century, they say that everything is pre-ordained.” The curious thing about revisionism is that the writer has to know the traditional history in order to overturn it. All these people know the accepted version of events – they just don’t want you to know.

May 23, 2005 - 8:05 am 2. charlotte:

Orwell as non-fiction.

May 23, 2005 - 8:07 am 3. RBMN:

This is what happens to engineers who only sit at the drawing board (the university,) and never head into the workshop (real life.) At the drawing board, all machines work just fine and your hands never get soiled.

May 23, 2005 - 8:27 am 4. Frederick:

We have already seen the initial outline of how the struggle between the still inchoate blogosphere and the MSM seems likely to play out. The MSM already has begun to forfeit its claims to special authority or to indispensability. But we have not yet begun to see even the faintest of traces of how the parallel struggle with what we might call the MSE, the main stream educational establishment, will play out. That will be a very different struggle because individual consumption of the MSM product is voluntary. The MSE, however, is the very embodiment of what the MSM has only aspired to be, a structure that not only generates intellectual content, but also has actual power to maintain a monopoly and to require consumption. The MSM has no licensing and credentialing power, mandatory readership and viewership laws, or almost universal assumption that reading and viewing is needed to prosper economically. This will be a very different struggle. It will be interesting to see how institutions evolve or die as it plays out.

May 23, 2005 - 8:29 am 5. Ron:

The Marxist’s have never really gone away, they are here in the United States in the classrooms and in the Teachers Unions. They were set back but now they have regrouped. Their battlefield is now the classroom and the big artillery is the New Think of the department of truth and education.

May 23, 2005 - 8:35 am 6. PJ:

Skook, you’re right–it’s tantalizing to think that one has uncovered a suppressed truth. That’s what drove the leftism of the 60s. It was sexy! Now, unfortunately, those suppressed “truths” are codified into education at every level. Strangely enough, it’s the immigrants from real repressive societies who balk at this BS. A critique of any society other than US is studiously avoided. The Americans have been largely bullied into self-loathing.

I recently talked to a young filmmaker whose next film will be about the American eugenics movement and how it caused the Holocaust. What really surprised me was that his pals all knew about the subject and voiced their approval.

May 23, 2005 - 8:40 am 7. chuck:

This whole situation arouses a deep disgust in me. Is it becoming true that the only necessary qualification of a teacher is having the right opinions? No wonder the college and university faculties attract the people they do.

How does one change a self selected group like college faculties? Perhaps tenure has outlived its usefulness in public institutions.

May 23, 2005 - 8:41 am 8. charlotte:

To be honest, the US has lagged behind other industrialized countries in the field of education, but with vastly increased funding and sensitivity training for faculty and students alike, America soon will have the finest re-education system in the world.

May 23, 2005 - 8:46 am 9. Rick Ballard:

Frederick,

The battle against MSE indoctrination camps will be won at two levels. One level is political through control of local school boards and the other is through market forces – private schools that supplant indoctrination centers. The indoctrination centers located within the blue castles are susceptible only to economic forces right now – which is why extension of the voucher program is so important.

Beyond the blue castle moat both options are viable. This morning I’m working on final budget preparation for a pre-school/K-3 model that anticipates a 6/1 ratio at the pre-school level and a 24/1 ratio at K-3. New facilities are budgeted at a 20 year amortization and include anything you would find in most elementary schools. The breakeven per student cost comes in at $4,200 while the local school school district is whining about subsisting on a bit less than $7,000. This is in the Bay Area so the private school costs are about 20% higher than they would be on a national average.

Those wishing to see an end to the indoctrination centers should focus on volunteering to help in school board elections or perhaps consider running themselves.

May 23, 2005 - 8:58 am 10. David Thomson:

ìIs it becoming true that the only necessary qualification of a teacher is having the right opinions?î

Is this a rhetorical question? Are you merely pretending that you donít already know the answer? There is nothing particularly surprising going on at Brooklyn College. It is simply a reminder that anyone possessing a soft science Ph.D. should be considered an idiot until proven otherwise. This sort of degree is usually awarded only to intellectual sluts of the liberal establishment. And yes, there are a number of exceptions—but this is unfortunately the general rule. What is a tenured member of the faculty? You can almost take for granted that this is an individual who would sell out their own mother to get ahead in academia. Am I going off the deep end? Are my words over the top? No, I am calmly explaining just how bad the situation has deteriorated. I easily have the facts to back up my assertions.

May 23, 2005 - 9:04 am 11. Kevin P:

Roger:

The Catholic Church had Popes, Bishops and cardinals to make sure proper Catholic doctrine was taught from the pulpit. The Secular Orthodoxy has College and High School teachers and they are far more rigid then the church.Catholics don’t try to pretend that they are not a religion. The Secular Orthodoxy tries to pass off the myth that they are not practicing a religion that depends on faith and that they are just presenting scientific proof. They do not present multiple thoeries and let the student draw his own conclusions. They specifically shut down the thinking process and they are programming these kids.

May 23, 2005 - 9:10 am 12. David Thomson:

ìThe Secular Orthodoxy tries to pass off the myth that they are not practicing a religion that depends on faith and that they are just presenting scientific proof.î

Exactly. And thatís what makes them so dangerous. One should always beware of somebody who blatantly lies. However, the individual indulging is self deception is often far more dangerous. This fool will look you right into the face and insist that their views are the result of objective and dispassionate study.

May 23, 2005 - 9:23 am 13. Silicon valley Jim:

Must prospective public school teachers accept a professor’s argument that “white English” is the “oppressors’ language” in order to enter the profession?

Indeed. Tragically, failure to teach grammatically correct English virtually condemns the students to poverty. That failure can take more than one form, of course: “bilingual” education, which is usually unilingual education in a language other than English, does it quite effectively. Books teaching high-paying skills, such as software development and circuit design, are quite easy to find in “white English”; as far as I know, they don’t exist at all in “black English” or “ebonics”, or whatever it’s called this year, and far fewer of them are available in, for example, Spanish.

I don’t believe that our primary and secondary schools should be the equivalent of vocational schools, but I think that teaching language transcends that. The languages of the affluent in the twenty-first century are English and Chinese. Whatever comes next is a distant third place.

May 23, 2005 - 9:44 am 14. Roger:

Japanese will also be useful.

May 23, 2005 - 9:50 am 15. chuck:

Indeed. Tragically, failure to teach grammatically correct English virtually condemns the students to poverty.

I remember making that argument to the members of a commune of teachers from Columbia Teachers College back in 1968. I added the point that racial prejudice depended as much on speech patterns as it did on skin color. Evidently I didn’t get my point across. Or rather, I missed the obvious and simpler solution of outlawing the Oppressor’s English.

May 23, 2005 - 9:54 am 16. David Thomson:

Here is Jamie Glazovís interview with Stanley Rothman regarding ìPurging Conservatives from College Facultiesî:

ìI taught at Smith for almost 40 years. Increasingly job candidates in the social sciences were on the left and eventually those hired were also on the left and more or less took over the relevant departments. People like me became a minority. We may be on the verge of a reversal of that pattern but we have no evidence on that either.î

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=18118

May 23, 2005 - 10:00 am 17. David Thomson:

Here is Jamie Glazovís interview with Stanley Rothman regarding ìPurging Conservatives from College Facultiesî:

ìI taught at Smith for almost 40 years. Increasingly job candidates in the social sciences were on the left and eventually those hired were also on the left and more or less took over the relevant departments. People like me became a minority. We may be on the verge of a reversal of that pattern but we have no evidence on that either.î

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=18118

May 23, 2005 - 10:00 am 18. chuck:

The languages of the affluent in the twenty-first century are English and Chinese.

I assume you mean Mandarin Chinese. I believe only the written form is universal, though that might be changing.

May 23, 2005 - 10:02 am 19. Frederick:

Rick Ballard: You’re right that political and market-force elements will play an important part. The blogosphere also will play an important part. Without it, e.g., no one would even have known about K. C. Johnson’s tenure fight at Brooklyn. We also can see dimly a few clues about what is going to unfold. The exponential growth in home schooling and the growing trend toward converting home schooling into cooperative schooling. The obvious, but yet unrealized, potential of computer-based instruction. The decline in male enrollment at universities that we’ve already seen. The discovery by parents that they still will be paying on their own student loans when their children reach college age. The astonishing time it takes most state university students to complete their bachelors’ degrees. The increasingly obvious decline in the quality of Ivy League and Oxbridge educations. The expansion of required university courses in diversity and composition at the same time many liberal arts and social science departments are threatened with declining enrollments. The growing use of adjunct professors for undergraduate instruction. The inability of most liberal arts and social science Ph.D. programs to create non-academic markets for their products. The growing realization that liberal arts and social science Ph.D. programs are Ponzi schemes. The almost vertical decline in university professors’ prestige everywhere outside the academic echo chamber.

May 23, 2005 - 10:06 am 20. Catherine:

I’ve been spending a lot of time tracking ed politics, but I had no idea what was going on at Brooklyn College.

This falls under the ‘it’s always worse than you think’ category.

I came across the ‘history and social studies supplements’ while researching math education — and in the process I think I solved a mystery.

but first, here’s a quiz

For those of you who have grade-school aged children, how many of your kids are learning probability, estimation, data-gathering, and charts-and-graphs?

Can your children make stem and leaf charts ?

I was mystified by all the data collection and graphing that goes on in contemporary math texts until last night, when I skimmed the Fordham Foundation’s The State of State Math Standards 2005.

These two passages tell the story, I think:

With few exceptions, state standards documents at all grade levels [in virtually all states] include strands of standards devoted to probability and statistics. Standards of this type almost invariably begin in Kindergarten (and sometimes pre- Kindergarten). Utah, for example, asks its Kindergartners to “understand basic concepts of probability,” an impossible demand since probabilities are numbers between 0 and 1 and Kindergartners do not have a clear grasp of fractions.

and, from New York state’s math standards:

Students use ideas of uncertainty to illustrate that mathematics involves more than exactness when dealing with everyday situations.

So there you have it.

All of these teaching ‘innovations’ come from constructivism, the one-hundred-year-old educational philosophy most of us know as progressivism.

Constructivism almost invariably teaches relativism (except when it comes to Israel, it seems).

There is no one right culture, no one right moral value, no one right answer.

It’s easy enough to create a constructivist history-and-social-studies curriculum.

But how do you introduce relativism into grade school mathematics?

Here’s how: you turn math into a branch of English Language Arts and Social Studies.

Have the kids study probability and estimation!

Here’s what the report’s authors have to say about this:

This “Key Idea” is misleading and a poor choice of category

for performance indicators. It mistakenly associates

ambiguities inherent in choosing mathematical models

for “everyday situations” with mathematics itself.

May 23, 2005 - 10:34 am 21. Catherine:

PJ

I recently talked to a young filmmaker whose next film will be about the American eugenics movement and how it caused the Holocaust.

This notion is being formally taught in a new supplement from the most popular social studies curriculum in the country, “Facing History and Ourselves,” which has been in use in our schools since 1982.

The purpose of the supplementary resource book FHAO published in 2002, titled Race and Membership in American History: The Eugenics Movement (RMAH), is even more poisonous. FHAO wants teachers and students to infer a causal connection between the American eugenics movement and the Holocaust; that is, to infer that Americans and American science, however indirectly, were responsible for Nazi Germany’s extermination policies and the Holocaust.

RMAH makes it clear that few American scientists subscribed to the eugenics movement by World War II. Nevertheless, the chapters on “The Nazi Connection” so cleverly connect Hitler’s use of the ideas of German scientists on racial “eugenics” to an acknowledgment of the leadership of American scientists, educators, and policy makers in the eugenics movement that Americans appear almost directly responsible for the Final Solution. The net effect is the discrediting of American society.

[snip]

Facing History and Ourselves has just begun to introduce this book at workshops and to develop an on-line course based on the book. Social studies teachers are likely to accept FHAO’s implicit thesis about who was responsible for the Holocaust because its resource books are likely to be their only source of information on the topic.

Stealth Curriculum

May 23, 2005 - 10:54 am 22. Kevin P:

Roger:

Martin Luther King was a “moral retard”. The religous community that drove the campaign to end slavery were “moral retards” Lech Walsea was a “moral retard”. Ghandi was a “moral retard.” Mother Theresa was a “moral retard.” Sharansky was a “moral retard”. Malcom X was a “moral retard” Solzhenitsyn was a “moral retard”. Not only that but they are not capable of performing moral acts. It is a good thing that we have these professors in place to tell the young of our country what morons these people are and that to follow there example is the sign of moral decay and stupidity. Someday Shortell will be recognized as the true leader that opened our eyes and showed us what a mistake we made by holding these people up for praise when they should have been ridiculed and shown to be the idiots they really were.If we have these type of people performing those type of faux moral acts the civlized world will surely crumble.

May 23, 2005 - 10:56 am 23. Rick Ballard:

Catherine,

I don’t have school age children and none of my grandchildren will ever attend a public indoctrination center but your criticism is only valid if you consider the local indoctrination center’s purpose to be education. The example you provide is decent evidence of the true purpose of the establishment.

If you’re a parent living within the confines of a blue castle or in territory controlled by blue castle functionaries then you should consider either the home schooling/ cooperative home schooling that Frederick mentions or a non-progressive private school. That is. if you wish your child to be educated rather than indoctrinated.

May 23, 2005 - 10:57 am 24. charlotte:

Catherine,

So, does “one plus one” become more than one but less than three and more or less a fixed quantity unless it is approximated for fluid real circumstances or recognized as an artificial construct of oppressive exactitude found in western society? Our kindergarteners are getting real smart!

(We homeschooled ours.)

May 23, 2005 - 11:00 am 25. Knucklehead:

Rick, Frederick, Kevin, Catherine, (and others I’m missing):

You have each apparently given some independent thought to fighting and, we can all hope, winning this battle with the constructionists/progressives/marxists/whatever the heck they are for the recovery of our nation’s educational system.

This will not be an easy battle to fight, let alone to win. The MSM can be swarmed. The MSE (thanks, Frederick!) is compartmentalized and not nearly as susceptible to attack or rehabilitation.

The average parent doesn’t begin to discover, if they ever do discover, that their children are being ill-served by our public education establishment until they are well into “grammar” school. Typically 3rd or 4th or 5th grade. When they finally do discover this they quickly become wedged into trying to solve the problem for their own child. Move them out of public school and/or figure out how to educate them despite the school. That rarely leaves most people with either the time or energy to wage the battle required with the system.

And just about the time the average parent has begun to figure out how to function despite the school their child is in the child moves on to the next phase. Elementary into middle school, then HS, then college. The controlling powers have divided this problem into small bits they can easily control and we cannot easily influence. It really is a masterpiece of divide and conquer they’ve run on us.

May 23, 2005 - 11:01 am 26. Silicon valley Jim:

Japanese will also be useful.

I agree. There are, however, only approximately 125 million Japanese speakers in the world, compared with 1.3 billion or so Chinese “speakers” (more accurately, readers).

I assume you mean Mandarin Chinese. I believe only the written form is universal, though that might be changing.

Fair point. I really meant just the written form, which, I’m told by some knowledgeable people, has enough in common with kanji (the ideograph/pictograph written form of Japanese) that those who can read Chinese can read kanji to a considerable extent. I’m also told by some different knowledgeable people that, even within mainland China, the spoken languages can be very different from region to region. Those more knowledgeable than I should feel free to correct my understanding on this.

May 23, 2005 - 11:04 am 27. chuck:

Catherine,

Apart from the politics, as a mathematician I would posit that probability is one of the more subtle areas and contains more philosophy in its interpretation than other parts of mathematics. As to charts, graphs, and probability forming the foundations of a mathematical education, no way is this good. Charts and graphs fall under visualization, which is certainly useful, but contains little of the intellectual discipline necessary for higher math nor do they develop the computational skills and familiarity with numbers needed for algebra. It is worth teaching probability but at a later stage, perhaps in highschool, which is when I discovered it for myself in games involving dice.

May 23, 2005 - 11:06 am 28. chuck:

“Facing History and Ourselves,”

Geez, a heading from the NY Times. Just what are we supposed to face? Nevermind, it was a rhetorical question. Want to bet the eugenics supplement doesn’t go after Margaret Sanger and attack Planned Parenthood? And what about those evil dog breeders, not to mention the cattle industry? Will we all be required to participate in state arranged marriages where the partners are chosen by lot? I am just pointing out that the ideas of selective breeding are widespread and used every day. One of the problems I have always had with the left was their need to outlaw reality in their rush to perfection.

May 23, 2005 - 11:26 am 29. Cosmo:

The policing of ideological conformity, the shaming and denial of opportunity meted out to those who deviate from orthodoxy, the mandated sensitivity and group guilt — all reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution, with its “struggle sessions” and “correct thought.”

Chinese communists did this, ostensibly, to strengthen the regime, but ended up using it to discredit political enemies and for intramural squabbling over the spoils of corruption. The academy is no different, with the exception that it campaigns actively against the society and government which serve as its hosts.

May 23, 2005 - 11:49 am 30. truepeers:

I found Roger Scruton’s comments on home schooling and private schools of interest:

http://rightreason.ektopos.com/archives/001466.html

“Nietzsche pointed out long ago that, in a democracy, state institutions will quickly be colonised by resentment. (He used the French word, ressentiment, in order to emphasize the deep and pre-rational sources of the emotion.) Not able to win people by the normal means of cooperation, concession and mutual respect, the resentful will seek to co-opt the power of the state in order to break down resistance to their punitive goals. In the sphere of education the power of the state is enormous. Legal measures compel parents to educate their children, deprive them of any choice among the schools offered by the state, and impose a curriculum and timetable that transmit the secular and libertine morality best suited to inducing dependency on the state. I donít say that there is an intention to produce dependency on the state: dependency arises by ëan invisible handí, once the egalitarians have succeeded in taking control of the educational network.”

May 23, 2005 - 12:23 pm 31. tcobb:

Silicon Valley Jim—

I got to know a man from China who was over here receiving training. A lot of what he said about life in China was really interesting, but one thing that got me was that very few Chinese ever venture far from where they are born. I was told that if you are from point A in China and you travel a hundred miles in any direction, you can barely understand the language that people speak in the new vicinity.

May 23, 2005 - 12:39 pm 32. Gidgiddoni:

I thought it interesting that they mentioned the American eugenics movement. It wasn’t really an “American” movement in the first place, but was the darling of the “progressive” movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The American Left would love to forget this. It fits the “progressive” ideology nicely: unbounded faith in “science” as a solution to all social and human ills. The Nazis were, in fact, dedicated socialists, which was why they were called the National Socialist party, and like many socialists of the time thought eugenics was a wonderful idea. They were highly admired by American “progressives” during the 1930s for their wonderfully enlightened and organized methods of weeding out “undesirables” of all kinds. History books often read like no one had any idea of the Nazi’s killings until we freed the concentration camps. Not so. Much of the American Left was applauding right up until the war started. After WWII, this was all quietly buried as everyone saw where eugenics really lead. Suddenly no one was a eugenicist, and no one had ever *been* a eugenecist, rather like just after 9/11 suddenly no one was anti-American or anti-war, and no one had ever *been* anti-American or anti-war, as the results of these ideologies were present in full color on every TV in the States. Even in the 2004 election the Democrats’ public faces, like John Kerry and most of the Senate, did their best to pretend this even while its pundits and supporters ranted and raved.

If Nazism was a right-wing movement, Karl Marx was a reactionary.

P.S. Plenty of the anti-semitism from the eugenics days seems to linger in some nasty corners of the far left, judging by their treatment of Israel.

May 23, 2005 - 12:47 pm 33. Kevin P:

Frederick:

“The inability of Liberal Arts and Social science Ph.D programs to create non-academic markets for their products”

I think you are technically correct but in a way they are creating jobs for there grads outside of the college enviroment. The government.There is a growing trend in government circles to hire these grads to help explain or to help implement the growing numbers of social programs that the government is artificially creating as the the state takes over more and more controll of society.Because these programs are shielded from the performance requirement of the market the quality of the product is less important then the idealogical intent. The government hires these soft science grads to study, create and implement their “programs” that are going to change our society into the state controlled utopia that they have invented out of thin air. And because these programs tend to expand and replicate each other and have no profit or loss judgement that weeds out the bad in the marketplace the quality of these programs are never held up to proper scrutiny.And of course as more people work for the government they vote to keep their jobs and elect people who will guarantee their employment. The cycle of waste is never ending.

May 23, 2005 - 12:50 pm 34. Ron:

Cosmo, your comments “the mandated sensitivity and group guilt — all reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution, with its “struggle sessions” and “correct thought.” are right on, I never thought of it like that.

How many know what a “struggle session” is I wonder? I had a young Chinese man working for me and I noticed that he had a limp and when I asked about what was wrong he told me that he was injured chopping down trees. He was well educated and I couldn’t see him doing that and he said that he had been in a penal battalion and he wasn’t doing it because he had wanted to do it. He used to hate his days off because of the “struggle sessions” and the process of gaining the “correct thought.” The PC and cultural sensitivity training in our educational system is right out of the Chinese Penal Camps.

May 23, 2005 - 12:52 pm 35. WichitaBoy:

chuck,

Right, right, right, and right! A better scale than [right &lt --- &gt left], it seems to me, is [wishful thinking &lt --- &gt brutally honest]. Like you, I would like many of the things believed by the “left” to be true but they don’t pass the honesty test. Somebody said that the essential difference is between those who focus on an imaginary perfect future and those who focus on the consequences of a known imperfect past.

Catherine,

Professional statisticians have profound disagreement over the meaning of probability. There are two main schools. One believes that probability deals only with long-term frequency measurements (”frequentists”). The other (”Bayesians”) believes that probability is a measurement of the state of one’s knowledge. I am a Bayesian. The frequentist dogma completely ruled during the Twentieth Century and it became difficult for Bayesians to get jobs or publish papers.

The ultimate meaning of probability is a deep philosophical matter which is unlikely to be resolved by grade-school children.

May 23, 2005 - 12:59 pm 36. Buddy Larsen:

The Fordham Foundation pedagogic brief for introducing probability and an emphasis on the pictoral into lower elementary ‘rithmetic is enough to make one wonder whether or not the blatant dumb-down of K-12 in the last few decades is merely a result of the neo-liberal notion of freedom and self-esteem, or a deliberate partisan conspiracy to put doofusses in the voting booth.

Homeschoolers, I salute you, and bow deeply before the nobility of your commitment.

May 23, 2005 - 1:10 pm 37. truepeers:

Coming late to yesterday’s discussion on anti- to pro-American conversion stories, and linking it to this one – highlighted for me by the Brooklyn twit’s comments on religion – i would like to note that the fear of religion and Keith Thompson’s conversion story point to a common problem.

Keith Thompson was finally moved by his consciousness of an *event*, by the Iraqi election and the left’s reaction to it. Similarly, religion is all about the memory of real or imagined events – i.e. revelations and their ritualization/institutionalization.

On the other hand, the academy of the Enlightenment does not respect real or imagined events – what Marxists used to call the epiphenomenal – and it is always looking behind them to ascertain and deconstruct the purported structures or forces that shape “the deep flow of history”.

I would suggest that to be in touch with the fact that human consciousness is immersed in eventfulness – that the essential structure of human culture is scenic – is to distinguish oneself from those focussed on abstract metaphysical renderings of the human scene, i.e. those who do not acknowledge the ways in which their intellectual creations are essentially scenic; similarly, it is to distinguish oneself from those who see behind every scene the workings of some hegemonic or patriarchal forces. In other words, it is to distinguish oneself from those who seek, like the mystics the academicians so often are, for the purported deep structures, or the masculine and western conspiracy, behind the “epiphenomenal” scene.

The mystic/academic must scapegoat the scene itself, instead of examining how the scene could have come into being as a product of the sacrificial behaviours in which he is evidently swimming.

Some will be moved by events like 9/11 to see the world in new ways, to better understand our dependence on the sacrificial scene; but many will remain trapped in their abstract renderings of the human scene, continuing to scapegoat the great Satan in order to uphold their essentially conspiratorial beliefs in deeper forces or structures behind events.

Western culture was once in touch with the fact that human consciousness is founded in eventfulness because it was religious and religion is essentially that which remembers founding events. Those of us who have strayed beyond religion understood in terms of the *ritualistic* remembering of events, need not return to religion as ritual, nor lose faith; but we need to return to some form of respect for the singularity of the human historical experience of the human scene/event, if we are to build a new sensibility that can free itself from the abstract and mystical formulations of the gnostic academicians.

We must live again in the reality that we are engaged in a conversation on a historical scene that is, in part, a commemoration of the first human scene, the event that founded human consciousness. I would remind that there are some academics honestly pursuing this reality, and some interest and support might be given to the few worthy humanists who persevere among the neo-fascists of the universities. My favorite scholars in this respect are those who follow the works of Rene Girard and Eric Gans. But I see signs of others asking relevant questions aobut the eventful or scenic basis of human culture.

May 23, 2005 - 1:14 pm 38. erp:

Our public schools, once the envy of the world, started their decline about 30 years ago when in the interest of fairness, control was taken away from locally elected school boards and transferred to anonymous bureaucrats controlled by the teachers unions at the state and federal boards of education. It worked and now one school is just as bad as another.

Horror stories about our education system are legion, but there isn’t anything we can do directly to improve matters. It doesn’t do for irate parents to storm the public schools and demand changes because they will take it out on your child. The stakes are very high. Billions flow through the hands of the education establishment and they won’t give it up easily.

It would be unconscionable to send a child to a public school, so parents must make difficult choices. Private schools are very costly but well worth the sacrifice. Home schooling, cooperatives of home schoolers, and charter schools are other options.

As more people keep their kids out of the public school system, their revenues will decline, so the edbiz gestapo will try to get home schooling and charter schools outlawed. There have already been rumblings about that. We must stay alert and not allow any further interference from the government in our children’s education.

An informed electorate is our only defense against the forces of ignorance determined to destroy our way of life.

May 23, 2005 - 1:18 pm 39. Skookumchuk:

Gidgiddoni:

Very,very true. The left loves to forget – lives to forget – the harm it has caused. And when it can’t forget, shifts the blame to those it hates. But as I said in my comment up top, people always rebel against the heavy hand of state indoctrination.

Regarding the international “progressive” love affair with eugenics, the Swedish National Institute for Racial Hygiene (now, there is a phrase) was dismantled only in 1976.

May 23, 2005 - 1:18 pm 40. PeterUK:

Taking into account that Gramsci died in 1937,it has taken the Right too long a time to realise that,to paraphrase another famous marxist,”If you grab them by the culture,their hearts and minds will follow”.

http://www.theory.org.uk/ctr-gram.htm#hege

The left has be busy deconstruction the West’s cultural icons for decades,to provide a new reality it is first necessary to destroy the old one. Make the people uncertain then provide a new certainty.

May 23, 2005 - 1:34 pm 41. PeterUK:

Sorry should be “deconstructing”

May 23, 2005 - 1:37 pm 42. chuck:

Gidgiddoni,

Much of the American Left was applauding right up until the war started.

Well, it was certainly current and made its way into the popular literature. Do you have any links that would document this in more detail and list the people involved and their affiliations?

As I say, the practice of selective breeding is widespread and certainly underlies the interaction between genetics and the evolution of populations through sexual selection. In light of that, the question becomes not one of eradication of the idea, but rather one of where it went wrong. One point would certainly be the elevation of academic prejudice to state policy.

WichitaBoy,

When I wear the physicist hat I am a frequentist; I don’t believe that the temperature of a body is a reflection of my (lack of) knowledge of its state. Jaynes got into trouble on this point. Of course, from the point of view of a physicist, the true ergodicity of a system is almost irrelevant: what experiment is sufficiently accurate to find a discrepancy?

On the other hand, when wearing the engineering hat I am definitely a Bayesian. I almost think that there are two separate disciplines that go under the name of probability.

Re: the philosophical side. I was impressed when I discovered that John Maynard Keynes had written a whole book on the subject, Treatise on Probabilty. Not an easy read, I might add.

May 23, 2005 - 1:37 pm 43. chuck:

Skookumchuk,

the Swedish National Institute for Racial Hygiene (now, there is a phrase) was dismantled only in 1976.

Didn’t the Swedish socialist party come to power in the early thirties as sort of a democratic fascist party? I have read this, but have not yet got up the energy to track it down. If you have more information I would be glad to hear it.

May 23, 2005 - 1:46 pm 44. Buddy Larsen:

If the current debate going on in Sweden as to whether or not legal sex with animals is or isn’t good for society, I’d say that that 1976 dismantling of the Swedish National Institute for Racial Hygiene was probably a mistake.

May 23, 2005 - 1:50 pm 45. Skookumchuk:

chuck:

I’m pretty sure the Swedish Social Democrats started up before World War I.

May 23, 2005 - 1:58 pm 46. madawaskan:

Roger-

The California Board of Education-

I cannot tell you how truly depressing that is. Jeds and Pads- disgusting-I guess the “furniture” keeps them from complicating things with the truth.

Ugh! Ya there ain’t any words are there.

May 23, 2005 - 2:00 pm 47. Buddy Larsen:

Truepeers, great post…I agree that we must either be optimistic or feign it (just in case the lack is wrongheaded). It’s the only way to fight those who well understand the human need to transcend and will therefore always ascribe it–and everything else that doesn’t put the whip in their hand–as mere false consciousness.

May 23, 2005 - 2:03 pm 48. Buddy Larsen:

Wrt the California thing, surely there is some countervailing voice against such indoctrination? It ain’t just gonna stand, is it?

May 23, 2005 - 2:08 pm 49. madawaskan:

Hey didn’t OBL point to Sweden as the one OK place in western civilization during his “gold robe video tape”?

Pratter dom Sverige?

I think the re-educators might add that to the list of languages given their need to appease.

May 23, 2005 - 2:09 pm 50. Terrye:

Here in Indiana I don’t think you will hear anyone talk about English as anything other than the language we speak in the normal world. What happens in Brooklyn is their problem. No wonder they are blue up there.

I heard Chrichton say that he thought there was a parallel between the eugenics movement and the global warming. In both instances politics controlled the science.

The truth is there are some people today that look at the modern day genetics industry and see some parallels with eugiencs as well. A lot of progressives like Margaret Sanger were ahderents of the movement because they beleived they could breed out poverty and “feeble mindedness”.

The Holocaust was an evil in and of itself.

May 23, 2005 - 2:11 pm 51. charlotte:

If the current debate going on in Sweden as to whether or not legal sex with animals is or isn’t good for society

Guess you didn’t sit through Albee’s play. Verdict is it’s OK, at least metaphorically

May 23, 2005 - 2:17 pm 52. Buddy Larsen:

(*whew*)

May 23, 2005 - 2:21 pm 53. Terrye:

I think the whole purpose to the No Child Left Behind Act was to make education more about education and less about indoctrination and babysitting.

Teachers might no like it, but parents don’t like having teenage children that can not read or do basic math either.

I read a novel by the Jodi Picoult, “Second Glance” that harkened back to the eugenics movement in Vermont. Strange but interesting book.

May 23, 2005 - 2:22 pm 54. Rick Ballard:

“Wrt the California thing, surely there is some countervailing voice against such indoctrination? It ain’t just gonna stand, is it?”

Why do think I’m involved in planning a new school? It’s like the sand dollar story, you can’t save’em all but you’re bound to do what you can. BTW – my grandkids are out of CA. Knucklehead was on target regarding the time constraints of parents of school agers (at least at the elementary level), The other factor is the fact that parents with kids that age are in many cases still working through indepence issues involving their own parents – they’re still in the process of discovering how much their parents have learned since they left home.

May 23, 2005 - 2:26 pm 55. chuck:

Skookumchuk,

I’m pretty sure the Swedish Social Democrats started up before World War I.

Yes, that seems to be right:

“from 1917 until today Social Democrats have been in the Cabinet all the time except:

* 1922-1926ÔøΩ

* 1926-1932

* summer 1936

* 1976-1982

* 1991-1994 ”

In fact, the history of Sweden in the last century seems to be pretty interesting. There was a lot of social and intellectual exchange with Germany throughout the first half of the century, but the outlawing of political uniforms in the early thirties and the abysmal failure of the fascist parties in elections seems to indicate that they didn’t fall into the fascist orbit politically.

May 23, 2005 - 2:26 pm 56. Buddy Larsen:

Terrye, it backs into human cloning…also a strange idea in that no one seems to understand their own feelings about it. I know I don’t, it’s just too tabula rasa.

May 23, 2005 - 2:27 pm 57. Buddy Larsen:

Chuck, no, but they didn’t fight it, either.

May 23, 2005 - 2:39 pm 58. Luther McLeod:

“The government hires these soft science grads to study, create and implement their “programs”.”

Just an aside but I have for years had a Sunday morning hobby of studying the want ads for trends in who is being hired for what and for how much.

Anecdotally, of course, I can say that fully half of all ads are for social constructs/problems. Not all are government, but the ones that aren’t are the ones that have been outsourced to private industry. I also believe the total number of such jobs has gone way up in the past five or ten years.

The education issue is most daunting. I believe it is the most important issue we face as a country. Interesting for me is that ‘home schooling’ is yet another issue/subject that I have had to alter my viewpoints on. Not that I was completely unaware but once again I learn a bunch at Roger’s place.

May 23, 2005 - 2:48 pm 59. John Boyle:

I have not been able to read all of the comments, so this may be unoriginal. The objective of this reeducation enterprise is also to render the American population uncompetitive. Evidence of this is already widespread. This also implies that future populations will be poorer, being less well educated in any productive skills, and less able to find escape for their own children in more costly educational alternatives. In short, this is a multi-pronged effort to expand and perpetuate the restive proletariate in anticipation of the overthrow of the capitalist system – and with it, any hope for enduring future democracy here.

It is no wonder those like Bill Cosby, who are issuing valid and courageous warning calls to already ruined communities, will be attacked and silenced in any and every way possible.

May 23, 2005 - 2:51 pm 60. Old Dad:

Some suggestions:

1. Reform teacher licensing regulations. Require only subject matter expertise, and a Bachelor’s or equivalent (including experience in a related field).

2. Implement merit/ results based pay schedules for teachers across the board.

3. One and two above will absolutely kill the Ed schools. No one in their right minds would bother with a worthless education degree.

4. I’m not sure how unions work jurisdiction by jurisdiction, but I do know that in soem school systems, union membership is mandatory and dues are automatically deducted from teacher pay checks. Teachers should be able to opt out.

5. Support private and parochial schools.

6. Eliminate tenure at all levels.

May 23, 2005 - 2:54 pm 61. Catherine:

Golly, all kinds of good stuff here—

Knucklehead describes my experience exactly.

I had a honeymoon period with our extravagantly funded public school ($18,000 per student or thereabouts) up until the end of 4th grade.

Now I’m scrambling to teach my ‘typical’ son math, and, on another front, to force the school to offer my older autistic son the vocational program to which he is legally entitled.

I also await the results of the new placement tests instituted by the middle school to whittle down the number of kids assigned to ‘Phase 4′ math, the ‘accelerated’ class.

Since Christopher was the very last child in the school to go into the accelerated class — thanks to my on-the-side homeschooling — I’m assuming he’s going to be the first cut (though I could be wrong).

That will mean another battle.

This is a battle we intend to win, and Ed is so good at these things that I ought to just calm down and not worry about it.

But the whole thing is hanging over me.

At this point I find dealing with the district to be a constant struggle, eating up time, energy, and money.

And resistance seems futile.

I should probably add that our individual teachers are always good people and often excellent teachers to boot.

But often they’re as oppressed and bulldozed as I am.

At the moment I’m quite discouraged about the possibility of reforming the schools in any way. Of course, I disapprove of ‘defeatist’ thinking on principle, so I try not to get too mired in negative predictions.

I have zero confidence that the school board system will produce reform, however.

I am intrigued by the possibilities for homeschooling and cooperative schooling, as Rick B and Charlotte mentioned.

Homeschooling numbers just seem to go up and up — and the instant you start talking about homeschool cooperatives that gets my attention. Cooperative schooling is a concept I might be able to sell my husband on. (His cousin is basically doing cooperative homeschooling for her teenage son who, for reasons I won’t go into, wasn’t making it at his also-super-expensive public school.)

Chuck and WichitaBoy Thank you so much for your thoughts on probability—I’m saving them.

I’m actually getting to the point where I somewhat understand what you’ve said!

(I’ve been re-teaching myself elementary mathematics, start to finish! It is a BLAST!)

Charlotte

The way you bring more-than-one-answer into What is 1 + 1? is to introduce the idea of invented algorithms.

There is more than one way to find the answer to 1 + 1.

The children are required to find the answer using more than one strategy, and, often, to write down their strategies in math journals.

By sheer accident I found Christopher’s 2nd grade math journal just yesterday.

I had no idea he even had a math journal in 2nd grade. (Paging Skookumchuk.)

On each page he describes his strategy for finding a sum.

And, on each page, his strategy is ‘I used tally marks.’

His tally marks aren’t even written in bundles of 5; they’re just a bunch of straight lines.

So basically his strategy was, “I counted.”

On one page he wrote 3 + 3 + 6 and came up with an answer of 19.

I counted his tally marks, and there were 17 of those.

Buddy L

My earlier post wasn’t clear — the Fordham Institute is opposed to teaching probability to 4 year olds. They publish a yearly report assessing state education standards.

May 23, 2005 - 2:54 pm 62. photoncourier.blogspot.com:

If this department chairman actually acts on his stated beliefs, while performing in his official capacity, then I would think his actions would be in violation of the “establishment of religion” clause.

May 23, 2005 - 2:56 pm 63. Buddy Larsen:

MLK was discussed nearby, and I think in Bill Cosby we have found a successor.

May 23, 2005 - 2:57 pm 64. Catherine:

Chuck

This is way off-topic for Roger’s blog, but the subject of visual representation in mathematics education is something I’ve gotten especially interested in.

There is some thinking that the Chinese IQ advantage (I believe Chinese kids average about 5 points higher IQ than American kids) may be due to all the characters they memorize, which supposedly develops spatial intelligence.

As well, the mathematics curriculum of Singapore, which is the single most successful ‘national curriculum’ we know of, uses a unique way of teaching algebra to very young children that involves the drawing of bar models. I now require Christopher to do a bar model every day, and I myself am about to graduate from the 3rd grade “Challenging Word Problems” book!

Plus there is some research out on formally teaching engineering students to sketch & draw, I believe; the conclusion was that their ’spatial visualization’ ability grew.

I also read that the reason for male dominance of math & physics is probably mostly a difference in spatial ability.

Last but not least, and this could be entirely coincidental, but I like it: the first girl ever to win the Math Olympiads is from Singapore, and, I presume, grew up drawing the Singaporean bar models.

So . . . at the moment I’m thinking that some form of attention to ’spatial visualization ability’ is good in grade school mathematics. I assume that would include bar models & graphs & the like . . .

I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.

articles:

Effect of Instructions on Spatial Visualisation Ability

in Civil Engineering

Maizam Alias et al

Solving Algebra and Other Story Problems with Simple

Diagrams: a Method Demonstrated in

Grade 4-6 Texts Used in Singapore

Sybilla Beckmann

Science News:

Learning to read 2,500 pictorial symbols, as Chinese students do in grade school, yields a 5-point advantage on IQ tests, compared with the scores of Westerners whose languages are based on alphabets, according to a new analysis of mental capabilities of Greek and Chinese children. The international team of analysts, led by psychologist Andreas Demetriou of the University of Cyprus in Nicosia, attributes the scoring disparity to a superiority in visual and spatial tasks that comes with learning to read Chinese.

May 23, 2005 - 3:15 pm 65. Barry:

I’m still trying to figure out what “social justice” means. I have been for 20 years.

People who wear white after Labor Day will be jailed?

Interrupting a speaker at the dinner table will result in a fine?

Drunken mooning of a couple having a picnic may be prosecuted as a felony? Aggravated mooning if it involves boisterous laughter?

Perhaps someone can enlighten me regarding the meaning of “social justice.”

May 23, 2005 - 3:17 pm 66. photoncourier.blogspot.com:

Catherine…I’ve never understood the argument that “spatial visualization” is the key to success in engineering and science. It’s true that you need good visualization abilities in civil or mechanical engineering..but there are vast realms in which it has little role, including computer science, lots of math, and lots of electrical engineering.

May 23, 2005 - 3:21 pm 67. Aretae:

I’m a smidge late coming to this discussion, but it hits a topic I’ve been mighty interested in for some time. I, prognosticating aggressively and without sufficient evidence, have been arguing that MSM has already lost, but they don’t know it yet. The fact that an ever-increasing percentage of people…and a notably high percentage of actually educated/politically active people get their information from sources other than MSM is a death-knell for the traditional authority-on-high approach of the MSM. Dead, but still moving ’cause it’s too stupid to die.

Having a strong interest in education, I also recently started examining the future of MSE. I think that they’ve got 10 years before they’re in worse shape than MSM is now. Reasoning: Top high-school students, and even junior high students have frequently (

Wretchard on the Iraq war battles, rather than the inane text they are supposed to read, and will bring it up in discussion. Instapundit and the Volokhs link to every notable FIRE violation around, which means that MSE can’t tell students what their rights are as much any longer

Where does that put education authority, when it comes to high-schools? Gone, as far as I can tell. How far off that are professors of literature, when talking off their thesis topics? Can an indoctrination-centric MSE manage to take on ubiquitous google+10years-connected-laptops used by information-savvy students?

Response #1: yes, except at very top institutions, where you have the brightest of students. MIT will break the indoctrination curve. Podunk Community College will still be stuck. Answer: CalTech might be first, but it won’t be last. Podunk might take 10 extra years, but it’s coming.

Response #2: Professors can still intimidate. Answer: FIRE + the blogosphere as a loudspeaker

Disclaimer: Work as a corporate IT trainer. Have taught in public schools & lots of other places. Homeschool my own children. Subscribe loosely to Constructivism as an educational theory, but not as a substitute for knowing facts.

May 23, 2005 - 3:26 pm 68. Catherine:

photoncourier

Beats me!

I don’t even know what spatial visualization ability is, exactly (though I’m starting to get the sense that it’s usually defined as the ability to rotate figures in your mind’s eye — )

This idea does come up over and over again, in the work of different researchers . . . I think we see ‘converging lines of evidence’ on this idea.

But I’m feeling my way here.

May 23, 2005 - 3:33 pm 69. photoncourier.blogspot.com:

Yeah, I’ve seen similar definitions, involving the ability to picture the movement of objects in 3-D space. I can’t imagine how one would use this skill in (for example) the design of a computer operating system.

I also wonder, given the purported differences in gender skills in spatial visualization…why are there as many female air traffic controllers as there are? I can’t find any definitive data, but it seems like the proportion must be about 25%. And that job is very largely *about* 3-D visualization…

May 23, 2005 - 3:40 pm 70. Buddy Larsen:

Maybe it’s a hunting adaptation? …we’re so few generations removed from Cro-Magnon.

5 measured IQ points? That’s HUGE…how did Mao manage to hold those people down?

May 23, 2005 - 3:42 pm 71. chuck:

Catherine,

So basically his strategy was, “I counted.”

This has been formalized as the Peano axioms ;o) One book that started with those axioms and worked up to the complex numbers began with the statement that all mathematicians should work through the material once and then they could forget it. At some point one must be able to say “I remembered.”

Your son’s strategy reminds me of when I was trying to pass exams in organic chemistry where we had to propose reactions to synthesize a molecule from given precursors. Basically, I could only remember one reaction ‘trick’ and tried to use it for everything. Heh, organic chemistry was not one of my strong subjects.

May 23, 2005 - 3:48 pm 72. truepeers:

Buddy you are are a store of the most arcane articles. How do you do it? Of course, I haven’t much patience for reading that false consciousness stuff, though I find it curious that the term was still being used in this 2001 article, since so much lefty energy had by then already gone into rejigging/renaming the concept to make it more mystically scientistic – see Foucaultmania. Perhaps the author’s “anarchism” explains his conservatism?

The left lives in a world where events are never as true as overarching theories of them, and so much effort is put into making sure that things don’t happen or never get recognized when they do, cause that would just be to disturb the theorizing. They can get away with it; thanks to the cocoons spun by consumer society reality need impose itself rarely. The children of privilege, pretending to be the most radical, are the most conservative. In other words, my free friends, we should know that a paradoxical consciousness always trumps a false consciousness of false consciousness.

May 23, 2005 - 3:50 pm 73. charlotte:

There is something about drawing Singaporean bar models that sounds a bit risque for grade schoolers, Catherine!

But I do think drawing and abstraction are wonderful mind-developing tools for math and the rest. I’m not a big proponent of teaching the nut-and-bolt mechanics of reading to very young kids- had more success with my kid in reading aloud and passing on love of story, to include pictures, before giving the phonetic secrets to decoding written language (a one day exercise). Mine grasped math in much the same way- more conceptually along with the rules and good rote exercises that are necessary for further discovery. She either ended up being, or would have been anyway, a visualizer who can see the structure and hear the cadence of stories, music and math in her head. But, perhaps different learning strategies for different kids with different needs and abilities- difficult to know, really. You seem to have wonderful instincts; after all your good investigation, trust your knowing because no one knows your children better than you.

May 23, 2005 - 3:59 pm 74. Knucklehead:

Catherine,

At this point I find dealing with the district to be a constant struggle, eating up time, energy, and money.

And resistance seems futile.

Herein lies the most brilliant facet of their divide and conquer strategy. They don’t have to defeat you, they merely have to resist you until you go away. While you would surely like to solve the problem on a systemic level the single thing that matters to you more than anything is Christopher.

They have everything they require (primarily a deep and well entrenched bureaucracy) to wait you out. When Christopher moves on to the middle school you will also. They will pass the problem (you) along and the resist you until you’re gone quagmire will start all over again.

BTW, the divide and conquer strategy isn’t limited to academics in our public schools. It is used for sports and other extracurricular activities. In fact they use those various things to run the divide and conquer schtick across the entire population of students and parents.

May 23, 2005 - 4:07 pm 75. chuck:

Catherine,

On the off topic topic. I would be interested to see the visualization used in the Singapore schools. After the memorization of the basic facts, arithmetic computation is all about algorithms, most of fairly recent provenence. As a variant of the paper and pencil methods, the use of an abacus comes to mind. I have read that some become so proficient using the abacus that they don’t even need the physical device, they can just move their fingers and get the answer.

Anyway, I am by no means opposed to algorithms and visualization per se. I think mental visualizations do enter into many aspects of thought, including operating system design, but in a very fuzzy, cloudy sort of way. It is almost an organizational device, like the old mnemonic trick of putting different things in different parts of a house and then walking through it. Sign language does something similar, does it not? Hmm… I’m just blathering now.

As to the virtues of learning written Chinese, I would think that a fair amount of mental descipline and close observation would be involved in the learning, so that might be another aspect. The effect of all these things is probably very hard to measure and separate one from the other.

May 23, 2005 - 4:13 pm 76. Pat Curley:

I have often thought that there are different levels of sophistication of thought on religion (as on many other issues). A bright teenager might experience the revelation that Professor Shortell has, that religion is a bunch of rot. Somewhat later in life he or she might make the next step, that while religion itself may be a bunch of rot, it does give your kids a good grounding in morality. Still later may come the revelation that while there may not be a god, living one’s life as if there were one can lead to greater happiness. (I’ll let you know if I reach the next stage of enlightenment).

I’m agnostic myself, but I’ve come through the “religion is a force for evil in the world” mindset and pretty much discarded it in favor of “religion is a force for good in the world, but sometimes gets twisted by people for their own purposes.”

May 23, 2005 - 4:20 pm 77. nomad8:

When I went to Brooklyn College in the early 1950’s it was known as “The Little Red Schoolhouse”

It appears its ideology has not changed very much over the years.

May 23, 2005 - 4:41 pm 78. madawaskan:

Catherine-

The learning Chinese characters improves spatial ability reminds me of the Japanese do better at math because of Oragami -hypothesis…..how did that pan out?

I don’t know but it would seem that physical manipulation of objects would help. Hands on type approaches.

May 23, 2005 - 4:41 pm 79. Frederick:

Chuck:

“an organizational device, like the old mnemonic trick of putting different things in different parts of a house and then walking through it.”

Yes. That was a very highly developed techique in antiquity, which was learned as a part of the general discipline of rhetoric. It was used to perform amazing feats, such as learning to recite the Iliad backwards. The Portuguse Jesuit Matteo Ricci stunned the 17th century Chinese MSE by showing how he had used a virtual house filled with Chinese characters to memorize all of the basic elements of Confucian civilization. There are two excellent books on these subjects that readers may enjoy: Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (use in antiquity and the renaissance); and Jonathan Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci.

May 23, 2005 - 4:46 pm 80. Buddy Larsen:

Knucklehead, having been in two seperate highly regulated small biz’s most of my working life, an image of the “thing” developed in my mind–it’s that giant Pillsbury Do-Boy from Ghostbusters, it comes striding thru your life, arbitrary and full of whimsy, barely noticing your meaningless existence as it blunders through your life, with you stuck like a tiny piece of gum to some lower extremity, frantically punching and kicking for a gulp of air, sobbing and cursing whatever bakery launched the damned thing.

Charlotte, she’s a good investigator because she’s one a them book-writers.

Truepeers, thank Goodness you think and write for the good side…you could just as easily do it for the Morlocs, if your heart wasn’t right!

May 23, 2005 - 4:47 pm 81. dick:

Photon,

As a business applications programmer for 40 years, I can tell you that when I wrote programs or debugged programs or developed systems, I had to visualize how someone might do data entry. I also had to visualize the flow of information through the system. This was definitely a visual exercise in my case and in my experience in the case of those who were good at fixing things up.

While the thought of programming being a job of just sitting there mindlessly coding things is what a lot of people see the job being, my experience was that it was that only at the very beginning. Once you got going in the field, you were involved in a lot of different things. You had to develop systems and screens so that the layout was logical and that involved seeing how the operator read the stuff to be input. You had to make it flow so that things that belonged together were together. All this involved visualization, the shape of things. I am not sure that this transfers to all other areas, but in the areas that I worked it certainly did.

The other part of visualization, not just shapes but visualization anyway, was in the layout of programs. You had to remember to write in such a way that the person coming next in line to modify things would be able to see what you were doing. I can tell you from personal experience that many people do not have this ability. I have had to modify programs where it was just easier to just start over and redo the whole thing than try to break down the mess that had been written. I wonder if the absence of teaching logic these days could have been the cause of that. I think that certain people seem to have an innate grasp of logic and others have to have it pounded into them. I ran into a lot where the pounding stopped before it should.

The part of education that really gets my goat is the part where people are not taught the use of language. It is not considered necessary for many jobs. I beg to differ. In business one of the biggest problems I encountered was the interpretation of what was written down. All too often the job was so badly done that a great deal of time was lost in meetings trying to see what was meant. At least we had the chance to talk to the person. The problem is exacerbated when you are the one who comes to the project late. Trying to read what someone has written to find how to do something or to see the reasoning behind the logic in processes becomes a lost cause. I eventually ended up having to go to the programs themselves to see what was done and then try to figure out why from that point. It is necessary in business today to pass on tasks to others as your career advances. It is also necessary that when you pass it on you give them enough to see why things were done as they were. Given the average writing skill of today, this is a lost art and a lost cause. At one contract I had they finally brought in technical writers to do this because the people doing the work were unable to express anything understandable. The schools are falling down terribly in this area. The vocabulary, the sentence structure, the spelling, the structure of thought behind the writing – all lacking.

I know this is rather business oriented, but I see that the same problems would probably exist in regular academia as well as in hard sciences. All must have some form of passing on what has been learned and what has been done regardless of whether this is in formulas or prose. The schools just are not doing this well at all.

May 23, 2005 - 5:01 pm 82. Paul Snively:

Folks interested in probability are also directed to Stewart Russell and Peter Norvig’s “Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach,” 2nd. Ed. The whole second half of the book deals with reasoning under uncertainty, machine learning, perception, etc. but is readable by anyone with a couple of years of algebra under their belt. Peter, incidentally, is Director of Research for Google—definitely a guy who knows his stuff.

May 23, 2005 - 5:05 pm 83. PeterUK:

Some interesting research on linguistic cognition that might also indicate an area where artificial intelligence might have problems.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1623448,00.html

May 23, 2005 - 5:10 pm 84. charlotte:

I don’t know but it would seem that physical manipulation of objects would help. Hands on type approaches.

Yes, Madawaskan! Young kids should fold paper, mold clay and play with volumes of water and sand in containers, before exploding toasters, etc. Wish we had done the abacus more.

Buddy, I’ve been meaning to order Catherine’s book, along with McEnroe’s. Thanks for the reminder. Who else here has published (I have all of Simon’s)? It’s always fun to put publications with an author’s conversation. BTW, when are you going to produce a manuscript about your Texan experience?

May 23, 2005 - 5:10 pm 85. Joseph (formerly Samuel):

Once people start measuring other peoples worth by how much they validate ones own worldview, at that moment cease to serve others but only themselves.

Who does the left serve these days? The downtrodden? Yeah right! Why should people on the left worry about Iraqi children or even the schooling of religious kids when they are viewed as enemies and threats to the power they hold? The left cries about separation of Church and State yet for them school is their church. As such it so follows for them… how dare the unwashed challenge their halls of secular worship!

Freedom for these people on the left is measured by how free they feel, and what power they hold, the freedom of the unwashed to them is expendable to advance their own interests. If such freedom is found through sacrificing the unworthy Red Stater, or whole nations like Iraq then so be it, as the left’s greater good is served. This type of freedom is freedom reserved for the ideologically pure and those that sit in the Ivory Towers of liberal-left elitism. It is in fact not freedom at all. These people will never be satisfied by true democracy because they desire to silence and squash all opposition by undemocratic means, yet true democracy always encourages a loyal opposition.

One last thing… These people are also unwittingly School Choice’s greatest advocates, they wish upon themselves their own worse nightmares… they deserve it.

May 23, 2005 - 5:17 pm 86. Buddy Larsen:

Buen fuego, JfS! Charlotte, seem to’ve developed a little temporary block, right after I got the author’s name down on paper, about forty years ago-:( …Peter, that’s a great link–including the sublinked article down at the bottom, “Fear of being seen as a big girl’s blouse“. Thank you for that; I never realized I suffered from that phobia, but upon reading that line I recognized immediately how common a malady it might well be, once offered up as one.

May 23, 2005 - 5:46 pm 87. photoncourier.blogspot.com:

Dick..thanks for lengthy response. I agree that programming, at least at the higher levels of the art, is an advanced conceptual skill which has little to do with “mindlessly coding.” However, I think the skills involved are closer to those involved in language, music, and pure mathematics than to the visual skills involved in, say, civil engineering. (It’s probably not a coincidence that many programmers are musically-inclined) The fact that it’s useful to do flow charts, data flow diagrams, and various representations of data structures doesn’t make programming primarily visual any more than the use of graphical outlines by a novelist would make novel-writing a primarily visual field.

May 23, 2005 - 7:17 pm 88. richard mcenroe:

ìIs it becoming true that the only necessary qualification of a teacher is having the right opinions?î

That’s not a teacher, that’s a zampolit… which is, after all, the goal.

May 23, 2005 - 7:41 pm 89. someone:

Let’s not get too sidetracked here. The main advantage we have over the Chinese is the ability to transmit to our children the mental and cultural habits necessary to have and maintain a free — and therefore non-corrupt and productive — society.

That is what the educrats are trying to dismantle with stuff like this Jed-Pad brainwashing. Fortunately, much of the necessary learning goes on outside of school. Unfortunately, bad schooling can undo a lot of it.

May 23, 2005 - 7:44 pm 90. someone:

madawskan, charlotte: Have you looked into Waldorf schools at all?

May 23, 2005 - 7:49 pm 91. WichitaBoy:

truepeers,

The idea that the world of the mind is more real than the perceived world is the essence of Platonism. It is precisely for this reason that Nietzsche called Socrates a “monster”.

photoncourier,

I am a highly visual thinker. In doing original mathematics research, I found it necessary to create visualizations of highly abstract mathematical concepts, visualizations which have no bearing on reality whatsoever, but which allowed me to look at them and get a handle on what was going on. chuck’s analogy of memorizing things by looking in the rooms of one’s house is an excellent one, and probably as close as can be explained. Some mathematicians, on the other hand, cannot visualize a simple cube. I don’t think there is any connection between the visualization skills and mathematics/engineering skills one way or another; I think they are orthogonal.

On the subject of mathematics education for younger kids, there’s a new blog on this very topic and everybody’s encouraged to check it out.

chuck,

I’m still struggling with what reality really is. If a body in the forest has a temperature and there’s nobody there to measure it,….

Catherine,

Historically, the city of Minneapolis has had a five-point advantage in IQ scores over the rest of the US. (Think Powerblog and James Lileks.) I wonder what could have caused that?

May 23, 2005 - 9:31 pm 92. Buddy Larsen:

Mondale moving to DC?

May 23, 2005 - 10:25 pm 93. Dick Eagleson:

None of this is news to anyone with significant interaction with the teacher education and credentialing establishment in the last 40 years. The credentialing bodies have chipped away at requirements for actual subject matter knowledge in favor of left-wing re-education camp offerings in the awfulness of America and capitalism for the last four decades. Their job is nearly complete. Look at the undergraduate requirements for a education degree in California, for example, and you will find – along with the latest “theory du jour” from the teacher ed professoriate – mostly leftist special pleadings thinly disguised as classes in appropriately-named “Liberal Studies.”

Fortunately, there is a ready alternative contained in the No Child Left Behind legislation. NCLB established a regime of subject matter-based minimum competency examinations that are intended to form an alternative basis for teacher credentialing. This can be done in California, for instance, through the initiative process, as it will almost cetainly fail to be done via the Democrat-dominated state legislature here.

Alternative certification, combined with the growth of charter schools – many of which reject leftist orthodoxy – can restore genuine educator competence and educational integrity in the urban schools where the leftist education establishment has done the worst of its wrecking.

May 24, 2005 - 2:36 am 94. Cybrludite:

Sez Chuck,

As I say, the practice of selective breeding is widespread and certainly underlies the interaction between genetics and the evolution of populations through sexual selection. Or in plain terms, if mating choices weren’t selective, there wouldn’t be a market for mail-order Russian brides…

May 24, 2005 - 3:20 am 95. HA:

Knucklehead,

constructionists/progressives/marxists/whatever the heck they are

They are Marxists. Gramscian Marxists to be specific. The first step in winning this ideological war is to know the enemy and call it what it is. And make no mistake. This is a real war, the the other side is a real enemy. The consequences of losing this war are cannot be overstated. The rise of Gramscian Marxism in the West and the resumed aggression by Islam after 400 years has put Western Civilization itself at stake. As usual, Wretchard puts it best:

The moribund Left knows who is boss and is selling the only thing they have remaining: access to media and cultural institutions, which suits the Islamofascists just fine. A division of labor has been established in which the Left provides the paralyzing injection on Western society leaving the jihadis a clear field within which to operate.

http://belmontclub.blogspot.com/2004/03/ichneumon-wasp-european-left-has.html

May this war remain cold, but looking out over the next 10-20 years I think the odds are against it. When I look at the current conditions in Western Europe, in particular France and the Netherlands, I can’t see how Balkan style sectarian violence can be avoided. Western Europe is being colonized by Arabs/Muslims. They are not immigrants, but colonists. They do not assimilate, but rather set up enclaves which are becoming no-go zones for the indiginous Europeans.

It is only a matter of time before the Europeans begin to resist and then things will get real ugly, real fast. There has NEVER been a single example in ALL of human history where an indigenous population has been displaced by a migratory population without violence. I would love for someone to explain to me why Europeans will be the first.

Domestically, Gramsican Marxists have taken over the Democratic party, the dominant media, Hollywood, academia, the ACLU, and the public school system. The march through institutions is complete. The goal is to build socialism by undermining our faith in our values, our traditions and our country. Our domestic Gramscians share the same goals as the Internationalist Gramscians that dominate the UN and the EUSSR.

May 24, 2005 - 3:24 am 96. Ryk:

For photoncourier, Catherine, and the rest interested in Singaporean education…

I presently live and work in Singapore, and have been here for a number of years working in different fields — enough that you probably wouldn’t believe me if I listed them all. It has brought me into contact with Singaporeans from all walks of life and educational levels.

You may be talking quite a lot about spatial acuity, Chinese characters, and a 5-point average difference in I.Q., but my response to that is simple — if all of that is true, then how is it that I’ve been able to work here overseas for so long and at so many disparate jobs?

There are holes in the Singaporean curriculum that even the government here has acknowledged and is trying to reform. Based in part on the Japanese system and in part on the British school system, the children here are trained from an early age to rely on memorization instead of thinking or comprehension. Certainly they can score highly on standardized tests! But the end product of the school system here (save for those students that are able to see beyond the system) is someone who finds it difficult at best to think for himself, or apply his knowledge in a real-world situation.

There is another disadvantage to the Singaporean educational system, which is more cultural in origin but is reinforced by the schools — a deep-seated need for consensus. Very few here are able to take the ball and run with it. Those that can, however, almost always find themselves on the fast track to the top, simply by sheer scarcity.

An aunt of my girlfriend has been a teacher in the local system for many years, working with the equivalent of high-school freshmen. Please note that this teacher is the product of the local school system and has never studied abroad. She’s teaching the equivalent of a civics course, and I was recently roped into helping her with her class outline. Her present curriculum is about logic, yet she herself does not know the difference between inductive and deductive reasoning, and had never heard of the terms. Children here are given pressure to conform and excel, but are not necessarily given the tools to succeed save by rote.

There are far more problems with schools in Singapore than I have mentioned here.

For all the problems involved in a U.S. education I would still take it any day over any other system I’ve seen here in Asia — Japanese, Taiwanese, Singaporean, Malaysian, or Korean. Someone who does well in the U.S. system learns *how* to learn, and more importantly, learns how to *think* for themselves. That is the part of the system that I feel is most important, and most at threat by indoctrination of the sort I’ve seen described in these articles.

P.S. — There are over 100 distinct dialects of Chinese, yet there are only a few that are prevalent across larger areas (Mandarin, Hokkien, Fukien (Cantonese), Teochew being some of the major dialects). Mandarin can be considered the official language, because it is the language of the government, but it is a second language for many (HK, Taiwan, Singapore). A good analogy might be someone speaking Low German to an Englishman — many of the words are similar, and if you have a good ear you can understand what is being said if you speak slowly and gesture a lot. But there will be problems with more complex arguments.

Chinese characters *do* mostly mean the same thing across the country, even if they are pronounced differently, however you have to be careful to mark the difference between Simplified and Traditional Chinese characters. I myself highly recommend learning the most important ones — ‘Fire Exit’ and ‘Restroom’.

May 24, 2005 - 4:22 am 97. HA:

PeterUK,

Excellent link on Gramsci. A MUST read.

May 24, 2005 - 4:29 am 98. HA:

Barry,

I’m still trying to figure out what “social justice” means. I have been for 20 years.

Social justice is when everybody is equally poor.

May 24, 2005 - 4:30 am 99. Knucklehead:

HA,

Social justice is when everybody is equally poor.

Everyone equally poor is a necessary but insufficient condition. That’s the part that makes it “social”.

I apologize for not being able to articulate this (i’ve never been able to quite put my finger on how to describe this), but to complete the “justice” part, everyone must be equally criminal/guilty.

Social just is both distributed poverty and distributed guilt. We must all be equally poor and equally punished.

May 24, 2005 - 5:42 am 100. Buddy Larsen:

Good stuff here. Goes without saying that the conflict between the haves and the have-nots is as old as time, heck it’s Newtonian, chemical. What capitalism offers is the possiblity to be a ‘have’ thru adding value to the whole. ‘Having’ is at base a vote on the security of the future. The problem of the poor is always with us, but it seems like our country worked best when people thought in multi-generational terms. Expectations weren’t along the lines of class struggle but along helping one’s progeny–the future–build value. Marxism–and most sympathizers don’t realize they’re such–got loose thru the ‘idealism’ of us Boomers, who double-amped it with a simultaneous and contradictory party-time youth where everything had to be now–screw building a life that would ‘pay’ off better for succeeding generations than it might for me right now. Talk about pay the piper…long slow clean-up after the party–in all senses of the word ‘party’.

May 24, 2005 - 6:19 am 101. Knucklehead:

PeterUK,

Thanks for the link. Interesting stuff and it sure seems to fit.

Any idea what portion of the MSM and, more importantly IMHO, the MSE are true-believers working toward to alter the hegemony as per the Gramscian model and what portion are simply useful idiots and/or pragmatists simply trying to muddle through a career by giving their employers what they want?

May 24, 2005 - 7:42 am 102. dick:

here see the use of aptitude testing for the various vocations. I know from having taken a lot of them that for programming the spatial visualization questions make up a high percentage of the questions. For a period of time it seemed that every contract or job I took required me to take another aptitude test. One would thnk that 10-15 years of experience with references would make that useless but it was still required in a large number of companies. After about 20 years in the field they stopped this in my case but I wonder if it is still out there in many others. Are thee things useful at all? I know some people just have an ability to take tests but not much ability on the job but I don’t kow how you can test for that.

May 24, 2005 - 9:01 am 103. WichitaGirl:

*Ryk*

Your post about Singapore education is really fascinating!

I don’t know much about Singapore per se — but I’m familiar with the Americanized version of the primary Singapore math curriculum, and there’s no doubt that it’s really good stuff. It’s also hard to believe that the kids who took the TIMSS tests knew and remembered the answers to the word problems that they were doing, though I have no doubt that they practiced heavily to develop their expertise.

I’m sure that your criticisms of Singaporean education are valid, and it may be that they could learn from us when it comes to developing the ability to take initiative. But I think they are doing something right when it comes to math education.

May 24, 2005 - 9:10 am 104. John Boyle:

HA . . .

A really stunning post on Gramscian Marxism, about which I had never heard. I read the entire linked testimony with great interest.

It is always a transcendent event when you discover what you have long intuited about so many things, finally explained in a single package. No mere conspiracy theory this . . .

In all of this, the Achilles heel of the West has been its free institutions, which are, therefore, open to subversion. Hopefully our freedoms will be the antidote as well.

I am a student of, as well as a victim of, the anti-war movement of the late 60’s and 70’s, which really was the pretext for the injection of this revolutionary virus into the American body politic. I have long known this intuitively, but now see validated its factual basis and I now understand its theoretical framework.

Those who engineered and financed that project were never interested in the war in and of itself, except as it provided a ready-made pretext to accomplish in a dramatic and accelerated way, some of the major goals of the Gramscians – particularly the discrediting of some of our major institutions (the military, authority) and the co-opting of others openly – the media and the academy especially.

They are doing it again over Iraq. The objective dissonance between the atrocious activities of the enemy, as opposed to those of Americans, so much fewer in number and less serious in degree, the total silence of the media on the one issue, and the obsession of the media with the other, are only two examples of deja vu Vietnam.

Hopefully the New Media, like this blog, will add its weight to saving us all from what is already well on its way.

I used to think it was too late. And I used to think I was alone in seeing its ugly outlines slouching toward Bethlehem.

May 24, 2005 - 10:54 pm 105. John Boyle:

I got lost in the surf and referred to an excellent link to Gramsci Marxism, but now I don’t know where it linked from. I thought it was in HA’s excellent post on this. Not. Here is is:

http://waysandmeans.house.gov/hearings.asp?formmode=view&id=954

It is a MUST READ for understanding what has been happening to us over the past 40 years.

May 25, 2005 - 6:27 am 106. HA:

Knucklehead,

I apologize for not being able to articulate this (i’ve never been able to quite put my finger on how to describe this), but to complete the “justice” part, everyone must be equally criminal/guilty.

Hayek gives some insight to your difficulty in articulating what the term “social justice” means. In his view, the term is deliberately vague. I googled Hayek and social justice and found the following description which fits perfectly:

From this line of reasoning it follows that “social justice” would have its natural end in a command economy in which individuals are told what to do, so that it would always be possible to identify those in charge and to hold them responsible. This notion presupposes that people are guided by specific external directions rather than internalized, personal rules of just conduct. It further implies that no individual should be held responsible for his relative position. To assert that he is responsible would be “blaming the victim.” It is the function of “social justice” to blame somebody else, to blame the system, to blame those who (mythically) “control” it. As Leszek Kolakowski wrote in his magisterial history of communism, the fundamental paradigm of Communist ideology is guaranteed to have wide appeal: you suffer; your suffering is caused by powerful others; these oppressors must be destroyed. We need to hold someone accountable, Hayek notes, even when we recognize that such a protest is absurd.

http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0012/opinion/novak.html

May 25, 2005 - 6:09 pm 107. HA:

John Boyle,

Here is the article I first read about Gramscian Marxism. Reading this article was an epiphany for me. I read it, and suddenly everything about contemporary politics began to make sense:

http://www.policyreview.org/dec00/Fonte.html

May 25, 2005 - 6:16 pm 108. John Boyle:

HA,

Thank you for the link. I also highly recommend to all the article (really testimony submitted to the House Ways and Means Committee) which is linked in my post just above. I intend to circulate these articles to my friends among the POWs and Swift Vets and other military veteran activists groups, who are currently on R&R not far from the battlefield, on guard and awaiting developments.

May 25, 2005 - 8:35 pm 109. HA:

John Boyle,

Thanks for the link to Bill Wood’s statement. It is tremendously encouraging that some of our elected representatives are beginning to grasp the extent to which Gramscian Marxist rot is corrupting our society.

Keep spreading the word…

May 26, 2005 - 3:38 am 110. HA:

John Boyle,

Do you know the circumstances under which Wood gave that statement?

May 26, 2005 - 3:47 am 111. PeterUK:

John Boyle,

Heres the link again to Gramsci’s theory of hegemony,saves scrolling back up.

http://www.theory.org.uk/ctr-gram.htm#hege

May 26, 2005 - 6:45 am 112. Buddy Larsen:

Pretty damn hair-raising bunch of links. So much for the ‘accidental conspiracy of dunces’ explanation.

May 26, 2005 - 7:40 am 113. John Boyle:

Thank you, HA and Peter UK. This is indeed hair raising stuff. I really don’t think even many well informed and prominent commentators are aware of the depth and seriousness of the enemy we face, and how far he has moled into the foundations of our culture. You can tell from the kinds of limited theories of motivation they assign to “the Left” – like mere anti-Bushism. There is a presumption, in their comments, of benignity about the oppostion which the facts of Gramsci’s total revolution theories contradict. Many seem to think the opposition is merely misguided or of ill will in some limited, personality sense.

I found Mr. Wood through this website, http://www.ejfi.org/ where he has published another article. The political position of that site itself is, interestingly, a bit difficult to determine, perhaps attesting to the higher level of cultural conflict that it addresses – in other words, stuff beyond mere partisnaship. I do not think Wood is a Member of Congress, and I am not sure to what extent this kind of “submission” or “testimnony” is actually read by Members or staff – if at all.

I emailed him and he did reply, and I did ask that question – about the testimony’s potential impact. I have yet to get a further reply.

May 26, 2005 - 4:24 pm 114. HA:

John Boyle,

I initially thought Bill Wood was a US Representative when I read your link. That apparently is not the case.

If you want to get further information on Gramscian Marxism and how it has been transmitted into mainstream politics, try googling “gramsci frankfurt school”

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&q=gramsci+frankfurt+school

I found this link at unjobs.org particularly revealing:

http://unjobs.org/books/frankfurt-school-of-sociology

If you want to know what aspiring UN bureacrats read, go have a look.

May 27, 2005 - 5:27 am 115. PeterUK:

The flaw in Gramsci’s thinking is that, like most marxists he didn’t understand people,great idea,wrong species .If the dominant culture is weakened or destroyed other cultures rush in to fill the gap,people invent their own cultures,it is more likely that society breaks down into tribal subgroups than it embraces the utopia imposed from above.

It is significant that the resurgance of Islam comes at a time of Western self doubt and cultural decay.

As they say about any mechanism “If you don’t know how to put it together,don’t take it apart”.

May 27, 2005 - 8:06 pm

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