Found at ARFCOM.
Quote of the Day – John Taylor Gatto (Pt. 3)
Another excerpt from The Underground History of American Education:
By standards of the time, America was utopia already. No grinding poverty, no dangerous national enemies, no indigenous tradition beyond a general spirit of exuberant optimism, a belief the land had been touched by destiny, a conviction Americans could accomplish anything. John Jay wrote to Jefferson in 1787, “The enterprise of our country is inconceivable”—inconceivable, that is, to the British, Germans, and French, who were accustomed to keeping the common population on a leash. Our colonial government was the creation of the Crown, of course, but soon a fantastic idea began to circulate, a belief that people might create or destroy governments at their will.
The empty slate of the new republic made it vulnerable to advanced utopian thinking. While in England and Germany, temptation was great to develop and use Oriental social machinery to bend mass population into an instrument of elite will, in America there was no hereditary order or traditional direction. We were a nation awash in literate, self-reliant men and women, the vast majority with an independent livelihood or ambitions toward getting one. Americans were inventors and technicians without precedent, entrepreneurs unlocked from traditional controls, dreamers, confidence men, flim-flam artists. There never was a social stew quite like it.
The practical difficulties these circumstances posed to utopian governing would have been insuperable except for one seemingly strange source of enthusiasm for such an endeavor in the business community. That puzzle can be solved by considering how the promise of democracy was a frightening terra incognita to men of substance. To look to men like Sam Adams or Tom Paine as directors of the future was like looking down the barrel of a loaded gun, at least to people of means. So the men who had begun the Revolution were eased out by the men who ended it.
Quote of the Day – John Taylor Gatto (Pt. 2)
From his Underground History of American Education:
The official use of common schooling was invented by Plato; after him the idea languished, its single torchbearer the Church. Educational offerings from the Church were intended for, though not completely limited to, those young whose parentage qualified them as a potential Guardian class. You would hardly know this from reading any standard histories of Western schooling intended for the clientele of teacher colleges.Intense development of the Platonic ideal of comprehensive social control through schooling suddenly reappeared two-thousand years later in eighteenth-century France at the hands of a philosophical cultus known to history as philosophes, enthusiastic promoters of the bizarre idea of mass forced schooling. Most prominent among them, a self-willed man named Jean Jacques Rousseau. To add piquancy to Rousseau’s thought, you need to know that when they were born, he chose to give away his own five offspring to strangers at birth. If any man captures the essence of enlightenment transformation, it is Rousseau.
The Enlightenment “project” was conceived as a series of stages, each further leveling mankind, collectivizing ordinary humanity into a colonial organism like a volvox.
—
The ideal of a leveling Oriental pedagogy expressed through government schooling was promoted by Jacobin orators of the French National Convention in the early 1790s, the commencement years of our own republic. The notion of forced schooling was irresistible to French radicals, an enthusiasm whose foundation had been laid in preceding centuries by utopian writers like Harrington (Oceania), More (Utopia), Bacon (New Atlantis), Campanella (City of the Sun), and in other speculative fantasy embracing the fate of children. Cultivating a collective social organism was considered the ingredient missing from feudal society, an ingredient which would allow the West the harmony and stability of the East.
Utopian schooling (was) never about learning in the traditional sense; it’s about the transformation of human nature.
(My emphasis.)
Quote of the Day – John Taylor Gatto
From his Underground History of American Education, which I will be quoting from for the next several days, I think:
The word pedagogue is Latin for a specialzed class of slave assigned to walk a student to the schoomaster. Over time the slave was given additional duties, his role was enlarged to that of drill master, a procedure memorialized in Varro’s instituit pedagogus, docet magister: in my rusty altar-boy Latin, The Master creates instruction, the slave pounds it in. A key to modern schooling is this: free men were never pedagogues. And yet we often refer to the science of modern schooling as pedagogy. The unenlightened parent who innocently brings matters of concern to the pedagogue, whether that poor soul is called schoolteacher, principal, or superintendent, is usually beginning a game of frustration which will end in no fundamental change. A case of barking up the wrong tree in a dark wood where the right tree is far away and obscure.
Pedagogy is social technology for winning attention and cooperation (or obedience) while strings are attached to the mind and placed in the hands of an unseen master. This may be done holistically, with smiles, music, and light-duty simulations of intellection, or it can be done harshly with rigorous drills and competitive tests. The quality of self-doubt aimed for in either case is similar.
Pedagogy is a useful concept to help us unthread some of the mysteries of modern schooling. That it is increasingly vital to the social order is evinced by the quiet teacher-pay revolution that has occurred since the 1960’s. As with police work (to which pedagogy bears important similarities), school pay has become relatively good, its hours of labor short, its job security first rate. Contrast this with the golden years of one-room schooling where pay was subsistence only and teachers were compelled to board around to keep body and soul together. Yet there was no shortage then of applicants and many sons of prominent Americans began their adult lives as schoolteachers.
With the relative opulence of today, it would be simple to fill teaching slots with accomplished men and women if that were a goal. A little adjustment in what are rationally indefensible licensing requirements would make talented people, many performance-tested adults in their fifties and sixties, available to teach. That there is not such fluid access is a good sign the purpose of schooling is more than it appears. The year-in, year-out consistency of mediocre teacher candidates demonstrates clearly that the school institution actively seeks, nurtures, hires, and promotes the caliber of personnel it needs.
And I quote this as the brother of a woman who has been teaching in the public education sector since 1980. Her work hours are not short, and her pay is not exhorbitant, but the same cannot be said of many of her coworkers or administrators. Nor, I would add, would this have been true of the author prior to his resignation from the NYC public school system, exceptions proving the rule.
Still Winning
In Lewisville, Texas:
Family-friendly gun range offering birthday parties for kids
Eagle Gun Range will host birthday parties for kids
“One of the reasons we’re doing this is, when I had my boys, I didn’t have a place to take them and educate them about how to handle a gun safely,” Prince explained. “I really want families to be able to take their kids here and teach their young shooters how to shoot safely.”
Two rooms will be available for birthday parties.
“The age limit is eight years old. You have to be tall enough to get above the shooting table,” Prince said. “They’re not gonna be left unattended. Parents are gonna be one-on-one, or if there’s not enough parents we’ll have range safety officers here to show them how to do it safely.”
Of course, panty-twisting is occurring:
But some see things in a different way. Dawn McMullan is a mom raising two sons in East Dallas, and she’s done some gun control advocacy in the past.
“It makes me very nervous,” she said. “I think eight-year-olds, developmentally, can’t tell the difference between play and reality sometimes.”
“And also to put it in a party or game atmosphere just seems to not respect a gun as much as we should respect guns,” she said.
Still winning, though. RTWT. Opinions?
Well, Bummer.
As I have noted previously, I have a Rock River AR upper chambered in .458 SOCOM coming to go with my new York Arms lower. I have brass, primers, powder, and dies in hand, and a case gauge coming. What I need are bullets.
The one I want to try most is the Remington .458 405 grain softpoint, but I have been unable to find it at any retailer. So, I emailed Remington:
Could you inform me as to when Remington will be making a production run of the .458 caliber 405 grain softpoint projectile? I cannot find this bullet in stock at any retail outlet, and it’s the one I am most interested in trying in my .458 SOCOM. From what I’ve read, this is a once-a-year product for Remington, and from all appearances not enough were made last year to keep up with demand.
Thank you for your attention.
They responded:
There are no scheduled runs for the bullets alone. We have two runs scheduled for 45-70 loads that have the 405 grain bullet however.
I replied:
Am I to gather from this response that Remington does not intend to produce this projectile as a reloading component in 2012, then?
And the conclusion:
There are non(sic) on the schedule and that is the conclusion that we would come to as well. Our apologies.
Well, damn.
One of the reasons I chose the .458 over the .50 Beowulf was bullet selection. I guess not so much anymore.
Quote of the Day – John Taylor Gatto
His short essay “I Quit, I Think” published in The Wall Street Journal after
…my thirtieth year as a school teacher in Community School District 3, Manhattan, after teaching in all five secondary schools in the district, crossing swords with one professional administration after another as they strove to rid themselves of me, after having my license suspended twice for insubordination and terminated covertly once while I was on medical leave of absence, after the City University of New York borrowed me for a five-year stint as a lecturer in the Education Department (and the faculty rating handbook published by the Student Council gave me the highest ratings in the department my last three years), after planning and bringing about the most successful permanent school fund-raiser in New York City history, after placing a single eighth-grade class into 30,000 hours of volunteer community service, after organizing and financing a student-run food cooperative, after securing over a thousand apprenticeships, directing the collection of tens of thousands of books for the construction of private student libraries, after producing four talking job dictionaries for the blind, writing two original student musicals, and launching an armada of other initiatives to reintegrate students within a larger human reality….
and after being named New York State Teacher of the Year:
Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history. It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents. The whole blueprint of school procedure is Egyptian, not Greek or Roman. It grows from the theological idea that human value is a scarce thing, represented symbolically by the narrow peak of a pyramid.
That idea passed into American history through the Puritans. It found its “scientific” presentation in the bell curve, along which talent supposedly apportions itself by some Iron Law of Biology. It’s a religious notion, School is its church. I offer rituals to keep heresy at bay. I provide documentation to justify the heavenly pyramid.
Socrates foresaw if teaching became a formal profession, something like this would happen. Professional interest is served by making what is easy to do seem hard; by subordinating the laity to the priesthood. School is too vital a jobs-project, contract giver and protector of the social order to allow itself to be “re-formed.” It has political allies to guard its marches, that’s why reforms come and go without changing much. Even reformers can’t imagine school much different.
David learns to read at age four; Rachel, at age nine: In normal development, when both are 13, you can’t tell which one learned first—the five-year spread means nothing at all. But in school I label Rachel “learning disabled” and slow David down a bit, too. For a paycheck, I adjust David to depend on me to tell him when to go and stop. He won’t outgrow that dependency. I identify Rachel as discount merchandise, “special education” fodder. She’ll be locked in her place forever.
In 30 years of teaching kids rich and poor I almost never met a learning disabled child; hardly ever met a gifted and talented one either. Like all school categories, these are sacred myths, created by human imagination. They derive from questionable values we never examine because they preserve the temple of schooling.
That’s the secret behind short-answer tests, bells, uniform time blocks, age grading, standardization, and all the rest of the school religion punishing our nation. There isn’t a right way to become educated; there are as many ways as fingerprints. We don’t need state-certified teachers to make education happen—that probably guarantees it won’t.
How much more evidence is necessary? Good schools don’t need more money or a longer year; they need real free-market choices, variety that speaks to every need and runs risks. We don’t need a national curriculum or national testing either. Both initiatives arise from ignorance of how people learn or deliberate indifference to it. I can’t teach this way any longer. If you hear of a job where I don’t have to hurt kids to make a living, let me know. Come fall I’ll be looking for work.
If you have not read his book The Underground History of American Education and you have children or grandchildren, I strongly recommend you do so. It’s available in its entirety online.
Quote of the Day – Mark Steyn Again
From the same NRO piece as yesterday:
In the twilight of the West, America and Europe are still different but only to this extent: They’ve wound up taking separate paths to the same destination. Whether you get there via an artificial common currency for an invented pseudo-jurisdiction or through quantitative easing and the global decline of the dollar, whether you spend your final years in the care of Medicare or the National Health Service death panels, whether higher education is just another stage of cradle-to-grave welfare or you have a trillion dollars’ worth of personal college debt, in 2012 the advanced Western social-democratic citizen looks pretty similar, whether viewed from Greece or Germany, California or Quebec.
That’s to say, the unsustainable “bubble” is not student debt or subprime mortgages or anything else. The bubble is us, and the assumptions of entitlement.
Can I get an “AMEN!”?
Quote of the Day – Mark Steyn Edition
One recalls the 1990 Eurovision finals in Zagreb: “Yugoslavia is very much like an orchestra,” cooed the hostess, Helga Vlahović. “The string section and the wood section all sit together.” Shortly thereafter, the wood section began ethnically cleansing the dressing rooms, while the string section rampaged through the brass section pillaging their instruments and severing their genitals. Indeed, the charming Miss Vlahović herself was forced into a sudden career shift and spent the next few years as Croatian TV’s head of “war information” programming.Fortunately, no one remembers Yugoslavia. So today Europe itself is very much like an orchestra. The Greek fiddlers and the Italian wind players all sit together, playing cards in the dressing room, waiting for the German guy to show up with their checks. — NRO, Twilight of the West
2 + 2 = DUH!
A while back I quoted from a piece written by one Barry Garelick as a Quote of the Day, and later in The George Orwell Daycare Center. He has a new piece out, linked at the Education News website, entitled Mathematics Education: Being Outwitted by Stupidity. Excerpt:
In a well-publicized paper that addressed why some students were not learning to read, Reid Lyon (2001) concluded that children from disadvantaged backgrounds where early childhood education was not available failed to read because they did not receive effective instruction in the early grades. Many of these children then required special education services to make up for this early failure in reading instruction, which were by and large instruction in phonics as the means of decoding. Some of these students had no specific learning disability other than lack of access to effective instruction. These findings are significant because a similar dynamic is at play in math education: the effective treatment for many students who would otherwise be labeled learning disabled is also the effective preventative measure.
He includes this graphic:
Preceded by this:
Over the past several decades, math education in the United States has shifted from the traditional model of math instruction to “reform math”. The traditional model has been criticized for relying on rote memorization rather than conceptual understanding. Calling the traditional approach “skills based”, math reformers deride it and claim that it teaches students only how to follow the teacher’s direction in solving routine problems, but does not teach students how to think critically or to solve non-routine problems. Traditional/skills-based teaching, the argument goes, doesn’t meet the demands of our 21st century world.
As I’ve discussed elsewhere, the criticism of traditional math teaching is based largely on a mischaracterization of how it is/has been taught, and misrepresented as having failed thousands of students in math education despite evidence of its effectiveness in the 1940’s, 50’s and 60’s.
(My emphasis.) You know, the time period that produced the scientists and engineers who took us to the moon using slide-rules.
Reacting to this characterization of the traditional model, math reformers promote a teaching approach in which understanding and process dominate over content. In lower grades, mental math and number sense are emphasized before students are fluent with procedures and number facts. Procedural fluency is seldom achieved. In lieu of the standard methods for adding/subtracting, multiplying and dividing, in some programs students are taught strategies and alternative methods. Whole class and teacher-led explicit instruction (and even teacher-led discovery) has given way to what the education establishment believes is superior: students working in groups in a collaborative learning environment.
Remember that John Taylor Gatto placed “the great transformation which turned schools from often useful places (if never the essential ones school publicists claimed) into laboratories of state experimentation“ at 1965 – at least in the major metropolitan areas. I graduated from high school in 1980. This essay, and that graphic is just further evidence that I got out while the getting was still good. Read the whole thing.
Oh, and the comments, from which comes this from reader Caroline:
I have three kids and am a veteran mom of nine Fairfax County VA public schools. The math teaching here has been uniformly abysmal, but as a parent who bought into the FCPS public relations mantra that we’re the BEST, I wasn’t sure why my kids struggled (I’m pretty sure now). They are all gifted (one went to Thomas Jefferson HS for Science and Technology).
Example: In third or fourth grade, my daughter “got” how to calculate an irregular area using multiplication, but was told she had to do the math several different ways, one of which was something to do with counting all the little lines that extended from the area on a grid. I didn’t even get it. All it did was totally confuse her, and then lay the groundwork for many cries over the years of “I HAVE to do it the TEACHER’S way, or she’ll be MAD. I can’t do it YOUR way or MY way!” What a lesson!!
That’s what my grandkids are subjected to. Then there’s this, from reader “wintertime”:
After spending several years working with the cub scout and tutoring programs in our church, I am convinced that the **only** children in our county who are learning to read, and do basic arithmetic ,have parents who aggressively **”afterschool**! Honestly, in working with these kids who do **not** have parents who are literally homeschooling after school ( “afterschooling”) it is like watching a train wreck in slow motion.