Quote of the Day – Edumacation Edishun

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This one from Victor Davis Hanson:

Our schools rate just below Mississippi in math and science. Tell me why, given our high taxes and highest paid teachers in the nation? Can the governor or legislature explain? Is the culprit the notoriously therapeutic California curriculum? The inability to fire incompetent teachers? The vast number of non-English speaking students? Derelict parents? How odd that not a single state official can offer any explanation other than “We need more money.” What is the possible cure for the near worst math and science students in the nation? Yes, I see it now: the California Senate just passed a bill mandating the teaching of homosexual, lesbian, bi-, and transgendered history, just the sort of strategy to raise those English composition and vocabulary scores among the linguistic and arithmetic illiterate.

He has much more to say on a much broader subject, but that paragraph is QotD.

UPDATE:  I am reminded that this is another good place to reference California state Senator Tom McClintock’s 2005 piece, A Modest Proposal for Saving Our Schools. Nothing’s changed, except state Senator McClintock is now U.S. Representative McClintock.

More on my Houston Trip

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After the meetings on Friday, the other people in my group had a flight home at 3:00PM (one, in retrospect, I probably should have been on) so after I dropped them off at the airport, my time was my own.

I had dinner that evening at Taste of Texas with Uncle Kenny and El Capitan, a couple of local Houston bloggers. Uncle Kenny co-blogs at Jaded Haven and Washington Rebel. El Capitan blogs at Baboon Pirates. El Capitan wrote about the meetup here.

It was a pleasant evening of interesting conversation and excellent food. One of the very enjoyable fringe benefits of blogging is the ability to meet good people who know you at least well enough to meet for dinner almost anywhere you go. Thank you, gentlemen.

Home

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Finally.

Remember when I said I’d gotten some travel vouchers from United?  My parents are planning a trip, and I asked my dad if he could use them.  “What airline?” was his question.  “United,” I replied.  “I’d rather walk,” he said.

United has merged with Continental.

Now, flying to Houston was painless.  Getting back, not so much.  I arrived at the airport at 07:15 for my 09:20 flight – and discovered that said flight had been Cancelled.  Oh.  Joy.  So off to the ticket counter goes I to find out what my options were.

Continental had rebooked my flight.  For TUESDAY.  BZZZZT!  Sorry, wrong answer!  Well, they could book me on the 6:00PM flight.  That was all they could do.

OK, how about Phoenix?  I can get a rental car and drive down to Tucson.  Sure, they can do that.  There’s a flight leaving at 09:10, or they can put me on standby for the 11:50 flight.  The earlier the better, so I have a boarding pass for the 09:10 flight to Phoenix, boarding to begin at 08:35, and to compensate me for my inconvenience, they give me a $6 voucher for food from any vendor in the airport.  By the time I leave the ticket counter it’s 08:15.

By the time I make it through security theater (don’t even ask about that) and get to the gate, it’s 08:50.

And boarding has not started yet.

We finally start boarding at 09:00.  We push back from the gate at about 09:25.  And sit on the tarmac for thirty minutes.  Seems there’s a hydraulic problem.  We’re going back to the gate.  We get back to the gate about 10:00.  And sit.  Oh, wait!  They’re going to let us off the plane while it’s being repaired – no, they have another plane for us!

At a different terminal.

It’s the 11:50 flight they offered to put me on standby for.  I don’t know what they did, but they had one completely full flight when we pushed back from the gate.

At 12:20.

An hour into the flight, we have a “medical emergency” – a passenger is ill.  However, they decided to continue on to Phoenix rather than divert.  We land in Phoenix at 12:50 local time.  We wait while EMT’s check out the ill passenger and take her off the plane first.  I’m in the back of the aircraft.  Debarkation takes twenty minutes.  I head for the car rentals.

Do you know how much it costs to rent a car one-way from Sky Harbor to Tucson International?  Don’t ask.  Somehow I doubt it will be a reimbursable expense.

I call my wife once I’m in the car on the way home.  I’m going to be home in time for the birthday dinner at The Cheesecake Factory for my stepdaughter and my neice’s husband.

No I’m not.  My mother is in the hospital.  Dad took her in at 03:00 this morning with shortness of breath.  She has atrial fibrillation and fluid buildup around her heart, and isn’t getting enough oxygen.  This is the second trip in a month for this condition.  Apparently they didn’t adjust her meds properly.  So instead of going home and then out to dinner, I went straight to the hospital.

Now I’m home.

Houston is a 17-hour shot down I-10 from my house.  Next time I think I’ll drive.

But Knoxville is next weekend.  I hope American Airlines is better.

Traveling

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I’m flying to Houston, Texas today and will be in meetings most of tomorrow.  Dinner Friday night with a couple of bloggers (I hope) and returning to Tucson on Saturday.  Saturday night I’ve got a family obligation, so needless to say blogging will be light.  There’s an überpost simmering on a back burner though, that I hope to hit “Publish” on in a week or so.

Meanwhile, the free ice cream machine is on the fritz.

Sometimes I Wish I Drank

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As Tam said, “Et tu, Clarence?”  The Supreme Court in an 8-1 decision basically rubberstamped the Indiana Supreme Court’s Barnes v. Indiana decision, further eviscerating the 4th Amendment’s guarantee of the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects in the name of the War on (Some) Drugs™.

And I find that I am in complete agreement with Justice Ginsberg:

The Court today arms the police with a way routinely to dishonor the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement in drug cases.

I’d expect this of Clarence Thomas, not Ginsburg.

I feel a strong urge to get completely drunk and take a long, very hot shower.

One Hundred Years of Public Education

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My brother sent this to me tonight.  I think I’ve seen it before, unattributed, but it’s right in most particulars.

The danger to America is not Barack Obama but a citizenry capable of entrusting a man like him with the Presidency. It will be far easier to limit and undo the follies of an Obama presidency than to restore the necessary common sense and good judgment to a depraved electorate willing to have such a man for their president. The problem is much deeper and far more serious than Mr. Obama, who is a mere symptom of what ails America. Blaming the prince of the fools should not blind anyone to the vast confederacy of fools that made him their prince. The Republic can survive a Barack Obama, who is, after all, merely a fool. It is less likely to survive a multitude of fools such as those who made him their president.

A comment in response to it seen elsewhere, however, puts it in perspective:

I’m not worried about the 1/5 of America that voted for him, I’m worried about the 3/5ths of America that didn’t care enough to vote at all.

And Yet Another

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Following up on the previous post, Instapundit links to a piece about playwright David Mamet and his new book on losing his liberal outlook.  Some choice excerpts:

Higher ed, (Mamet) said, was an elaborate scheme to deprive young people of their freedom of thought. He compared four years of college to a lab experiment in which a rat is trained to pull a lever for a pellet of food. A student recites some bit of received and unexamined wisdom—”Thomas Jefferson: slave owner, adulterer, pull the lever”—and is rewarded with his pellet: a grade, a degree, and ultimately a lifelong membership in a tribe of people educated to see the world in the same way.

“If we identify every interaction as having a victim and an oppressor, and we get a pellet when we find the victims, we’re training ourselves not to see cause and effect,” he said. Wasn’t there, he went on, a “much more interesting .  .  . view of the world in which not everything can be reduced to victim and oppressor?”

This is the whole strategy of “critical theory” – the Frankfurt school’s methodology for using the education system to de-moralize (hypen used intentionally) the population. Thomas Jefferson? He can’t be a great man, he was a slave owner and adulterer! Pull the lever!  Writing an essay on economics?  The grader will be a Keynesian, so it had better slant that way!  Pull the lever!

On cognitive dissonance:

“The question occurs to me quite a lot: What do liberals do when their plans have failed? What did the writers do when their plans led to unemployment, their own and other people’s? One thing they can’t do is admit they failed. Why? To admit failure would endanger their position in the herd.”

To admit failure would require them to question their ideology, and that loses them their position in the herd.

In the beginning of Mamet’s conversion, his Rabbi sent him books:

One of the first was A Conflict of Visions, by Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institution. In it Sowell expands on the difference between the “constrained vision” of human nature—close to the tragic view that infuses Mamet’s greatest plays—and the “unconstrained vision” of man’s endless improvement that suffused Mamet’s politics and the politics of his profession and social class.

“He came back to me stunned. He said, ‘This is incredible!’ He said, ‘Who thinks like this? Who are these people?’ I said, ‘Republicans think like this.’ He said, ‘Amazing.’ ”

I didn’t have to be converted by Sowell’s magnum opus, but Conflict of Vision‘s effect on me was similar.

And, of course, the article points out the inevitable herd reaction to Mamet’s conversion:

After reading The Secret Knowledge in galleys, the Fox News host and writer Greg Gutfeld invented the David Mamet Attack Countdown Clock, which “monitors the days until a once-glorified liberal artist is dismissed as an untalented buffoon.” Tick tock.

Read the whole piece.

I think I just added another book onto my pile.

An Example of Critical Pedagogy

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From the comments to my recent post A Failure of Critical Pedagogy comes this video of a Tucson Unified School District board meeting in which a parent stood up and read from some of the books used in that district’s “Raza Studies” program, which I’ve covered before in Balkanization and Why I Keep Marxadelphia Around.

Watch this video, and listen to what the speaker has to say.  Then listen to the response from the TUSD governing board member.  Is he in denial, or just completely obtuse?

http://static.photobucket.com/player.swf

Do you want that taught to your kids?  How do you feel about it being taught exclusively to students of hispanic descent?