Tag: Brave New World

How We “Lost the Culture War”

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It’s been a pretty steady refrain, from Bill Whittle to CNN that the reelection of Barack Obama proves that the Right has “lost the culture war”. There has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth over how this happened, but it’s been apparent to me that it started in our public school system, and here’s an interesting article to that point.

From City Journal, Spring of 2009 edition, Pedagogy of the Oppressor:

Like the more famous Teach for America, the New York Teaching Fellows program provides an alternate route to state certification for about 1,700 new teachers annually. When I met with a group of the fellows taking a required class at a school of education last summer, we began by discussing education reform, but the conversation soon took a turn, with many recounting one horror story after another from their rocky first year: chaotic classrooms, indifferent administrators, veteran teachers who rarely offered a helping hand. You might expect the required readings for these struggling rookies to contain good practical tips on classroom management, say, or sensible advice on teaching reading to disadvantaged students. Instead, the one book that the fellows had to read in full was Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire.

For anyone familiar with American schools of education, the choice wasn’t surprising. Since the publication of the English edition in 1970, Pedagogy of the Oppressed has achieved near-iconic status in America’s teacher-training programs. In 2003, David Steiner and Susan Rozen published a study examining the curricula of 16 schools of education—14 of them among the top-ranked institutions in the country, according to U.S. News and World Report—and found that Pedagogy of the Oppressed was one of the most frequently assigned texts in their philosophy of education courses. These course assignments are undoubtedly part of the reason that, according to the publisher, almost 1 million copies have sold, a remarkable number for a book in the education field.

The odd thing is that Freire’s magnum opus isn’t, in the end, about education—certainly not the education of children. Pedagogy of the Oppressed mentions none of the issues that troubled education reformers throughout the twentieth century: testing, standards, curriculum, the role of parents, how to organize schools, what subjects should be taught in various grades, how best to train teachers, the most effective way of teaching disadvantaged students. This ed-school bestseller is, instead, a utopian political tract calling for the overthrow of capitalist hegemony and the creation of classless societies. Teachers who adopt its pernicious ideas risk harming their students—and ironically, their most disadvantaged students will suffer the most.

Read the whole article. If you have children in public school, ask their teachers if they’ve read Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and if so, what they think of it. Remember, this book was mentioned prominently in the “Raza Studies” fight here in the Tucson Unified School District.

Now, here’s an interesting coincidence:

As a case in point, consider the career of Robert Peterson. Peterson started out in the 1980s as a young elementary school teacher in inner-city Milwaukee. He has described how he plumbed Pedagogy of the Oppressed, looking for some way to apply the great radical educator’s lessons to his own fourth- and fifth-grade bilingual classrooms. Peterson came to realize that he had to break away from the “banking method” of education, in which “the teacher and the curricular texts have the ‘right answers’ and which the students are expected to regurgitate periodically.” Instead, he applied the Freirian approach, which “relies on the experience of the student. . . . It means challenging the students to reflect on the social nature of knowledge and the curriculum.” Peterson would have you believe that his fourth- and fifth-graders became critical theorists, interrogating the “nature of knowledge” like junior scholars of the Frankfurt School.

What actually happened was that Peterson used the Freirian rationale to become his students’ “self-appointed political conscience.”

AKA, their political officer.

After one unit on U.S. intervention in Latin America, Peterson decided to take the children to a rally protesting U.S. aid to the Contras opposing the Marxist Sandinistas in Nicaragua. The children stayed after school to make placards:

LET THEM RUN THEIR LAND!
HELP CENTRAL AMERICA DON’T KILL THEM
GIVE THE NICARAGUANS THEIR FREEDOM

Peterson was particularly proud of a fourth-grader who described the rally in the class magazine. “On a rainy Tuesday in April some of the students from our class went to protest against the contras,” the student wrote. “The people in Central America are poor and bombed on their heads. When we went protesting it was raining and it seemed like the contras were bombing us.”

These days, Peterson is the editor of Rethinking Schools, the nation’s leading publication for social-justice educators. He is also the editor of a book called Rethinking Mathematics: Teaching Social Justice by the Numbers, which provides math lessons for indoctrinating young children in the evils of racist, imperialist America.

Rethinking Schools, if you remember, was the source of the piece that inspired my education überpost The George Orwell Daycare Center.

Continuing:

Partly thanks to Peterson’s efforts, the social-justice movement in math, as in other academic subjects, has fully arrived (see “The Ed Schools’ Latest—and Worst—Humbug,” Summer 2006). It has a foothold in just about every major ed school in the country and enjoys the support of some of the biggest names in math education, including several recent presidents of the 25,000-member American Education Research Association, the umbrella organization of the education professoriate. Its dozens of pseudo-scholarly books, journals, and conferences extol the supposed benefits to disadvantaged kids of the kind of teaching that Peterson once inflicted on his Milwaukee fourth-graders.

And now you know why schools can’t teach algebra, as detailed in The George Orwell Daycare Center.

Again, read the whole piece. Do you understand now how we “lost the culture”?  And why we aren’t going to get it back?

Quote of the Day – Higher Education Edition

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(M)ost school systems are run by people who think that a four year degree in literature is a wonderful thing, and I do, too, but the country is kept running by people who know temperatures and pressures and torques and amps and volts and combustion characteristics and other things that don’t fit in the average sit-com. Yes, there are some colleges offering these things, but there are also a lot of people who picked up the skills on the job. — Mostly Cajun, Ch-ch-ch-changes!

I graduated from college with a degree in what I call “nuclear basket-weaving” – a Bachelor of Arts in General Studies, my three areas of concentration (in descending order): math, physics and engineering.

This gave me a good technical background but no actual practical knowledge other than how to do drafting, back when it was still done with paper and pencil.  That did not make me all that employable.  I started off as a helper in an electric shop at $5/hr, back when the minimum wage was $3.35.  And remember, I had a four-year degree (after 5½ years of school)!  The bottom quintile of pre-tax income in 1986 was $14,300 or less.  I made less.  I did not tell them (nor did I feel) that $5/hr was beneath my dignity.  I said “Thank you, sir, you won’t regret this!”

That $5/hr job allowed me the opportunity to learn, and the stuff I know today I learned on the job. It’s made me very employable. I’ve been unemployed once over the last twenty-six years, and that was over Christmas of 2009. Currently, I get a call or an email from a headhunter about once or twice a month. That’s because I do know stuff about temperatures and pressures and torques and amps and volts and bits and bytes and words. Kids coming out of college these days? Not so much.  And the majority of the ones who do?  Foreign students who are likely to take that knowledge home with them.

My income now puts me on the ragged edge between the fourth and fifth quintiles.  Add in my wife’s income, and we’re solidly in the (bottom of) the top 20% of income earners in the U.S. as households go.

All because I studied stuff that makes me valuable to the people who produce wealth.

As I’ve pointed out previously, Mike Rowe has a lot to say about this topic that’s worth listening to.

Quote of the Day – John Taylor Gatto (Pt. 7)

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The secret of American schooling is that it doesn’t teach the way children learn, and it isn’t supposed to; school was engineered to serve a concealed command economy and a deliberately re-stratified social order. It wasn’t made for the benefit of kids and families as those individuals and institutions would define their own needs. School is the first impression children get of organized society; like most first impressions, it is the lasting one. Life according to school is dull and stupid, only consumption promises relief: Coke, Big Macs, fashion jeans, that’s where real meaning is found, that is the classroom’s lesson, however indirectly delivered.

The decisive dynamics which make forced schooling poisonous to healthy human development aren’t hard to spot. Work in classrooms isn’t significant work; it fails to satisfy real needs pressing on the individual; it doesn’t answer real questions experience raises in the young mind; it doesn’t contribute to solving any problem encountered in actual life. The net effect of making all schoolwork external to individual longings, experiences, questions, and problems is to render the victim listless. This phenomenon has been well-understood at least since the time of the British enclosure movement which forced small farmers off their land into factory work. Growth and mastery come only to those who vigorously self-direct. Initiating, creating, doing, reflecting, freely associating, enjoying privacy—these are precisely what the structures of schooling are set up to prevent, on one pretext or another.

As I watched it happen, it took about three years to break most kids, three years confined to environments of emotional neediness with nothing real to do.

Quote of the Day – Fractal Leftists Edition

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From commenter Windy Wilson to Out of Airspeed, Out of Altitude, and Damned Near Out of Ideas:

   (T)he philosophy of leftists since the Cretaceous or Permian or Mississippian (to reference Kipling): The experts know better how I should run my business, hire, direct and fire my employeees, what sort of refrigerator, stove, Air conditioner, electric light I should buy, what my clothes should be made of, how much and what foods I should eat, what sort of fuel I should put in my car, how big the car should be, ad infinitum. Like some sort of fractal, the same pattern is both writ large and small, and reveals itself in the collapse of the European Union and in the design of the Airbus.

May Victims of Communism Day

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Today is the fourth annual Victims of Communism Day, a day to remember the people murdered by their own governments in their quest to achieve a “worker’s paradise” where everyone is equal, where “to each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities” is the beautiful dream lie.  R.J. Rummel, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Hawaii, has calculated that the total number of victims of Communism – that is, the domestic victims of their own governments – in the USSR, China, Vietnam, North Korea and Cambodia is 98.4 million people.  For all Communist governments during the 20th Century, he puts the estimate at approximately 110 million.  And this wasn’t in warfare against other nations, this was what these governments did to their own people – “breaking eggs” to make their utopian omlette.

Six million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, and another six million people the Nazis decided were “undesirable” went with them.  “Never again” is the motto of the modern Jew, and many others just as dedicated.  But “again and again and again” seems to be the rebuke of history.

The Communists are hardly alone in these crimes.  Rummel estimates that the total number of people murdered by their own governments during the 20th Century is on the close order of 262 million, but the single biggest chunk of that truly frightening number is directly due to one pernicious idea:  That we can make people better.

Why do I own guns?  For a number of reasons, but one of them is this:

The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed – where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once. — Judge Alex Kozinski, dissenting, Silveira v. Lockyer, denial to re-hear en banc, 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, 2003.

I intend to repeat this post each May 1 that I continue to run this blog.

And, if you’ve got a spare 51 minutes, I recommend strongly that you watch this lecture, “Why Socialism?”

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nt58gg1DQGk?rel=0]

Shorter John Derbyshire

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John Derbyshire has been fired from National Review for writing a completely politically incorrect piece entitled The Talk:  Nonblack Version. Pretty strong stuff.

Short version:

There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery. Then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved. — Jesse Jackson

Read this piece by Heather Mac Donald, too.

During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.  —  George Orwell

UPDATE: EXCELLENT discussion of the topic over at RobertaX’s place.

UPDATE II: Eric S. Raymond (and his commenters) have some interesting things to say as well. Take Eric’s quiz. At least one commenter here has failed it.

“…when a long train of abuses and usurpations…”

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Back in August of 2009 I wrote Restoring the Lost Constitution. In that piece I quoted a bit from an Orson Scott Card novel:

(America) was a nation created out of nothing – nothing but a set of ideals that they never measured up to. Now and then they had great leaders, but usually nothing but political hacks, and I mean right from the start. Washington was great, but Adams was paranoid and lazy, and Jefferson was as vile a scheming politician as a nation has ever been cursed with.

…

America shaped itself with institutions so strong that it could survive corruption, stupidity, vanity, ambition, recklessness, and even insanity in its chief executive.

and asked the question, “But can it survive enmity?”

Gerard Van der Leun now addresses that question in his piece, Presence of Malice: Against the Conservative Portrait of the President. You’ll note that it expands upon the point of last Saturday’s Quote of the Day, that also came from Van der Leun’s site.

For that which we are about to receive may we be truly thankful…

The Selfish Gene

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Thirty years ago, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins published The Selfish Gene, a book dedicated to the idea that the purpose of life was, essentially, reproduction – survival of the molecules of life.  Or, as Robert Heinlein put it,

A zygote is a gamete’s way of producing more gametes. This may be the purpose of the universe.

This is expressed as “Birds do it, bees do it, why don’t we do it?” All species have a drive to reproduce, and we’re told that women have a “biological clock” that ticks down constantly.  Bonnie Raitt’s 1990 song Nick of Time speaks to this:

A friend of mine, she cries at night
And she calls me on the phone
Sees babies everywhere she goes
And she wants one of her own

She’s waited long enough she says
And still he can’t decide
Pretty soon she’ll have to choose
And it tears her up inside

She’s scared,
Scared to run out of time

It’s an old idea. 

Remember this scene from The Matrix?

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpKphB4w9ME&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&version=3&w=640&h=360]

Here’s what Agent Smith was talking about, Monty Python style:

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

Well, Agent Smith is wrong – on a number of levels – but the one I’m concerned with here is the part about humans multiplying “until every natural resource is consumed.”  Not so.  In fact, one of the problems the “West” is experiencing right now is the exact opposite.  We’re not “multiplying” enough.  We’re not even replacing ourselves.  It’s a problem that has attracted a lot of attention.  Mark Steyn’s 2006 phillipic America Alone:  The End of the World as We Know It concerns itself almost exclusively with the demographics of Europe, and the fact that Europeans aren’t reproducing.  Here’s another recent example, Forbes Magazine, Declining Birthrates, Expanded Bureaucracy: Is U.S. Going European?

One hopes that the current crisis gripping the E.U. will give even the most devoted Europhiles pause about the wisdom of such mimicry. Yet the deadliest European disease the U.S. must avoid is that of persistent demographic decline.

The gravity of Europe’s demographic situation became clear at a conference I attended in Singapore last year. Dieter Salomon, the green mayor of the environmentally correct Freiburg, Germany, was speaking about the future of cities. When asked what Germany’s future would be like in 30 years, he answered, with a little smile, “There won’t be a future.”

We’re not giving birth, but we’re not dying as fast either.  From Foreign Policy, The World Will Be More Crowded – With Old People:

(W)hat demography tells us is this: The human population will continue to grow, though in a very different way from in the past. The United Nations’ most recent “mid-range” projection calls for an increase to 8 billion people by 2025 and to 10.1 billion by century’s end.
Until quite recently, such population growth always came primarily from increases in the numbers of young people. Between 1950 and 1990, for example, increases in the number of people under 30 accounted for more than half of the growth of the world’s population, while only 12 percent came from increases in the ranks of those over 60.

But in the future it will be the exact opposite. The U.N. now projects that over the next 40 years, more than half (58 percent) of the world’s population growth will come from increases in the number of people over 60, while only 6 percent will come from people under 30. Indeed, the U.N. projects that by 2025, the population of children under 5, already in steep decline in most developed countries, will be falling globally — and that’s even after assuming a substantial rebound in birth rates in the developing world. A gray tsunami will be sweeping the planet.

So we’re not reproducing, but we’re living longer.

The 2006 “comedy” film Idiocracy considered the idea that population growth occurred among people not intelligent enough to control their reproductive habits, while intelligent people just put it off:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXRjmyJFzrU?rel=0]

But that doesn’t seem to be the case, either. Intelligence isn’t the dividing line on reproduction rates. If anything, it appears to be wealth – wealthier nations tend to have lower reproduction rates than poorer ones. But is it only an economic decision? Do poorer nations squirt out kids at a higher rate than richer ones because intercourse is the best, cheapest entertainment going? Or is there something else, some other influence that affects human reproduction rates?

Mark Steyn noted in America Alone another interesting thing: America, along with maintaining at least a replacement reproduction rate is also one of the last Western nations still nominally Christian.

A while back, I wrote Why I am an Atheist. The gist of that post is the question What’s religion for? I think I have a better understanding now. Let’s watch the rest of that clip from Monty Python’s Meaning of Life:

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

Every version of Christianity follows Genesis 1:28

And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

I’m not a student of comparative religion, but I’d be willing to bet that the major religions out there have some similar form of entreaty to their adherents.

It would appear that in humans, the “selfish gene” expresses itself as personal selfishness. Cultures achieve material wealth, lose religion, and stop reproducing. Something other than “the selfish gene” is required to keep gametes making more gametes, and religion fills that need. The rites, rituals, rules and ramifications of religion act to produce social pressures to reproduce, and to do it along societal norms. Lose those, and demographic suicide threatens.

That is, unless we really do reach Raymond Kurzweil’s technological Singularity and achieve near-as-dammit human immortality. Of course, if we do cross that particular event horizon, what it means to be human will be redefined.

Anyway, this multimedia essay is the result of a lot of windshield time over the last three weeks. I found the idea intriguing. Discuss amongst yourselves.

Quote of the Day

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From a comment to Victor Davis Hanson’s Atlas is Sorta Shrugging:

I can tell you for a fact that major portions of the country – particularly urban areas on the coasts, but not just those – are diametrically opposed to absolutely every single thing you stand for. Their stance may be extremely hypocritical, unconstructive, contradictory and irrational, but they will not acknowledge it, even in the face of the most objective and logical arguments. In fact, they will look upon you as borderline criminal for rejecting their creed.

What the Obama presidency has revealed is that America is not whole anymore, but is fractured among at least two major fault lines of political, economic and social thought, and this president not only thrives on that rift, but has done everything in his awesome power to expand and deepen it.

This is not the same america I was born into over 4 decades ago. You must prepare yourselves for the real possibility that, if a great crisis breaks upon the nation, that it will not survive intact.

And don’t count on either dominant political party to rectify the situation. Both have proven without any doubt that they are concerned only and specifically with what is in their short term interest as a party and as individual politicians, and they will sacrifice EVERYTHING, no matter how sacred, to pursue their goals, protect their status and enhance their position.

As I said, there will be no repeat of the war-between-the-states, but our major cities may very well burn.

Quote of the Day II – (formerly) Great Britain Edition

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Tam brings it so hard I had to do two QotD:

…look at Cameron’s résumé: He’s a blandly handsome guy who went to all the right schools and has never had a productive non-government job in his life… No wonder Obama hates him; they both wore the same dress to the prom.

England used to be a cool place. It used to rule the world. Now it’s like an island of California, except without the nice weather and food.

—  It’s a poor craftsman that blames the tools