Tag: QotD

Quote of the Day – John Taylor Gatto

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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.

Quote of the Day – Mark Steyn Again

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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

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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

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.

Quote of the Day – Precious Snowflake Edition

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  I have spent hours explaining an essay’s grammatical, stylistic, and logical weaknesses in the wearying certainty that the student was unable, both intellectually and emotionally, to comprehend what I was saying or to act on my advice. It is rare for such students to be genuinely desirous and capable of learning how to improve. Most of them simply hope that I will come around. Their belief that nothing requires improvement except the grade is one of the biggest obstacles that teachers face in the modern university. And that is perhaps the real tragedy of our education system: not only that so many students enter university lacking the basic skills and knowledge to succeed in their courses — terrible in itself — but also that they often arrive essentially unteachable, lacking the personal qualities necessary to respond to criticism. —  The Unteachables: A Generation that Cannot Learn, Janice Fiamengo

RTWT

And from the first comment:

Under rational circumstances, you don’t try to teach Algebra to students who have no idea of what number theory is, don’t know fractions etc. I had many a student try to tell me that adding 1/2 to 1/3 equaled 2/5. I swear to G-d this is true. Yet this type of student is graduated from high school to join the rational thinking masses. This really scares me to death. These idiots out number us 200 to 1. They can be told anything and they will believe it. Yes, they have the right to vote. How can these idiots, who can barely read, are ignorant of basic math, watch television for their ideas of the world, love their sex and drugs, be given such a privilege as to decide the destiny of our country?

Because it’s easier to lead them around by the nose than a population that understands the world around them. It’s been the plan for a hundred years, and it’s paying off in unintended ways.

Read the comments, too.

Quote of the Day – Confidence Edition

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From Captain Capitalism:

If you recall high school economics or college freshman economics (both were the same, colleges just made you pay extra to re-learn what you did in high school) there were “The Factors of Production.”

These factors were essentially the ingredients you needed in order for a business or an individual to “produce” something. There were originally three of them.

Land – you can produce nothing without at minimum some kind of office space.
Labor – the machines will not only not take over the world, they’ll just sit there unless a human spends his or her time running them.
Capital – Nobody is doing nothing until they get paid. And that includes the people who produce the tools and machines you’ll need to get started.

A fourth one was entered as they realized even with the above three, nothing would get produced. You needed a leader. An innovator. A man with the plan.

The entrepreneur.

Since there it was commonly accepted that there are three original, but most likely four real factors of production.

However, I would like to tender a fifth.

I’m doing this not to make things more complicated or to somehow be enshrined in the Economics Hall of Fame, but because our economy today practically proves there is a fifth and final factor of production that is required to produce, but is not accounted for in the current list. That fifth component is:

A future.

RTWT.

And then read my February 2009 post, Confidence.

Quote of the Day – EUtopia Edition

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Officials lie like rats in times of financial panic; they do it out of a sense of duty. They will insist that a given country will never leave the euro until the moment that it does; they will say that a deposit freeze is unthinkable until they announce that they’ve done it; they will tell you a bank is rock solid until the moment they padlock its doors. This is all for your own good, of course. They don’t want you to panic — and they want to make sure that your money is trapped when they take it away or turn it from gold into straw. —  Walter Russell Mead, Ratcheting Up The Crisis In Europe

Quote of the Day – Your Teacher Said WHAT?! Edition

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Last one from this book:

Progressivism may be hysterical, but it isn’t in retreat; it’s on the attack.  And it retains a powerful set of channels for communicating its philosophy, including television, newspapers, and the Internet.

Oh, and the schools.

Toward the end of the 2010 school year, and therefore the writing of this book, Blake brought home a writing project for her fifth-grade class entitled “Understanding Environmental Concerns.”  Here’s a sample.

Today you read about the environment and the importance of your country’s natural resources.  Currently a conflict exists between people who want to reduce the amount of chemicals in the air in order to protect the environement, and those who say it hurts business if we limit the amount of emissions they release.

Now, if you’re going to load a question for a bunch of ten-year-olds, you couldn’t really do much better than this:  The conflict is between people who want to protect the evnironment and those who want to help (or at least not hurt) business.  Environment or business:  Pick one.

But teachers aren’t pushing a Progressive agenda!  Just ask ’em!

As one commenter here has noted, they don’t see it for the same reason fish don’t notice water – they’re swimming in it.

Quote of the Day – Ideological Purity Edition

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From Robb:

The problem with Libertarianism is the same problem with Communism. Not everyone buys into your fantasy.

It’s…why Libertarians are powerless. Instead of trying to actually do something, they spend more time circle jerking in their purity tests than picking up their bowcasters and going door to door trying to explain their positions and heaven forbid – compromising where they can to move forward.

Quote of the Day – Progressive Edition

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From Your Teacher Said WHAT?!:

The desire to regulate economic life might be the defining characteristic of Progressive philosophy. It combines a mistrust of the free market in allocating resources; an appeal to a vague and indefinable virtue (“fairness”); a desire to achieve perfection in economic outcomes; a deference to experts over the judgement of ordinary folks; and, best of all, a chance to tell other people what to do. Oh, heck, let’s just say it: Regulation is progressivism.

It is also the perfect way to illustrate just how much Progressive thinking depends on treating adults like kids.

From Chapter 10, June 2010: 99.985 Percent Pure: The Price of Regulation