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My Blog Has Moved! February 25, 2009

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Please visit my new blog for this material and new posts:

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“Democrat Party” Must Be Eradicated February 14, 2009

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As the GOP legislators paint themselves more and more into a corner of irrelevance, it is past time to mention one of their verbal tics that has been bothering me for quite some time. The locution at which I bridle is the persistent designation of the Democratic Party by the contemptuously crafted designation “Democrat Party.” That they have not been called on this before is shameful. It is time to give them a taste of their own medicine. Therefore, I call on all those who care about correctness and civility in political discourse to adopt the locution “Republic Party” for the GOP and to persist in that designation until the Republic legislators mend their linguistic ways.

Testiness Over Test Scores May 25, 2008

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The furor over the abysmal scores of Georgia students is misdirected. Most blame the test (thereby blaming the messenger), then blame the system. Yet even the “improved” test is woefully unchallenging, and Georgia students perform badly on more objective tests like the NAEP.

Teachers and administrators join the chorus since doing so takes them off the hook. Yet they either actively support, or passively acquiesce in, the system. They should not be taken off the hook. Indeed, many should be given the hook.

Worst are the parents who complain because their children who have earned As and Bs have failed the test. They rather should complain that their children have been given As and Bs that they did not deserve in the first place.

This circle of recriminations simply allows the status quo to proceed unchecked except for calls to make modifications that will eviscerate our educational system even more.

Unhappy (Election) Returns May 7, 2008

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The furor of outrage against Lake County, Indiana, for turning in its election results slowly is another example of the misplaced priorities that so pervade our political and journalistic scenes. The mania for early returns puts undue pressure on local election boards. We have become a society that is incapable of delayed gratification, even where that is appropriate and desirable.

Television networks so greedy for a “scoop”—in an electronic age in which the very notion of “scoop” is anachronistic and atavistic—still rush to predict winners even if their doing so could skew results in places whose polls are still open when the predictions are made.

It is past time for us to eschew this kind of insidious narcissistic self-aggrandizement at the cost of reasoned political discourse.

If I had my way—I will worry, or let the Supreme Court worry, about the legality later—I would enact legislation prohibiting any state or television network from releasing any results or predictions on a given election day until the last precinct of the last state to vote on that day is closed.

Wright or Wrong? April 28, 2008

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There is something paradoxical about the current notoriety that has been foisted on the Reverend Jeremiah Wright by ignoramuses on both the right and the left whose blindered viewpoints have eventuated in a perniciously unfair tainting of the candidacy of Barack Obama through the most unjustly insidious guilt-by-association reasoning that we have seen in many a decade in what passes for our political discourse nowadays.

Of course Pastor Wright has the right—perhaps he would say, with some justice, the prophetic duty—to speak his mind. Furthermore, much of what he speaks is informed by a kind of rough erudition whose major defect is that it is more ideological than one would prefer. In addition, when he speaks of national policy, the scattered bizarre opinions should not obscure the fact that many of his observations are incisive and cogent, and there is an experiential competence that lends them some credence.

However, the attacks against him have given him a wider platform and credence than is appropriate. When he steps outside spirituality and broad national and international policy into specific and concrete social and political issues, he goes awry.

This is where the paradox becomes manifest. I have in mind, most especially, his sojourning into the territory of educational theory and so-called learning styles. He rightly has excoriated the “separate but equal” principle enunciated in the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of the U.S. Supreme Court. Nonetheless, when he declares that blacks, say, are “different, not deficient” and when he presents the questionable right brain/left brain educational theories as secular gospel, he is unknowingly defending what is nothing more than a cosmetically camouflaged—and equally insidious—“separate, but equal” doctrine of his own.

“Different, not deficient” sounds nicer than “separate, but equal,” but its sound is hollow when one recognizes underneath it the old Jim Crow wine in a new bottle.

The result is that his myopic critics—through their very criticism—have lent his comments here a credence that they do not deserve. His supporters, whose reaction to the criticism is to defend whatever he said as uncritically as those who misinterpreted him in the first place lashed out at him with a broad whip, may be more sympathetic—for historical reasons—than his detractors. Unfortunately, they are unknowingly in collusion to contribute, from a different side, to the lack of intelligent discourse that continues to poison our political universe.

The upshot of this is to perpetuate the larger paradox that since the civil rights movement, since desegregation, blacks at large have been worse educated than many blacks were who were educated prior to Brown v. Board of Education. Those well-educated blacks were educated by black teachers in segregated schools who held their students to rigorous standards and whose educating was not compromised by bogus educational theories that are no less racist for being articulated by a black pastor than they would be if articulated—in different words—by a white bigot. Furthermore, in the last half century, when our public schools experienced the steepest decline in quality of any time since their inception, all students have been worse educated, but those from disadvantaged ethnic minorities have suffered more damage than others because they have had greater obstacles to overcome.

Let us not forget—when all is said and done—that none of this has anything to do with Barack Obama, who is his own person. Because Neptune orbits the sun, we do not accuse it of being hot.

Bushie Language Alert: “robust” March 18, 2008

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Beware. Whenever Bush or any of his minions describes an event, phenomenon, or policy as “robust,” one can be certain that the actual state of affairs is either stagnant, moribund, or defunct.

An Unexpected Lesson from Kenya March 15, 2008

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The current administration and its party loyalists have produced an unhealthy and—as our great 19th century writers would have thought—unAmerican political climate. This climate is a dangerous combination of global imperialism and intellectual isolationism.

The global imperialism has been discussed amply by others and understood by any who were open to seeing its manifestations.

However, the intellectual isolationism has been neglected. Yet, our leaders—especially the Republicans—have marched under its banner in ways that put us at peril.

We have a president whose favorite “philosopher” is Jesus. We have an administration that has blundered into the Middle East with a cultural ignorance that doomed its efforts before they began. We have legislators who excoriated Supreme Court Justices who sought legal enlightenment in the decisions and law codes of other nations.

We have presidential candidates who genuflect before the dogmas of faith that our founders strove so strongly to replace by the reflections of reason.

We have leaders who have gone so far as to suggest that to turn to the wisdom of other nations for guidance is unpatriotic. These leaders have also declared themselves hostile to the fruits of the history of ideas, indeed of history in general.

In a word, we have leaders who embody the principle that we have—and should have—nothing to learn about, or from, other nations, the principle that we have—and should have—nothing to learn about, or from, the insights of creeds and philosophies and events that we regard as alien to us.

It is a small step from this attitude to a general feeling that we have nothing to learn simply. This distresses me because too many of our students have absorbed this attitude from an educational system that supports and nurtures it under the aegis of political leaders whose obstinate ineptness allows it to persist.

I was prompted to these thoughts by a Reuters News Service report that reminded me that we have much to learn from other nations. Indeed, what they have to teach us is not alien at all, but truer to our original national selves and soul than what we do now.

The dateline of the Reuters story was “Nakuru, Kenya, January 13.” The subject of the story was education.

According to the reporters, in the midst of agonizing unrest, “Kenyans’ focus on education has not wavered.”

Although the violent turmoil of the land caused the opening of schools in some areas to be postponed for a week, “for the most part, people are ready to send their children back despite the unrest.”

This contrasts strongly with the softness of our attitudes. In our schools, the least distress is taken as an excuse to cancel school or to allow students to evade classes if they need “counseling” to help them to cope with what by Kenyan standards would seem like a petty annoyance. Our educators—perhaps having learned from our media—tend to treat minor upsets as earth-shaking tragedies.

Our students resist school attendance and school work to a degree that would be unthinkable, even in a developing nation.

On the other hand, “Kenyans, like many Africans, see education as a priority and are willing to spend proportionally large amounts of their earnings to pay for it. It is common for parents to sell family land to pay for school.”

This kind of commitment has vanished from the United States. We had it once. We have it no longer.

Take school supplies. “In the centre of Nakuru…parents queued dozens deep to buy school uniforms, notebooks, pencils and textbooks on Saturday” prior to the Monday opening of school.

In the last two decades of my teaching career, more than half the students came to school the first day without either a writing implement or a notebook. This never ceased to shock me, since my own working-class parents would not have allowed me to appear at school—even through high school—without a full complement of essential school supplies.

It says much about the weakness of our schools that many of our teachers adopt the misguided practice of purchasing school supplies with their own money to remedy this situation—thereby strengthening the bad habit.

We are soft on education, and that has bred slackness in our national character.

I am reminded of Louis Malle’s semi-autobiographical film Au revoir les enfants (1987), about a Jesuit school in France during World War II that shelters a few Jewish students to protect them from the Nazis. In one wonderful little scene, the students are in geometry class when the air raid alarm sounds. As the students stand at their desks, the teacher tells them to take their books with them because “The lesson will continue in the shelter.”

This kind of dedication has disappeared from America. We need to resuscitate it. We need to hear more frequently in our classrooms the voice of that French teacher saying, “The lesson will continue.”