ACTA's Must-Reads

Is it really the case that Berube's "will to interpret" stops dead at the political affiliations of university professors? From reading some of Berube's writing, it's evident that he has looked at the data concerning political affiliation and, with that data in mind, come to the conclusion that the liberal leaning of college faculty has not adversely affected higher ed on the grand scale that ACTA and others have claimed. Now, clearly this isn't the same interpretation that this blog has come to after looking at the same data, but I think you'll agree that it is nevertheless an interpretation, one that reasonable people can arrive at after some thought. To claim that Berube's problem lies in his methodology as opposed to his conclusions, is a backhanded way of avoiding a direct debate with Berube's arguments; it's also a maneuver that allows one to claim that the only true, correct interpretation, given the data at hand, is your own -- a move, by the way, that tends to shut down interpretation by never allowing anyone who doesn't already agree with you to arrive at a valid interpretation.

Or perhaps I'm reading too much into all this -- I'm unfortunately one of those humanists who can't help but analyze and read into things, so you'll have to forgive me.

I'm pleased to see a self-professed humanist like "Roger Mexico" begin the discussion, rather than Foucauldian post-humanists, 9/11 conspiracy theorists, Marxists (many flavours here), critical "theorists" (i.e., devotees of theorrhea, as Dr Raymond Tallis has it), post-colonialists a la that pampered fraud Edward Said, sosh and psych radicals (i.e., pseudo-scientists), grievance "studies" specialists (i.e., ethnic, queer and gender shills), apologists for terror, anti-capitalists, ecoextremists, comp/rhet nagging nannies, social and political antinomians, radical egalitarians as well as the many liberals who tolerate, protect and promote the above who abuse (for cheap political gratification before their students) their positions of authority--collect these examples up and you've got more than a simple "liberal" bias problem at colleges and universities.

Dr JA

Dr. JA wrote:

I'm pleased to see a self-professed humanist like "Roger Mexico" begin the discussion, rather than Foucauldian post-humanists, 9/11 conspiracy theorists, [ . . . ]

OUCH!

Mona Charen has written quite a revealing article based on the "Conceptual Framework" that evidently guides the graduate program at Columbia University's prestigious Teachers College.

It's pretty clear from what the CF says that this particular school, one which teaches our future teachers how to teach, sees itself as an affirmative force for Good, but Good of a particular bent.

Here are a couple of key grafs from the Framework, taken from Charen's article, Just to whet your interest:

Okay, but then there is this: "We see teaching as an ethical and political act. We see teachers . . . as participants in a larger struggle for social justice. . . . Schools and society are interconnected. Social inequalities are often produced and perpetuated through systematic discrimination and justified by societal ideology of merit, social mobility, and individual responsibility . . . "

And it gets worse: "Traditionally organized schools help to reproduce social inequalities while giving the illusion that such inequalities are natural and fair. Schools purport to offer unlimited possibilities for social advancement but they simultaneously maintain structures that severely limit the probability of advancement for those at the bottom of the social scale. Research has shown that the majority of teachers in the United States are European American and middle class and that many of these teachers do not see the invisible yet profound social forces at work that bring about inequality among different cultural groups in society and in schools."

I'm struggling. I'm trying to reconcile the words of the Conceptual Framework with the notion that Columbia's Teachers College isn't far more committed to political indoctrination (i.e. what to teach) than simply teaching people how to teach.

Clawmute

I'm pleased to see a self-professed reactionary like "Dr JAH" continues the discussion, rather than end of history neocons, 9/11 ball-droppers, Objectivists (many flavours here), uncritical libertarians (i.e., devotees of free market libraries as Dr JAH has it), colonialists a la that pampered fraud Bernard Knox, econ and biz-skool radicals (i.e., pseudo-scholars), conservative grievance "studies" specialists (i.e., Arthur Schlesinger & David Horowitz), apologists for terror (i.e., Ramesh Ponuru & Dinesh D'Sousa), capitalists, anti-ecoextremists (i.e., big bizniz), religious fundamentalist nagging nannies, social and political Platonists, radical elitists (i.e., Allan Bloom) as well as the many right-wingers who tolerate, protect and promote the above who abuse (for cheap political gratification before the entire nation) their positions of authority--collect these examples up and you've got more than a simple "conservative" bias problem in the media, universities, the government, and big business.

Can someone familiar with these institutions explain to me why teachers colleges are not staffed with professors trained in the departments of psychology salient for understanding optimal strategies for learning (psychometrics, industrial psychology, child development, educational psychology, and the psychology of language)? Is there something inherently uninteresting about instructing aspirant elementary school teachers in the various approaches one might apply to teaching reading or arithmetic or how to draw up tests and diagnose learning disabilities?

"Jonah Goldberg"

To refer to Arthur Schlesinger as a 'conservative' is to use political terminology in an arbitrary way that obscures that for which he stands.

Liberal arts faculties are collecting pools of gliberals and leftoids, make of that what you will. That profile of the social thought of professors is confirmed by opinion research. It is merely illuminated by specific examples.

Actually, "Art Deco," if that is your real name, my use of conservative is the most literal use possible: one who wishes to conserve the traditions of the past, or one who resists change.

Also, Art, Education Departments are often staffed by professors who teach across disciplines, and most ed degrees involve a certain number of credits in fields like cognitive psych. But ed departments also teach current research on issues such as literacy, history of American education, philosophical foundations, public policy, and so on, so they cannot be staffed solely by psych professors. Still, the issues you mention are included in every ed curriculum I've ever seen ('tho diagnosing learning disabilities is better left to school psychologists -- teachers should simply be able to recognize possible signs).

Ah. So Jonah Goldberg is a conservative, then, as he would have the educational establishment remain exactly as it is.

Thanks for that bit of clarification.

Actually, Winston, you need to heed the advice of my freshman geometry teacher: "When you ASSUME you make an ASS out of U and ME."

Nowhere in my comments did I say that I'd have the educational establishment remain exactly as it is. At the same time, critics of contemporary education, such as E. D. Hirsch, have often spent *no* time in the K-12 classroom, and so we have to take their ideas with a grain of salt.

K-12 education today is more often than not a sad mixture of mechanical training in unchallenging content. It's the worst of all possible worlds: no motivation, no proven pedagogical techniques, and dumbed-down content. Hirsch is right that we need a more challenging elementary and junior high curriculum and that this curriculum should be nationalized. He's wrong that progressive ideas of education are responsible for the lack of such a curriculum. It's more about ridiculous decentralized American government and poor administrative curricular development.

I'd like to see something like the core knowledge sequence in public schools. Interestingly, most of the current core knowledge schools use progressive skills training to pass on the core curriculum, so these schools are high content, high skills.

Finally, teaching is undeniably an ethical and political act, as is everything else in life. How one teaches, how one grades, what one teaches, how one treats one's students: these are ethical issues and they have political consequences. I don't think it's the job of schools to teach political doctrine, but let's remember that teaching core knowledge and critical thinking are both grounded politically in a procedural liberalism.

Let's also remember that, as Walter Benn Michaels has recently written, no child deserves to be born poor. No matter what his or her parents did, no matter what others did to his or her ancestors, every child deserves to play the game on a level field. Equality of opportunity means recognizing the need to provide every American child with the same opportunities, regardless of birth. And as Jonathan Kozol has pointed out in numerous books and articles, the richest school districts have the highest level of per-student funding. These already privileged students receive better educations with better resources, and then they buy the best tutoring and test-skills-training money can buy, they get into the best colleges (40% of the admissions of which are often given out to the highest bidder before application time), and the cycle starts all over again.

Do I think education departments need to change? Sure. Let's make sure every 5-12th grade teacher has a masters degree in his or her content area. Then, let's provide FREE graduate training in education for beginning teachers. Let's get rid of every state's individual certification process and set up a national process in which all the exams are free. Finally, let's pay teachers the same as other professions that require masters degrees at the entry level. That's a good start.

I lost a rather long post (peccato!) I'd done last night on JG's sloppy writing, absurd claims and lame parody, so I'll merely do a short recap. Hattips first to Clawmute, Art Deco, and the short but mordantly spot-on remark of Winston Smith just above.

I'm not "JAH"--by the way, JG, what's the aitch stand for in your reckoning?

Since your lame parody fell flat and was off-point anyway--for I was discussing current ACADEMIC types, while you provided hardly a one--I asked myself why your post seemed so hastily done. Then it dawned on me (Fraud's Psychopathology of Everyday Life or The Interpretation of Dreams may have had an unseen hand in this apercu) that it could be that JG's chosen "academic" specialties are psych (mostly sway-dough scientific rubbish--I'm with Wittgenstein and Inspector Japp here), ed (where poseurs who like the soft but neurotic "academic life" tend to go, faute de mieux, if they can't do math, philosophy, foreign languages, classics, physical science, history, literature, law, theology, medicine, engineering etc.), or, in this worst of all possible choices, a contentless combination of the two fake disciplines: "ed psych". Not to worry if that's the case, JG, for there's certainly room for another scientific or historical study of psychology or education as phenomena, just as there is a place for histories of witchcraft, shamanism, phrenology, Mesmerism, orgone-box therapy (invented by one of Fraud's younger associates--it's a hoot!), sympathetic magic, astrology, and the like. Just don't become a believer, ok? Remember Tertullian's remark that "the sun shines his rays on the sewers and is not polluted". Keep your sense of humour, too, when you browse in "metaphysical" and self-service psych bookstores. And keep your Martin Gardner or Thomas Szasz or Alan Bloom or Plato (who rightly forbids both madness AND intellectual quackery) close by when you feel yourself slipping (that's what I did when I had to run the gamut (undergrad and grad) of defenders of these pseudo-intellectual quackeries while I certified as a teacher and before I returned multi anni fa to take the PhD and do some real scholarship in history, literature, and languages--so . . . oh, no, no JG, it's ok, there's no charge . . . vraiment, mon ancien, I'm not a shrink!--you know like, "Your Money and Your Life!"--Heaven forfend that I should take pelf for helping a bewildered neighbour!).

Several of your hastily-posted comments in your parody of a parody also intrigued me.

Is to be a social and political Platonist to belong to some outre cult now (see above for real examples)? Like the captured murderers in Agatha Christie's Poirot novels who toss out some epithet about the master detective being a foreigner or a Belgian, JG stammers out, "You, you . . . you . . .Platonist!" Aim to read him in Greek (if nothing else for the style) if at present you can't, JG, for it's exquisite--graceful, supple, witty, and yet tough. Your other epithets (e.g., "9/11 ball-droppers", "devotees of free-market libraries as Dr JAH has it", etc.) are so unintelligible as synechdoches for systems or groups I really can't make anything of them--please to explain here, JG). However, when you refer to MM Ponuru and D'Souza as "apologists for terror", that is clear. I only slightly know these gentlemen and fine writers personally, but I assure you that they are anything but what you have called them in some paroxysm of impotent rage (or in a "writ of fealous jage", as Clouseau has it) or in some "liquid" moment of strunken dupor. I shall plead your case with them, and I know they will be as understanding and kind to you as they have shown themselves to be to me. Caveas, JG: Try making such baseless accusations at my VFW post against me mates and you won't believe what's gonna happen even while it's happening, as the philosophical Eastwood has it.

And I suppose "capitalist" (sans modification ou sans plus d'explication) is another epithet that can stand alone as someone not desirable. Of course it can and does in typical humanities/social-behavioural "sciences" departments, where, as another blogger has it ("LL"--je pense que oui), the hothouse darlings all have lip-locks on the public teat while producing their next "further research (and grant money!) is indicated" "study". The darlings particularly seem to thrive in the fetid miasmas of pseudo-science departments (like sosh, sike, "clin-psych" sosh-psych, ed-psych [whoops!], "cult"-anthro etc.) and gender/ethnic "studies" lairs--i.e., wacked-out leftist social and political advocacy clubs masquerading as academic disciplines. No need to produce any saleable items in such an "academic" Laputa--"You capitalists produce--what a coincidence!--we consume!".

Though I've only begun turning a figurative page or two of your little parody, JG, I've got to check in with my grad-student right-wing gun moll, who REALLY knows how to leave nothing of her left-wing enemies but "quivering flesh and bone-chips" (as the old, now cold, drug-n'-whiskey powered Hunter S. Thompson has it), so I'll have to break now for a bit.

Oh, yes, a last admission. I don't deny the reactionary tag, for I wear it as proudly as my monarchist fleur-de-lys (in remembrance of when ancien regime France--"mere des arts, des armes, et des lois!" as Du Bellay has it, had a national backbone) and my VFW pin. But not to worry--if you and your leftist racaille gather on the street-corner to vociferate treason, I'll hold the order for my lovely queen's own beloved hussars to draw sabres and ride your lot down. Vive la Bastille!

A bientot, mon ancien,

Dr JA (sans "H")

Actually, "Art Deco," if that is your real name,

To the best of my knowledge, I have appropriated the identity of no other person.

my use of conservative is the most literal use possible: one who wishes to conserve the traditions of the past, or one who resists change.

Which is not a description of Arthur Schlesinger either, who is a secularist and non-doctrinaire social democrat who gives little weight to whatever intelligence might be encoded in extant institutions (unless his kindred are running them).

.. ed departments also teach .. history of American education, philosophical foundations, public policy, and so on...

Why?

Finally, teaching is undeniably an ethical and political act,

How is teaching arithmetic or carpentry either?

... as is everything else in life.

?

How one teaches, how one grades, what one teaches, how one treats one's students: these are ethical issues and they have political consequences.

How does teaching people to read, write, sum, and use tools have political consequences in the time and place where we live? Whether the government is run by analogues of Arthur Schlesinger or Francisco Franco, people will still have to work and still have occasion to avail themselves of the pleasures that come from being able to read, write, sum, and use tools.

teaching core knowledge and critical thinking are both grounded politically in a procedural liberalism.

There was such a thing as schooling 'ere John Locke ever lived.

Do I think education departments need to change? Sure. Let's make sure every 5-12th grade teacher has a masters degree in his or her content area. Then, let's provide FREE graduate training in education for beginning teachers. Let's get rid of every state's individual certification process and set up a national process in which all the exams are free. Finally, let's pay teachers the same as other professions that require masters degrees at the entry level. That's a good start.

All of which proposals address inputs and not results, and all of which benefit the material interests of aspirant teachers at every level.

Let's also remember that, as Walter Benn Michaels has recently written, no child deserves to be born poor. No matter what his or her parents did, no matter what others did to his or her ancestors, every child deserves to play the game on a level field.

What game?

Equality of opportunity means recognizing the need to provide every American child with the same opportunities, regardless of birth.

The logic of this would require the abolition of family life.

And as Jonathan Kozol has pointed out in numerous books and articles, the richest school districts have the highest level of per-student funding. These already privileged students receive better educations with better resources, and then they buy the best tutoring and test-skills-training money can buy,

And the effects, all else being equal, are exactly what?

"Ev'ry day, I get up and pray to JAH /
And he increases the number of clouds by exactly one." --Camper Van Beethoven, "Take the Skinheads Bowling"

If'n you dunno who JAH is, you really must listen to some rastafari 45s.

Dr. JAH: you should really read the work of yer lil buddies Ponaru and D'Sousa. Both have recently written that the religious right of the West needs to make the religious right of the East realize that they both agree that the true enemy is decadent (read: French and Hollywood) secular modernity. So the problem isn't with terror, but that this terror is directed against potential allies.

I also love how you cite Wittgenstein against psychology. I mean, he only died 55 years ago, so his critique of Freud must still hold true for the countless empirical studies done in Gestalt, behaviorist, cognitive, and other forms of psychology since then. Szasz also has nothing to say about cognitive psych or cognitive science, both of which form the foundation of most contemporary learning theory, from Bruner to Novak.

And Platonism is simply wrong as a philosophical system. The "Socratic method" is, of course, useful, but the idea -- Plato's founding notion -- that ideas exist in some timeless, pre-human realm -- well, that's poppycock and merde.

Now on to Art Deco, whose name is really Art Deco: Schlesinger proved himself to be a conservative in his craptastic little work, *The Disuniting of America*.

Teaching math or carpentry are political acts when you remember that if you teach X, you are necessarily deciding not to teach Y. So, given that most Americans won't ever need much math beyond basic algebra and simple geometry, why teach then calculus? What's the larger social principle at work? Likewise, if you study carpentry in high school, you are not using that time to study, say, philosophy or history. Again, it speaks to some image of the social purpose of education, and all such images are inherently political.

Then again, why am I arguing with Art? He clearly doesn't believe in equality of opportunity, which even conservatives agree is one of the foundations of the American republican ideal.

Finally, teaching is undeniably an ethical and political act, as is everything else in life.

Spare me . . . you would have the readership believe that killing an ant, harvesting a potato, thinking a thought, smelling a flower, delighting in a sunbeam, sharing your beer, or awakening in the morning each is a political act . . . that teaching is equivalently political to each of these activities.

Okay -- this is your assertion, the burden lies on you to prove it, not me or anyone else to falsify it.

Clawmute

Schlesinger proved himself to be a conservative in his craptastic little work, *The Disuniting of America*.

And I repeat myself: you are using political terminology in such a way that you will communicate only with a peculiar subculture or with your own navel.

Teaching math or carpentry are political acts when you remember that if you teach X, you are necessarily deciding not to teach Y. So, given that most Americans won't ever need much math beyond basic algebra and simple geometry, why teach then calculus? What's the larger social principle at work?

If husbanding one's time and acknowledging that that any society more complex than an agricultural village has a division of labor within which people have to find a niche, than you could call it a political act. Again, your use of terminology is idiosyncratic.

Likewise, if you study carpentry in high school, you are not using that time to study, say, philosophy or history. Again, it speaks to some image of the social purpose of education, and all such images are inherently political.

No, a political understanding is a dimension of one's understanding of social life in general and the social vision has to acknowledge that people are not playdough.

While we are at it, much of elementary education consists of 'activities' which take place between sessions of academic instruction, which may or may not stimulate a future interest in these sorts of pastimes. How is it 'inherently political' to have them sing songs in a classroom v. draw pictures v. play sports? What sort of social thought is being promoted with any of these activities?

Then again, why am I arguing with Art? He clearly doesn't believe in equality of opportunity, which even conservatives agree is one of the foundations of the American republican ideal.

If it requires replacing families with hatcheries run by social workers, I am not interested in equalitarian social projects. Much of what makes for unequal chances between persons is a function of the quality of domestic life or a function of occult factors that are not readily manipulable. Equality is not a requirement for dignity or virtue or for mundane satisfaction in life.

"On JG's case":

First, fine glossing on JG's parti-pris gibberish, Art Deco. Isn't it a stimulus to one's ingenium to have this roadrunner's coyote come back for more? Please stay JG--say you'll stay!--and bring a pack of sniveling pseudo-shrinkster passive-aggressives along with you so we can have a bi' mo' foon with 'em too!

What's the latest behaviourist "top gun" after the utter demise of the mighty school of Watson, Hull and Skinner at the hands of a few mediocre philosophers? Pinker, Dennett, the Churchlands and Dawkins? But soon I'll try out your Bruner and Novak--mind giving me their first or Christian names? And if you'll stop reading Szasz with your eyes closed, you'll see that in his 1990s books on he does make references galore to "conative" or "wanna-be" psych (which, as I've previously said to you, has value only when practised by insightful students of human nature--Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, St. Paul, Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, Petrarch, Cervates, Shakespeare, DuBellay, Pascal, Alfieri, Kierkegaard, Austen, Balzac, Flaubert,Ibsen, Chekov, Dostoyevsky, Trollope, Tolstoy, Proust, Mann, Hamsun, Eliot, Woolf et multi alii)--let psychologists abandon their pseudo-scientific delusions (like Ixions embracing some cloud-images of Hera fashioned to deceive them--talk about idle searches for the ideal form!). At least in Fraud's defence, I can say he conned his Greek and Latin pretty well, and, though I read German rather slowly, his style seems clear to me, though his "Oedipus complex" invention is both a thoroughly silly notion and a obvious misuse of the classical reference. On this, the much cleverer Nabokov has the last word: "Let the credulous and vulgar continue to believe that all their woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts". Sorry he's not living--when an author dies, JG, do you just throw away his or her books? You might try the astoundingly versatile Raymond Tallis, MD, for his "take" on psych and "cognitive" science as well as on literature and philosophy. Unlike psychs, he saves, not runs or ruins, the lives of his patients. Yes, JG, he lives, cures and writes today.

Pleased to see you couldn't muster anything against either Wittgenstein or Plato except their ages (non omnis moriar et exigi monumentum aere perennius, dixit Horatius poeta!, and he's right--ditto for Shakespeare, who imitates his beautiful words in several immortal sonnets)--but we all knew that en avance, bien sur! Your puerile references (pseudo-colloquial pidgin, I'd call it) to Ponuru and D'Souza indicate you've perhaps been regressing to Fraud's oral-erotic stage, and your slangy "pop culture" (surely an oxymoron!) references (sure, JG, I use 'em too, when I'm doing a bit of recreational/semi-intellectual slumming with the likes of academia's champagne hipsters, psych-nags and "control-freaks") are as lame as Hephaestus the Smithy and, I'm afraid, deserve but a derisive chorus of Olympian laughter.

The problem with psych of all tasteless varieties is that, like rhetoric (anyone untrained in classical languages caught referring to him-, her- or itself as a "rhetorician", should, paraphrasing Schopenhauer on troublesome noisemakers, stand down and receive five really good blows with a stick) and non-descript "education" in the States, it's virtually contentless itself--it attends to the how without the what or why. It leaves the greatest and most important questions of life not only unanswered, but unsought as well. However, you did utterly defeat your own puerile caricature of Platonic philosophy in a deft two-line stroke.

I'm afraid I'll have to let Agatha Christie's Poirot's Inspector Japp have the final word on your tribe: "Psychologists! . . . most of 'em are balmy themselves!" "C'est ca, d'accord!" answers Poirot, a mon avis.

Hope you'll keep on bloggin', JG, for as Clint Eastwood or Charles Bronson or some spaghetti-western top-gun has it, "It's not the land . . . it's not the money . . . it's not even the woman . . . it's jes' you n' me, pardner . . ." (puffs on thin cheroot)

Cheers, jeers, sneers, and later, I swear, beers,

Dr JA

Dr. JA wrote:

Sorry he's not living--when an author dies, JG, do you just throw away his or her books?

I'm inclined to think "no," unless someone, like Freud, fits comfortably into the PostModern Framework.

On the other hand, those who do not fit into the PMF . . . well . . . perhaps they are discarded . . .

Clawmute

I think I'd have to agree, Clawmute--nice finish! (like a good wine--j'aime beacoup un bon Bordeaux, when I can afford 'em--got a long-lost royalties check last week, so I think I'll shop for a case tomorrow after church)--until then, I'll have to settle for red-state beer and some great bedtime one-liners from Ann Coulter's "Godless".
Your humble servant,
Dr JA

Where to begin?

Clawmute does not believe that education involves ethical or political decisions. Insofar as politics concerns the social organization of humankind, education would be at the heart of any political system. I'm sure Dr JAH can give us some original Greek from *The Republic* on this subject. What we decide to teach our children is an ethical decision, an idea about what sort of man or woman we want our child to be. Dawkins has gone as far as to call the religious indoctrination of children a form of child abuse. That's absurd, because religion is just one part of a worldeview or ideology that every caregiver passes on to every child. The point is this: decisions about what to teach children form the core of what that child will ultimately be.

Art Deco uses the example of children's elementary school activities as proof that education isn't political or ethical. Of course, if he obeyed his ACTA leaders, he'd have read E. D. Hirsch, who has criticized "activity" based elementary school education at the political and ethical levels since the late 1970s. The notion that children need time to be children and play is itself an ideological notion inherited from Rousseau. A different vision of social organization might have children learning trades and academic information as early as pre-school (as Hirsch proves in his Core Knowledge schools).

On the topic of Schlesinger: if Art Deco actually reads *The Disuniting of America*, he will notice that the book argues that American education must work to preserve one version of traditional American culture -- not, he argues, because it's inherently worth preserving, but because it's "our" culture. Walter Benn Michaels has destroyed such arguments for years, showing the roots of culturalist thinking in racialism. But the point is this: the notion of preserving past tradition because it *is* tradition, and not because it's right, is by definition conservative. That's what Coleridge, for example, meant when he wrote about Walter Scott's novels as giving life to the historical conflict between forces of conservation and forces of progress.

Art also thinks that equality of opportunity means choosing between Communist State Organization and total inequality. That's a sucker's choice. Instead, children born poor could benefit from estate taxes and other progressive taxation; from equal public school funding no matter the property tax rate of the district; from universal free health care; from free pre-school; from extended maternity leave; from free public college education; from state-funded summer education and recreation programs for all children; from state-funded arts and cultural programs in areas with high poverty (inner cities, rural poor, post-industrial towns, etc.). Privileged children could be forced to list all the private tutoring and training they received on their college applications. Kaplan guarantees a 200 point SAT score increase -- kids rich enough to afford such programs should be forced to state so on their applications, so that the admissions committee can cut that 200 point increase from their score when comparing their files with those of underprivileged students. See, there are countless ways to help the poor without Big Brother removing kids from their parents.

Then again, Art writes, "Equality is not a requirement for dignity or virtue or for mundane satisfaction in life." Walter Benn Michaels also demolishes this ideology, which we could call the "Wife Swap" ideology: the extreme line between rich and poor in America is fine, because wealth doesn't guarantee happiness and poverty doesn't guarantee unhappiness. What Art forgets is that America is founded on the ideal of equality. To give up on that ideal is to be anti-American.

Then there's Dr JAH. He lists a long series of "insightful students of human nature," but the class they took must be a mess, because none of them agree with any of the others. Either human nature is so varied and mutable as to be a useless concept, or we need real scientific study of what human nature might mean. Psychology by no means is perfect, but name-dropping Wittgenstein doesn't get JAH out of the pesky chore of actually engaging contemporary cognitive psychologists and scientists. Wittgenstein's main problem with psychology was the idea of "private objects" -- a concept that itself was one of Wittgenstein's private objects that he never actually defines. Scholars of information processing, like Joseph Novak, have actually explored how scientists can make such private objects public by showing how we can begin to map the schemata of an individual. His work in science education is all about making public and explicit the sorts of faulty mental connections a student might have -- a necessary step before a teacher can really get a student to understand the correct connections between ideas. [Also, see Posner et al, "Accomodation of a Scientific Conception: Toward a theory of conceptual change," *Science Education*, 66(2): 211-227 (1982)] The work of David Ausubel, esp *Educational Psychology*, is important here. Which is to say to Dr JAH that my problem isn't that Wittgenstein is dead, but that you can't use his critique of 1940s psychology against 2006 psychology, anymore than you can write off Ausubel by citing Popper's critique of Freud's unfalsifiability.

And Dr JAH, I'm interested in Tallis, and in John Grey, but I don't think his critique of evolutionary science is as devastating as he thinks. Tallis would have us simply wrap the human mind in an ethereal Saran Wrap to protect it from any attempt at explanation, all in the name of preserving "the mystery of man" or some such mystifying idea. Of course, we will never fully understand how the mind works, but to say that mental activity cannot be understood at some level by investigating brain function is ridiculous and as anti-scientific as those Tallis criticizes. I guess we could turn to the Greek classics and wonder how the floating womb affects women's emotional state. Cuz they were the true students of human nature, after all.

Finally, Dr JAH, you'll need actually to read Ponnuru's and D'Sousa's recent work before spouting off about them. Ponnuru wrote a National Review article this past year blaming Hollywood and the French for their decadence, which Ponnuru claims has caused the anti-American sentiment of Al-Quaeda. D'Sousa's soon-to-be-released book makes the same argument, blaming the cultural left for fueling Islamic fundamentalist hatred of the U.S. Both authors believe that the Islamic world needs to realize that the "true" America is all about faith and wholesome values, not Hollywood's nightmarish representations of dancing boobies ('tho I'm glad that boobies can get Christian and Islamic fundamentalists so worked up).

Dr JAH, stop with the uncomfortable allusions to Dirty Harry already. Buy some Trojan dancehall singles instead, Jah love.

And Clawmute, you're just wrong. I think Freud is basically wrong; I think postmodernism as a philosophical mode of thought was basically wrong.

I just read your earlier comments discounting E.D. Hirsch's views because he hasn't, a ton avis, any experience in K-12 teaching. Well, Mr., or better, Dr. Goldberg, I do--six years--1983 to 89. How 'bout you? I confirm most of what Professor Hirsch says, though he doesn't go nearly far enough in his proposed reforms. Well then, at least give us the number of years you've been a K-12 schoolteacher!

Cheers, Dr JA

Dr JAH: I'm a lot younger than you and am just starting my career path. I've got one year as an uncertified instructor under my belt and I'm currently working on getting state certified (I'll be full-time in the classroom by winter 07).

But six years in one school is not a statistically useful sample to prove or disprove Hirsch's ideas. His own sources for classroom activity -- the Larrys Cremin and Cuban -- were cherry-picked (see Richard Ognibene's review of Hirsch's work). Thorough reading of Cremin and Cuban show that progressive education never actually dominated the school systems. Hirsch makes it seem like a zero-sum game between traditional or progressive education, when the true cultural dominant in education is behaviorism: low-content, low-activity, low-skills, mostly behavior and response training. Progressives and traditonalists need to band together against what John Gatto sees as schooling largely for human control. Hirsch's own Core Knowledge teachers use progressive activity and skills training to impart the core curriculum -- which is at it should be.

My point wasn't that Hirsch hasn't *taught* in K-12 schools, but that he admits that he did very little first-hand observation across the nation's K-12 classrooms before generalizing about the dominance of progressive education. Scientific researchers who have observed classrooms in statistically meaningful numbers conclude that the average American classroom involves whole-class instruction; training in repetitive tasks; little meaningful learning of content OR skills; teacher-dominated speaking; a large emphasis on following rules. Hirsch instead argues as if the average classroom is a child-centered discovery-learning playground.

To JG, Our "Soul-Doctor":

Sorry, JG, my affinity for Clint Eastwood movies prevails over your whinging wimpish complaints about using "Dirty Harry" references--actually, JG, you've got it wrong, comme d'habitude, for he wasn't DH in his westerns, and I didn't quote from one of HIS movies in my last post. Just testing--also, it's more fashionable in my British milieu NOT to get "pop culture" references exactly right--and you're the character who expects ME to get right your reference to "JAH"--a doped-up reefer-puffing Caribbean entertainer, apparently!--I corrected your error once; I'll not do it again, for if you persist in "reefering" (is that your recreational past-time, then?--I'll have a double scotch, thank you, and it's legal!) me by your own pet names, rest assured that YOU'LL have a different name when I next get round to destroying your bogus claims. DH has actually the solution that eludes you psychs, who like to go on and on about "motivation": when asked why the vicious serial-killer of women does what he does, the nervous-Nelly San Francisco mayor asks about WHY this piece of human garbage (not his words, of course, for he's been "schooled" by psychs and their psychobabbling "explanations", i.e., excuses, for criminal behaviour) kills, DH has the perfect and complete response: "He does 'cause he likes it". I'm afraid that's as far as you psychs can fairly take it. All ye know and all ye need to know. Doesn't leave you with much to pitch for your next grant to put your snouts in the public trough again, does it?

Yus, JG, thuh mind is wha' thuh brain duz--there's your whole specious argument in a nutshell, and, sorry, even an atheist like Tallis isn't buying that risible rubbish. In addition, the "exact science just round the corner" ploy won't work either, as you psychs have been bleating out that plea for as long as your pseudo-science has existed in its modern pathological form (figuratively, lest you start babbling about reified metaphors to our audience). Fraud attempted to add some cachet to your bogus intellectual imperialism by claiming opposition to psycho-ANAL-ism was itself a sign of neurotic resistance, but Karl Kraus kneecapped that phony appeal almost 100 years ago. He realised that "psychoanalysis is part of the disease of which it pretends to be the cure".

At this point I've to stop, for me, Mum, and me grad-student gun moll are off to Mass. But, like Arnold the "termination man", I'LL BE BECK! JG.

Dr JAH:

The fact that you don't know that Jehovah is called "Jah" in Rastafarian religious practice is quite entertaining. You really need to get out more. Maybe a little less Mass and a little more Force.

Also, cognitive psych is *not* equivalent with the view that the mind = the brain. That's more your extreme neuroscience. The mind is far more than the brain; but the mind is purely material. It's not the flying spaghetti monster, after all.

One more for good luck: I never said an exact science was just around the corner for psych. I said it'll never be around the corner. But the lack of total exactitude is not grounds for throwing up one's hands and running off to Church. Thousands of years of religion have gotten us no closer to the truth. So I'll give psychology -- a 100 year old field -- a few more years.

Jonah Goldberg wrote:

Clawmute does not believe that education involves ethical or political decisions.

I appreciate a good lateral arabesque as well as the next person, so you get full marks for avoiding my question.

Here's what you had previously written:

Finally, teaching is undeniably an ethical and political act, as is everything else in life.(your words, my emphasis)

I think you should back your assertion up, since it goes to the use of language and words to characterize issues, activities and events.

Would you consider it entirely appropriate for your daughter to tell you that she was going to a "political event" as she heads out the door to patronize your local crack house for a night of drugs and debauchery?

Clawmute

Clawmute does not believe that education involves ethical or political decisions. Insofar as politics concerns the social organization of humankind, education would be at the heart of any political system. I'm sure Dr JAH can give us some original Greek from *The Republic* on this subject. What we decide to teach our children is an ethical decision, an idea about what sort of man or woman we want our child to be. Dawkins has gone as far as to call the religious indoctrination of children a form of child abuse. That's absurd, because religion is just one part of a worldeview or ideology that every caregiver passes on to every child. The point is this: decisions about what to teach children form the core of what that child will ultimately be.

I think the dispute here is that we have not distinguished when we are speaking of teaching a class in some subject from when we are speaking of assembling a curriculum. Teaching one's son to use agricultural implments is not a political act and may be an ethical act only in that doing so derives from the father's obligation to equip his son to earn a living. For a classroom teacher of mathematics, he has a formal obligation to perform in accordance with his contract of employment, and such an obligation is ethical.

With regard to the allocation of resources between education and anything else we might expend time, equipment, and manpower upon, and with regard to the division of resources between various programs of study, politicians do make some ultimate decisions. However, the normative suppositions that guide the politicians influence both political and extra-political disputes in society. The political disputes are merely a subset of what divides people in any society. That aside, politicians are also influenced by factors having little to do with their social thought (e.g. career imperatives or institutional inertia).

Art Deco uses the example of children's elementary school activities as proof that education isn't political or ethical.

No, I used it as an example of how the practice of education is not necessarily political or ethical.

Of course, if he obeyed his ACTA leaders, he'd have read E. D. Hirsch, who has criticized "activity" based elementary school education at the political and ethical levels since the late 1970s. The notion that children need time to be children and play is itself an ideological notion inherited from Rousseau. A different vision of social organization might have children learning trades and academic information as early as pre-school (as Hirsch proves in his Core Knowledge schools).

I was merely noting how elementary schools conduct themselves, not evaluating it. I cannot see how instituting non-academic activities during the school day renders one a disciple of Rousseau. If I begin with the assumption that self-control is something one learns in stages as one grows older, the conclusion is that the balance between disciplined labor and play should increase over time. The empirical question would be what are the optimal ratios at any given age for achieving the institution's purpose (which last is not necessarily derived from Rousseau).

On the topic of Schlesinger: if Art Deco actually reads *The Disuniting of America*, he will notice that the book argues that American education must work to preserve one version of traditional American culture -- not, he argues, because it's inherently worth preserving, but because it's "our" culture. Walter Benn Michaels has destroyed such arguments for years, showing the roots of culturalist thinking in racialism. But the point is this: the notion of preserving past tradition because it *is* tradition, and not because it's right, is by definition conservative. That's what Coleridge, for example, meant when he wrote about Walter Scott's novels as giving life to the historical conflict between forces of conservation and forces of progress.

Prof. Schlesinger is a dyed-in-the-melt advocate of equalitarian projects implemented by the agencies of the central government. That he dissents from modish ideas promoted by teacher training schools does not change that.

Art also thinks that equality of opportunity means choosing between Communist State Organization and total inequality. That's a sucker's choice.

Actually, I pointed out that the bulk of the variation in people's educational performance and in the trajectory of their work life is derived from factors that cannot be readily enhanced (or contained) by public bureaucracies. People have endowments and dispositions that come from we know not where and people grow up in families that vary in what they nurture and to what degree they nurture.

Instead, children born poor could benefit from estate taxes and other progressive taxation;

That depends on how the income was re-distributed.

from equal public school funding no matter the property tax rate of the district;

The degree to which depends on how sensitive measures of academic performance are to to increases in inputs. (What summaries I have seen of empirical research into this question indicate that answer is 'not particularly').

from universal free health care;

How best to finance medical and surgical care is a vexed question. Are you sure you want to go there (unequipped with some study in economics)?

from extended maternity leave;

At whose expense, under what domestic circumstances, at what cost, and with what feedback effects?

from free pre-school; from free public college education; from state-funded summer education and recreation programs for all children; from state-funded arts and cultural programs in areas with high poverty (inner cities, rural poor, post-industrial towns, etc.).

I.E. from more patronage to aspirant teachers.

Privileged children could be forced to list all the private tutoring and training they received on their college applications.

In the case of myself and my siblings, none.

Kaplan guarantees a 200 point SAT score increase -- kids rich enough to afford such programs should be forced to state so on their applications, so that the admissions committee can cut that 200 point increase from their score when comparing their files with those of underprivileged students.

They are selling their services. I would take what is on their brochures with a hunk of rock salt.

See, there are countless ways to help the poor without Big Brother removing kids from their parents.

Our discussion was on the subject of schooling and its consequences, not on the universe of conceivable social-democratic measures (an assessment of the utility of which should take into account the possibility that one or another measure might act merely replace measures currently being undertaken by families and philanthropies).

Then again, Art writes, "Equality is not a requirement for dignity or virtue or for mundane satisfaction in life." Walter Benn Michaels also demolishes this ideology, which we could call the "Wife Swap" ideology: the extreme line between rich and poor in America is fine, because wealth doesn't guarantee happiness and poverty doesn't guarantee unhappiness.

Whether the income distribution is that in America or that in Sweden, whether we've unfettered free enterprise or a command economy, there remain divisions of labor, occupation strata, and hierarchy. Most people in societies not predominantly agrarian are of the wage-earning working class, and Walter Benn Michaels cannot change that. The material situation of this majority varies according to time and place, but the satisfactions of being able to support oneself and care for one's family remain.

What Art forgets is that America is founded on the ideal of equality. To give up on that ideal is to be anti-American.

Perhaps I am miseducated, but I do not recall that those colonists at Nova Scotia, Jamestown, Plymouth were all that concerned with equalitarian social engineering. I suppose there are compendia of their correspondence published that we could examine.

Clawmute and Art: ethics is the study of human choice. That includes choices as basic as what to eat as well as whether or not to kill another person.

A father who teaches his children to use farm tools is making a choice about what sorts of options are, to use William James's terms, alive or dead for that child. Time spent teaching a child to use farm tools is time not spent teaching a child to rebuild an engine or appreciate Cy Twombly paintings.

Sure, teachers must follow their contracts, but the ethical decision really occured when the teacher decided that s/he would teach at that school with that specific curriculum. Many teachers teach at private or religious schools precisely because they disagree ethically or politically with the curricula of public schools.

Art Deco doesn't believe that class has much to do with education. Look at the correlation between income and SAT levels and get back to me. The higher the income, the higher the test scores. Plain and simple. Furthermore, when we compare ther test results of US students to those from other nations, we need to remember that most nations scoring better than Americans have far better social services as well. French free pre-schools, for example, are proven to increase literacy for every year spent in them. In America, only those with the $$$ can afford more than the one year of public pre-school.

Artie D also believes that division of labor justifies economic class division. But why should a lawyer putting in 20 hours per week make more than the teacher putting in upwards of 60 to 80? Society needs both lawyers and teachers, but how we pay each profession is entirely up for negotiation. Paying all workers a liveable wage is the only American thing to do.

Art also forgets that the Puritans and Jamestown colonists were not Americans. They were British subjects. Americans didn't exist until after the Declaration of Independence.

More for "getting on JG's case":

Me'n me 22 yr-old gun moll, now independent writer, Cendrine, had a wonderful day and . . . (promise--no lovers' tales!--but 4 years and we're still in a kind of amorous delerium that must have a touch of the divine in it . . . strangers sense it, even pets!) after we dropped Mum at her home. Touring the villages and pubs of southern Michigan smartly tarted up for All Saints Eve or Halloween, we ended up in Hell--no, not Dante's Inferno where Paolo and Francesca, two of the world's sadly beautiful lovers, like our saints of love Abelard and Heloise (before whose tombs I and others have left tears--yes!, tears--and spring flowers at Pere La Chaise cemetery in Paris), whose story the world's greatest "modern" poet, Dante (with Shakespeare, they "divide the world--there is no third", as T.S. Eliot has it--a true and witty reference to Aristotle's principle of the excluded middle), but Hell, Michigan. Yeah, JG, m'lad, read 'em and don't fuss about their lack of lock-step pseudo-scientific consistency--it may seem too "messy" to cardboard linear thinkers like you and your mere psychologists, who, like Virginia Woolf's dogged grad student in philosophy, Charles Tansley, "was studying the influence of SOMETHING on SOMEBODY", but Kierkegaard has it right: "there is a system of logic, but there is no system of human existence". An excuse for delaying the next installment of JG's spanking, but what an excuse!

So, JG (if you've not given up by now--but I do seem to hear a whimpering "No . . . m-m-mas . . .). So y'r jes' a pup after all? La Fontaine's frog who tries to puff himself up to the size of a cow? Ca ne fait rien! But just to set the record straight--and heed, JG, so you don't jump to conclusions again in your "research", as you have above--for 4 of those years I taught in Oregon, I was a long-term sub teacher (usually a week to 4 months, so not a mere babysitting job) at both elementary and secondary schools. French, Latin, history, government and English, mostly, but also math (I could handle it through beginning calc), science of various sorts, ESL, even shop and home econ-- and your religion, psych. So, JG, wrong again--I served 4 districts in 32 schools, from a one-room schoolhouse in Banks, Oregon (where the elementary-school pupils hung their toothbrushes on the wall and one little boy, half-blind and wearing thicker glasses even than mine, would take hold of my coat to be led round while others played games he could not see played) to high schools of the 2000-student range in Beaverton. Sorry, JG, no dice. You blew it again.

Nor will your gratuitous mocks at my faith even touch me (Nolo me tangere!), for, as Aristotle (in the Nicomachean Ethics) has it, before 50 one is incapable of wisdom or philosophy because one's life is a series of disconnected emotional episodes. I'm sure you know Pascal's "the heart has reason that reason cannot know", but step back from it a moment to contemplate it's wisdom and truth (not manacled in "scare quotes", note). Religious thought--Catholic, Protestant--Jewish--is deeply psychological in the broad sense and deserves our attention.

Here I must break, for Cendrine, is now being rocked in that cradle beyond the stars, and I must go.

Tomorrow, I hope, but also in hopes that Clawmute and Art Deco will be on hand with their insightful remarks,

I am your humble servant,

Dr JA

Just for you, JG:

To paraphrase Eastwood (as DH) on JG types--"When'er ya gonna stop messin' round with this guy, Doc?" "Look, Harry," I reply, "I know he's trouble, but give 'im a chance--he's only a smart-ass theory-punk now--maybe he'll straighten up after he gets outta school--it's those leftie candy-ass wimp-profs that set 'im off . . . n' Rousseau, some nutso momma's boy . . . we'll keep an eye on 'im, ok?". "Yeah, well, you jes' do that, Doc . . . who's ROOsew?" "Jes' some dead pimpin' punk, Harry". "Yeah, well I'm off the th' range, Doc, but if I see that punk hangin' round schoolyards again . . . I'll be there too". "Sure, Harry, I know".

To paraphrase David Lodge: "nice work," Art Deco,"and you got it".

JG's obsession with class (common among the pampered and privileged in the States, though unlike JG, I won't presume to pre-judge his life experience and background as he does with others') nicely melds with the ethnic/women's "studies" shakedown whiners and shills. Like you, Art Deco, I'm US public school all the way--and in my case, single-parent, lower class, with neither parent ever attending anything more than high school, when a child a polio victim (which put me behind in school, along with 20-1000 vision and worsening in both eyes) and a mum with epilepsy--even got a short stretch, along with my little sis [20-1200 vision and a heart defect from premature birth]--7 yrs. younger and whom I most nights cared for alone from the age of ten--in juvenile detention for being abandoned [blah, blah--et alors?, JG?], YET--a wonderful childhood in which I looked forward to waking every day! One of my closest high-school chums was also politically conservative--he was single parent, trailer-dwelling (comme moi in early life)--in this case with an actually illiterate and pregnant mum, yet he and I were both varsity athletes and he introduced me to les poetes maudits and ancient history (got neither in public school despite 4 yrs of French and 3 of "history").

After returning from Nam and taking up grad studies in history and classics in the 1970s, my idol was the scholarship boy and crack classicist and Herodotus scholar J. Enoch Powell (who also was spot-on about the looming immigration menace in the UK).

Scratch most psychs and you'll find a determinist Tatar underneath (except the psychs themselves, naturallement!) And an apologist for delinquency and crime--psychologiser, c'est tout pardonner.

Nevertheless, JG, I do wish you luck in your career, but watch your spelling (not John "Grey", but "Gray", e.g., et passim, though some of your manifold errata are probably reggae-induced typos--we all make 'em), curb your anti-religious bigotry, and get a Wheelock Latin and a Balme and Lawall Greek as fast as you can and get to work on them. And then teach them to your kids. Ok, JG, see you next week, this one's on me, no charge.

Cheers and Vive la Bastille!

Dr JA

correction: "I'm off to the range"

It's great to find Doc JAH in an autobiographical mode. He must be preparing for his Oprah Book Club stint ("Oprah, your book this month simply must be Wheelock's Latin. It changed my life, it has a great rhythm, and I can really get my groove on to it. Top of the pops!").

He likes to lecture on typos, but the man corrects each of his blog comments seven or eight times. They're blog comments, fer chrissakes.

He makes the specious claim that class is only of interest to the privileged. Guess those coal miners shot down by Rockefeller were a buncha Whole Foods gourmets. I hate to have to play the game, but I'm an inner-city public school guy, community college, Ivy League for a Ph.D, and now state u for teaching cert. I'm the first generation of my family to go to college, or even to finish high school out of the vocational school track.

But this character actually holds up Enoch Powell as an authority on race relations! Oy vey!

Doc JAH would like to turn me into some apologist for positivist psych, but he'll have to work a bit harder than passing out some yellow-edged leaves from his Raymond Tallis fanclub newsletter. He admits he's never even heard of Bruner or Novak, so he's not done the research. Just mouthing off, like a child in an adult conversation. He likes to bring up his army service and classics knowledge, apparently because he thinks that all men should be like him. But that's the way a child views the world: it's all me, let me put it in my mouth. He's like Hegel's dog, who disproves the objective existence of the material world by eating it. Ingest away, Herr doktor!

(And four years in a single school district is also not a statistically relevant sample. Most research requires decade-long, nation-wide projects, collated with 100s of similar research projects both nationally and internationally.)

Dr JAH apparently also thinks that people interested in current research on how people learn are also apologists for criminals. Faultless logic, to say the least. Enthymemes, anyone? Dr. JAH's handing em out like wolf tickets. Either that or he's been watching too much Law & Order. Or mistaking psychology with psychiatry. Nah. How could the student of the crack racial classicist Enough Pow get his Greek all greek-loved up? Black menace!! Lock'n'load, boyz. Let's get started on that Great Wall of Mexico. The barbarian herds are here to clean Dr. JAH's faculty washroom. (Just don't ask to borrow his key.)

Dr. JAH also believes that opposing religion is "bigotry." Again, excellent logic that makes me dizzy. Opposition of unfalsifiable ideas is not bigotry. It's called being reasonable. Religion is nothing more than a series of claims about the world. Those claims are subject to the same demands of truthfulness or verisimilitude as any other claims about the world. And if you get out yer telescope, no doubt you can still find Mother Mary levitating bodily to Heaven. (Joseph Campbell was wrong about a lot, but as he once said, even at the speed of light, the fastest speed matter can travel, Mary won't have gotten too far in space over the past 2000 years.)

Religions offer some entertaining stories, but I'll take Gilgamesh over Judeo-Christian folklore.

Then again, Dr. JAH seems to think that I'm too "linear" to see that human nature is both universal and totally various depending on which of his canonical writers is talking smack about it. No doubt he forgets that the problem with Woolf's grad student was that he simply shadowed Mr Ramsey's footsteps (and was too low class to fit in at the summer house of the English boojies).

And Dr. JAH, I have no children. Don't get me started on the breeders with their filthy pups. (See, maybe I can win the Enoch Powell 10-Second-Hate Award too.)

Dr. JAH needs to stick to the topic. And until he actually reads Ausubel or Bruner or any primary research in the psychology of learning, he really should mind his business and stick to wot he's good at: telling people to join the army and study their classical languages (but not Chinese or Sanskrit or Arabic, of course -- the rivers of blood would just be too deep).

To provide la derniere main to this portrait of poor JG, who is doubtless idealistic (now don't start hyperventilating anti-Platonic screed, JG, I mean in the general sense) and keen to contribute to his future pupils' education, but I think he, like most of our public school pupils, have been sorely abused by neglect of the most important aspects of a true humanist education (classics, math, real history--not current events and leftist multiculti-diversity screed, logic, great books, science, fine arts [NOT film and photography], government, and modern foreign languages [like classics, starting in 3rd grade, and taught rigorously]--period. As I've said several times on various blogs, my students (all but 10% remedials, though not identified as such) at an historically African-American college in the South, great ideas and books belong to all of us, and I'd make no insulting condescension (pace Andre Gide's mocking of African children chanting in colonial schools, "Nos ancetres, les Gaulois", for Gide was wrong here, though he was prescient in the 1920s [in Les Faux-Monnayeurs] in his depiction of the literary/actual communist terrorist who says [translating] "of all the emanations of the human brain, literature is the one that disgusts me most"--a perfect follower of that malignant miscreant, Michel Foucault.) in the choice of reading excerpts for the class. They deserved and deserve the best, not the easy and flattering.

And JG, remember that the Greeks founded nearly every branch of what now is recognised as modern learning. Need I mention the etymology of the name of your own chosen branch? And so many others--and not just names, things.

The old teaching the young--doesn't happen as often as you think (e.g., Christ teaching the elders in the Temple, but consider the Teacher!).

And let me say that I think at bottom you are amenable to instruction and correction; one irony of the whole ruinous Deweyist (bad form of pragmatism as opposed to Pierce's and his best modern interpreter, Susan Haack) cohort is the tedious bleating about "learning through doing" while what "education" courses really provide is virtually contentless exercises in "learning about learning about doing".

Less money for public ed, not more. US teachers are typically overpaid compared to their private school (and to their European and Asian contemporaries), and wildly overpaid if their low level of learning's thrown in. And the local ed mafias and sports thugs drain off even more. Vouchers for poor pupils! Ca se voit!

Cheers and bonne chance, JG--you'll need it!

Dr JA

Clawmute and Art: ethics is the study of human choice. That includes choices as basic as what to eat as well as whether or not to kill another person.

If I am not mistaken, ethics is the branch of philosophy concerned with good and right conduct. Not all norms are ethical norms and not all choices are ethical choices (norms and choices derived from aesthetic criteria, for example).

A father who teaches his children to use farm tools is making a choice about what sorts of options are, to use William James's terms, alive or dead for that child. Time spent teaching a child to use farm tools is time not spent teaching a child to rebuild an engine or appreciate Cy Twombly paintings.

The options are objectively present, not conjured out of the father's imagination.

Art Deco doesn't believe that class has much to do with education.

I do not recall stating or implying that, but never mind.

Look at the correlation between income and SAT levels and get back to me. The higher the income, the higher the test scores. Plain and simple. Furthermore, when we compare ther test results of US students to those from other nations, we need to remember that most nations scoring better than Americans have far better social services as well. French free pre-schools, for example, are proven to increase literacy for every year spent in them. In America, only those with the $$$ can afford more than the one year of public pre-school.

The pathways of causality in these circumstances are anything but plain and simple.

Artie D also believes that division of labor justifies economic class division. But why should a lawyer putting in 20 hours per week make more than the teacher putting in upwards of 60 to 80? Society needs both lawyers and teachers, but how we pay each profession is entirely up for negotiation. Paying all workers a liveable wage is the only American thing to do.

If you wish to conjure up a quantitatively specific collection of just wages and just prices for purposes of legislation, you are going to have to (a.) derive the schedule itself and (b.) persuade a majority you have done it correctly. Please note that the utility of prices (including prices of labor) is that they economize on information, tolerably instructing economic actors how much to produce of what commodity and where to distribute it. That is a somewhat bloodless way of putting it, but it will have to do. Once you have finished crafting an analogue of the Federal GS system for the whole economy, you are then going to have to figure what to do about the gluts and shortages of particular types of labor bound to develop (among other administrative problems). Best of Luck.

Art also forgets that the Puritans and Jamestown colonists were not Americans. They were British subjects. Americans didn't exist until after the Declaration of Independence.

At the risk of getting into another sterile taxonomic dispute, I should like to point out that what occurred during the years running from 1774 through 1783 and 1789 through 1791 was the reconstitution of the political institutions of an already existing society (and, btw, the Federal constitution replicated many of the forms found in the various colonial charters). People's identity is not composed merely of their legal status.

The different components of the United States were founded over a period of 125 years as a consequence of a jumble of factors - religious dissent, commercial gain, agricultural migration and colonization, war and reasons of state. They were not founded as a consequence of the social imagination of agitators or intellectuals. The phrase "all men are created equal" was uttered at European societies composed of clergy, nobility, burgesses, and peasantry by representatives of the gentry of an American society where the Peerage and episcopate were thin on the ground and hereditary subjection was a distinction of caste rather than of order. That sort of egalitarian idea or sentiment is rather at a remove from latter-day disputes over social policy.

We have gotten rather far afield from any sort of discussion of Dr. Berube's insistence that the homogeneity of worldview on liberal arts faculties is of no consequence.

JG: Just a quickie for right now--Pup (to your "dog"), LEARN TO READ AND THINK!! CUT THE SASS AND BE INSTRUCTED!! Now look again at what you have written above--when I say "common" to a class you say "only" in reference to that class--bad reading on your part, but worse logic.

I said four districts, JG, not one; LEARN TO READ, man! Or maybe JG is just numerophobic?

Latin--can't do real scholarship without it. Then Greek--tout court! JG chooses the pride of ignorance, which is an attitude antithetical and even hostile to learning itself. Proves, I suppose, Lucan's, humanum genus fecit paucis ("humanity was made for the few") when one has the manifold opportunities of JG and refuses them. Ignorance shall be his punishment, as Plato and Augustine knew quite well.

I used to have a friend who would run through a list of authors until he found one his interlocutors hadn't heard of--then he'd say,"Well, he's EXTREMELY famous". Can you INFER the point of this, JG? Try to read, for once. (also see below)

I've read seven of Dr Tallis's books, not a newsletter--which do you wish to discuss?

Bruner and Novak, on your rec, pup, will, naturallement, go to the head of my reading list, just before a rereading of the Greek New Testament, Goethe's Faust, oder Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers, or Shakespeare's history plays . . . Ca se voit!--any living psych-hack is worth any dead giant (non omnis moriar! ena alla leonta!) a ton avis, JG! Yeah, we heard you before. And why should I "research" them?--on your rec alone? A call to read one book (and thus not another) must be argued, not merely asserted, and certainly not on your flimsy "authority". "Ausubel"--JG drops another part of a name of doubtless world-historical significance--is that because JG's read 'im? Cui bono, JG?

You don't "oppose" religious claims by cretinous mockery, bozo. Can you honestly say with a straight face that your intent above on puerile sneering at others' faiths was to present a counter-claim? Abi in malam rem to that JG! For, as Aristophanes has it, ton anthropon agkhein boulomai,/Hos tispot'esth', ho tous Theos apoteikhisas ("I want to stifle the man/Whoever he is, who's walled off the gods").

Correcting typos shows respect for the language and for one's readers (real scholars do it, JG!).
Drop an "ess" in a French word and you go from fish to poison. Also it's the birth of paranomasia--"pun" to you, JG.

"Children"--YOUR PUPILS, man!--even a gaping rustic could have gotten that after reading your blogs on your hopes of teaching, but nope, not JG.

Charles Tansley's problem, inter alia, was that he was at once a jacobin, a passive-aggressive bully and a bore--JG's man, tout court--no aristocratic ease and grace; no sprezzatura. (Ah, she stirs, my queen! I must take leave soon)

JG's ne plus ultra aim seems to achieve the notoriety of being a guest on a vulgar talk show. Perhaps also his assured "scholarly" tome on why US children are not abused by semi-literate union hacks posing as teachers would then be grabbed off the supermarket counter-racks along with the gum and candy. I've two scholarly books using seven languages (with original translations and heavy glossing), well reviewed. Let me know when yours appears.

Reread your Orwell on the language of class and racial taunts. As for as the great scholar, J Enoch Powell, screed can never touch him. As for me, my life proves otherwise. Trust me on this, for you, unlike Fraud, apparently detest testimonials. Perhaps the psych habit of requiring info of their victims, er, patients, you know, just "fundamentals" like detailed lists of sexual and toilet habits, c'est tout!, suggests JG's reticence. Leave it to the psychs to convert the ancient quest "to kalon" to "to kakon"!

Of course I'd like to study Chinese and Arabic--the main author I treat in one of my books was a Hebraist and Arabist, and I'm in awe of him for this--where's YOUR expertise in these tongues, or do you just use yours for the callow smarmy gibberish we've read so far, JG? I deliberately left out Sanskrit, for like ancient Hebrew and Latin, it's a dead language and thus of no value according to JG. And too, JG, wasn't it an 18th c. Brit colonialist who helped revitalise native Sanskrit scholarship? (see the 20th c. pro-Empire historian, biographer and decagenarian Nirad Chaudhuri, the "unknown Indian", on this).

I'm not sure the Army would take you--we've got higher standards than you may think--but if you could, you could better serve and protect your right to exalt ignorance and foment class hatreds.

I see other bloggers as well are attending to other errors you've made--what a living compendium of confusion and error is your scribbling, JG!

See you later, hater of true learning, our homunculus, our JG.

I make Jacques angry. I no like Jacques angry.

First off, I apologize for getting your personal data wrong. So, Jacques has taught in four districts, and it seems -- correct me if I'm wrong! -- all four were in a single state. Jacques doesn't actually address the issue of statistically-significant sampling of data, but I stand corrected. Four districts in a single state is, to put it gently, still not a statistically significant sample.

Jacques would have all scholars know Latin. Sounds good prescriptively. But descriptively, it's simply not accurate. Whether Watson knew Latin or not, it wasn't the Classics that allowed him to determine the structure of DNA. Aquinas, of course, wrote brilliantly on Aristotle without knowing Greek. Jacques can lord his knowledge of Latin over me, but as seen by his own ill logic, Latin is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for good thinking.

Finally, Jacques thinks I've "recommended" books by Bruner, Novak, Ausubel, and others. If you read my comments, you'll see I never recommended anything. I don't care if you read them or not. My point was simply this: stop spouting off about cognitive psychology and research on learning until you've read the research itself. That you're not even familiar with Bruner or Ausubel merely confirms that you haven't the slightest familiarity with current research (and by current, I'm talking 50 years). I'm not a psych major, never was, but I left college at least knowing the basics of constructivist learning theory, from Vygotsky to Novak. (Jacques, of course, tells his readers to read the same folks time and time again on *his* authority: "the unknown Indian" comes up a lot, along with Tallis and Susan Haack. Haack's work is pretty silly, 'tho she's right that Rorty is different than Peirce: gotcha, Rorty! Good thing Rorty rarely identifies his work with Peirce. I, too, will take Peirce over Rorty, but let's not spend an entire career policing the term pragmatism, which any intro to phil student could tell you started in the great Peirce-James arguments and are not terribly original to Haack.)

Then there's Tallis. Apparently, knowledge of Latin doesn't help Jacques read for tone. I was joking that your comments about Tallis sound like newsletter soundbytes. Let's also remember that the title of one of Tallis's books -- the brain is not a computer -- has been one of the guiding ideas of current neuroscience and cognitive psychology for, uh, 50 years.

As far as joining the Army, seems like the military has lowered their standards to continue their crusades in exotic, eastern locales.

Finally, I simply cannot take faith in religion seriously. Why Christ and not Thor? As expressions of human ideas about the world, religious texts are powerful. But as prescriptions of what one should believe, it's all rather laughable. I'll believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and I'll expect you to respect my belief without snickering.

JG: Dr JA no mad--laff with Cendrine thru JG's laytter. Laff more with C. when do laytter to JG. Love haters. Hate haters' hate. No get haters BEYOND grave, me swear.

Of course statistically-based studies are worth consideration, as well as WHO is doing them for what purpose. Watch for bias, especially leftist political bias in stats on ed, ed psych and ed philosophy, such as NAS members like the Thernstroms, Chester Finn et alii have written about. Tu quoque (please to look it up, JG), JG, whose opinion is ex pluribus unum (infer the meaning of this from the words on those little green slips of paper in your wallet, ok?); of course he might CLAIM the authority of others, but his ability to read and interpret . . . well, perhaps English is not his native tongue--we'll see how he does after his last ESL lesson.

Petitio principii (sorry--that's "begging the question" to you, JG) again in assuming ed psych is on as safe a scientific foundation as molecular biology? On translation, check the letters between Augustine (who had more Greek than he modestly confessed) and the mighty Jerome (who had Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic and who produced a Latin Vulgate Bible [the successor to the Vetus Latina versions] that was adopted by the Church, I think, officially in 1546). Furthermore, I'm not sure I've time to read endless reams of stats generated by pseudo-scientists (you must first establish a science by justifying its basis, its methods, its intellectual integrity, its universality, etc. and the sosh-psych-ed fields are far from this cachet)--most of us won't bother, e.g., with the learned cretins' who offer us stats and "evidence" that prove 9/11 conspiracy charges.

Check out Susan Haack's "Staying for an answer" in the TLS perhaps seven years ago for a time investment of perhaps an hour to contemplate its implications, which are staggering for the universities and their so-called commitment to truth. Then, perhaps, you'll want to move on to her full-length books--clear and well-argued, but, unlike JG, with an admixture of wonder and humility. Rorty is merely an antinomian political hack (no pun on Susan) and anti-religious bigot, but his partis-pris rubbish can also be instructive for its manifold errors. On pragmatism--Pierce's pragmatic theory of meaning seems to have been transmogrified into "pragmatic" theories of value and truth by lesser philosophes like James, Dewey, and, worst of all, Rorty. By the way, readers CAN check above if I've mentioned Haack "a lot", as JG asserts I have. Sorry, JG--it's ONCE, proving again that JG doesn't attend to details--you know, like stats and such and their proper interpretation. Linguists, especially classically-trained ones in the West, learn to do this. Sorry, JG, too many elementary errors--back to English and Logic 101 (no pass go), for refreshers. Then maybe we'll listen to you again.

Despite the unjustifiable excesses of the peasant-soldiery during the First Crusade after the capture of Jerusalem (I've no books where I'm writing from) in 1099 (?), without them Europe might be at least half Muslim--Deus vult! Fight them there, so we don't have to fight them here?, or, as some like JG perhaps might prefer, run away to central Greenland?

Ok, JG, we've heard your "non credo" several times--I respect your stand, but mockery of others' stands is a troublesome sign of prejudice and bigotry (sois-sage, JG!). What's the solution? "Slay them all--God will know his own!"--scherzo, JG! But seriously, folks, we've recently heard just this sort of talk from our radical Muslim enemies. We're at war.

Maladetto e distrutto sia da Dio lo primo punto ch'io incontrai di quello?--non lo credo, perche veramente questa commedia con divo JG era divertente--e almeno e finita, non e vero?
(mi scusi, caro Cecco)

Perhaps Italian, JG? E piu facile da imparare che il latino ed il greco. Start with the preceeding sentence and proceed on to the Scartazzini edition of Dante. Be a real humanista!

Ciao e buona fortuna, cucciolo!

Dr JA

emendamento dedicato a JG--"umanista" certamente!

JUST DON'T GET IT

J.A., "Jonah," et al. belabor the point:

a government-subsidized English teacher (a field with millions of unemployed majors) who, by luck of the draw has as much job protection as a Supreme Court justice attempts to lord himself over the chattering masses that pay him?

What a load! If Mr. Berube believes himself so talented -- why doesn't he leave government service? Become the next English-major millionaire. Save the taxpayers from the burden of (1) paying his over-inflated salary and (2) listening attempt to diminish rigorous social science with mere words.

What a load!

BD: If by "lord himself over the chattering masses" you mean "presents the evidence that very few cases of political discrimination in the classroom were offered as evidence before public hearings on the matter," then you're clearly right.

And I believe that Penn State, where Berube teaches, currently receives something like 10% of its funds from the government. His salary is actually paid by a donation given to the English department by Joe Paterno himself. You might do some actual research before stumbling into an adult conversation.

And there are not "millions of unemployed majors" out there for tenure-track English professor positions. Not even close. Your comments come off as the babbling of a fool.

Finally, I'm quite sure Berube could easily get a job at a private university.

In any case, do yourself the favor of shutting your cakehole and reading Berube's work before spouting off like a child.

Thanks for your spot-on commentary, B.D. (notwithstanding your occasional venture upon hyperbole, which should appeal to the jaunty M Goldberg, but apparently doesn't)! M Berube has distinguished himself as a dogged but failed disputer of David Horowitz's modest but essential reform programme for US colleges' and universities' "committments" to fair and balanced treatment of sensitive political topics in courses and classes.
I've a bit of a soft spot for ol' JP, but read my most recent post (soon to appear) on "Inside Higher Education" concerning the scandal of college sports programmes (answering MM Ammons and Simpson).

Cheers,

Dr JA

Okay, I'll bite. Where exactly did I blame the French and Hollywood for drawing al Qaeda's wrath? I seem to recall writing an essay two years ago where I explicitly rejected that idea.