After the Future

Defending the Western Canon

A part of my mission at After the Future has been to save the Western Canon from being captured by conservative ideologues. That is a heavy lift these days, and it shouldn't be. There's a reason why people like Jacques Derrida and Hannah Arendt--and really anybody who is truly culturally literate--have spent so much time with Plato and St. Augustine. The former recognize how the latter wrote the cultural software that runs Western Civilization. If you don't understand how Plato and Augustine did that, then you don't understand what or why you think what you think and believe what you believe. For one of the best explanations for why the Western Canon is important from a Progressive perspective, read director of Columbia University's core curriculum Roosevelt Montas's Rescuing Socrates or this piece in Jacobin by Liza Featherstone entitled "The Left Should Defend Classical Education". 

So I get a little frustrated when the more public-facing defenses of classical education are showcased in the MSM as part of the conservative social agenda. The results are predictable when a conservative businessman like Jeremey Wayne Tate, the founder of the Classical Learning Test (CLT), gets interviewed by a conventional progressive like the NY Times Lulu Garcia-Navarro. Why is Tate worthy of the attention of the NY Times? Because Ron DeSantis is pushing to replace the SAT with his CLT in the Florida State education system. 

I am no defender of SAT or of the whole standardized testing regime in general, including Tate's CLT. But I get pretty frustrated when guys like Tate become the frontmen for defending the Western canon. He doesn't have a prayer against Garcia-Navarro. He's at best a well-intentioned businessman who says, rightly, that a classical education should not be either conservative or liberal--but human. But he's a conservative guy trying to run a company. He'is worried about making payroll, and if the conservatives want to be his customers, then hoo-rah for conservatives.

He gives a ridiculously naive explanation for why public schools are failing and for why even Catholic schools like the one his daughter attends shape their curricula to the test. If the school is daughter attends was serious about their values, they would determine the curricula by their own pedagogical standards, not by what the SAT requires. (See Note 1) And so with such defenders of a classical education as Tate and DeSantis, it is easily condemned as guilty by association by the liberal consumers of the NY Times. Liberals used to know better, but don't now precisely because of the consumerist design and career-training ethos that has become the default in university curricula in the last several decades. Why would anybody in their right minds waste their tuition money on a philosophy or literature course?

I was going to do a more detailed analysis of how the presuppositions of both Garcia-Navarro and Tate gurantee that they will talk past one another, but who really cares? It's the same old, same old. Garcia-Navarro is smart and she asks fair questions, but it's clear that she's in the why-should-we-care-about-what-dead-white-men-think camp. Her audience would be better served if she interviewed Roosevelt Montas or Cornell West (who has a seat on the CLT board), both of whom would be far more capable of defending the importance of the Western canon from a non-conservative perspective than Tate is. She might learn something if she were to do so. 

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Note 1: One of the more significant absurdities in Tate's justification for the CLT is the story he relates about how his daughter's Catholic School offers an elective philosophy course that no students sign up for. Why? Because, according to Tate, it doesn't give them AP credits or isn't covered in the SAT. Waste of time. So, in Tate's mind, if curriucla are determined by the standardized test, then you must change the standardized test. It never seems to occur to Tate that if this Catholic School were truly effective in shaping the souls of its students, they should all be chomping at the bit to take this philosophy course for intrinsic motivations. But clearly this school is just turning out kids like every other elite high school, i.e., kids who don't care about learning but about getting ahead. They make choices not according to criteria that Socrates or Aristotle might approve but by what a Neoliberal careerist agenda approves. They are so many young Hippocrates-es looking for a life that Protagoras would train them for. Neither Tate nor Garcia-Navarro get the irony because neither clearly has any idea about what Plato was about. 

Forcing Change vs. Inspiring Change

Over the years, social scientists who have conducted careful reviews of the evidence base for diversity trainings have frequently come to discouraging conclusions. Though diversity trainings have been around in one form or another since at least the 1960s, few of them are ever subjected to rigorous evaluation, and those that are mostly appear to have little or no positive long-term effects. ...

If diversity trainings have no impact whatsoever, that would mean that perhaps billions of dollars are being wasted annually in the United States on these efforts. But there’s a darker possibility: Some diversity initiatives might actually worsen the D.E.I. climates of the organizations that pay for them. (NYTimes)

Who'd a thought?

There's a naive mindset, more typical of Liberals than Conservatives, that believes classroom education is the answer to all of humanity's problems. That's why they blame teachers for the achievement gap between kids who grow up in affluent families and those that grow up in poor ones. It's often been said that the number that is the greatest predictor of academic achievement is a kid's zip code. And this is why busing to desegregate the schools didn't work, no matter how laudable the the goal. The kids from the poor zip code have to go home after going to the school in the affluent zip code. And so does everyone who goes to a diversity training workshop have to go home after it. 

The underlying problem is the way we are acculturated. When are weaned, we learn that we are no longer the center of the universe, and that we must play our designated place in the tribe. This requires that we learn the tribal code and to play the role assigned to us by our family and by extension the larger society, which for most kids in low-income zip codes means learning the folkways of the streets.

Among the kids who grow up in a family whose parents don't value education, it's the rare one who will find a way to value it. Why should he care, if nobody he knows or cares about cares? Certainly his friends on the street don't. So why do people think that the time spent in school will change all that?

And it's even more ridiculous to think that a bunch of hours in a diversity training workshop will change resistant attitudes. The participants still have to go home after it. The people who are most resistant will sit through it because they have to, but their eyes will be firmly rolled back into their heads, and when they get back home or to the local bar, they'll vent about how these woke liberals are trying to brainwash everyone. 

But then again, we're a society that thought we could march into Iraq and make it a beacon for democracy throughout the Middle East. The astonishing, jaw-dropping naivete of it. You'd think we'd learn, but alas. We can't so long as we're trapped within the shallow constraints of our rationalist-materialism and its utilitarian approach to solving complex moral spiritual problems. 

Our deep cultural programming as kids isn't a closed system. Upgrades are possible, and people can and do transcend it. But when they do, it's because something has inspired them. They have an onto-normative experience, which means that something dormant in their souls is awakened to some better possibility for themselves to become more deeply themselves, i.e., to become more deeply human. No inspiration, no deeply substantive change.

Every teacher worth his or her salt knows that you can't teach kids who don't want to learn. You can't force it; you have to inspire it. It's the same for any kind of substantive positive cultural change. But in order to inspire it, you have to have been inspired at some point yourself. You have to have experienced in some small way an onto-normative awakening. Such an awakening is what drives the idealism of the best of our young people, but it's a seed, and it needs to be cultivated in the right way to grow into something strong and vital and wise. Does a Masters in education at the typical state university cultivate that kind of wisdom? Only if students encounter faculty there who themselves have some measure of it. Is it disqualifying if you have none of it? Of course not. 

The classroom approach to developing more positive attitudes toward diversity is as silly as teaching ethics in a business school. The smartest kids will tell the instructor what she wants to hear because the incentives demand that they do, but when they go to work at a place like Enron none of it will matter because the new social environment has incentives that completely contradict and mock what they were taught in class.

Learning in a classroom about the difference between consequentialist and deontological ethical systems through case studies and trolley-car thought experiments might be interesting for few hours, but are such discussions designed to wake up what is deeply, innately, ontonormative in the student? Not in my experience. Same with diversity training. So it might work if the business school ethics instructor has that spark or if the diversity workshop leader does. But is it disqualifying to teach these classes if you don't? And so it's not surprising at all that they have little success and often make things worse.

What about the people who teach our kids in school? Do they have that ontonormative spark? I'd say that most probably start out with one, but our bureaucratized and politicized and corporatized schools rarely provide environments in which that spark can be cultivated. The basic model for education reform over the last twenty years--whether Bush's No Child Left Behind or Obama's Race to the Top--incentivizes all the wrong things. It disregards sparks and emphasizes spark-dimming incentives that focus on data and scores. "We need to close that gap," these education reformers say, "and we need data to show that we're getting results."  

I wouldn't be surprised if many people who support diversity training or closing the achievement gap in schools have some dim sense that waking people up to their best possibilities is what they're trying to do, but they don't really have a clear picture of what a human being is and what motivates his or her deepest moral aspirations. They don't even understand this about themselves. It's very difficult in a society whose metaphysical assumptions are dominated by rationalist materialism. So they work with the behavioral/utilitarian models that they've been taught and hope for the best.

"So," you might ask, "if none of this works, should we then just do nothing?" No. We do what we can no matter what the limitations of the situation in which we find ourselves. But when the problems inevitably flow from the structural limitations of the kind of imagination shaped by the culture's utilitarian rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary, it's hard to feel optimistic that any statistically significant, widespread solutions are possible. We'll just keep doing what doesn't work over and over again because, y'know, we have to do something, right? And we'll keep doing it even if it makes things worse. 

Nothing changes in any significant way until the underlying metaphysical assumptions do. Structural political and economic changes are possible only if there's the will to effect them, but having such a will depends on a broad consensus about what kind of society promotes deeply human flourishing. What people talk about at home and in coffee shops and local taverns and churches and Rotary Clubs has to change. (Yes, and whatever the social media equivalent of all that is these days.) And the consensus that is required for any kind of substantive structural change is impeded by the materialist Neoliberal utitlitarian assumptions that dominate American thinking by its public intellectuals--both Liberal and Conservative--about how social change happens. It's hard to see how anything fundamental can change so long as that remains the case. 

il n'y a pas de hors-texte

I'm no Derridean, but I've read enough of him and about him to know he was no nihilist. Neither was Nietzsche. But many nihilist have read both and appropriated what they think they've found in their texts for their cause.

Both D. and N. grapple with the problem of truth and interpretation. Both have good enough b.s. detectors to recognize that what most people claim to be truth is some soulless idol that they worship in place of it. What most people call truth has the stink of death about it. Both wanted to find a method of inquiry and way of living that avoided that kind of idolatry, which is the tendency in all human beings when they let their relationship to the Living Real to rigidify. So Nietzsche undertook philosophy with a hammer, and Derrida took Heidegger's idea of 'deconstruction' to perform a similar kind of philosophy whose goal was to free up our relationship to the truth. This was for them a necessary task because In a Positivist age truth had come into the death grip of what McGilchrist calls the hegemony of the values of the usurping Left Brain. 

D. and N.'s goal was not to destroy or to debunk for the sake of debunking, but to free the  living from its entombment. They take a hammer to walls that imprison truth to liberate it, to make it available again in the lives of those who would love it if they could have any kind of living relationship with it. 

There are different interpretations of Derrida's statement that il n'y a pas de hors-texte, which is usually interpreted as 'there is nothing outside of the text'. Derrida was a punster, and I don't want to go down the rabbit hole that follows all the possible allusions. But I think a fair reading of it is that he was emphasizing how every encounter with the truth is one determined by its con-text. I think this is common sense, and it owes a lot to phenomenology, which with people like Husserl, Heidegger, Scheler, Stein sought to liberate philosophy from Positivism. Truth after phenomenology becomes focused on experience rather than on abstractions. And experience and our interpretation of it is always first and foremost contextual. 

There is the dictionary definition of a tree, and then there is our experience of a tree, which is different for the botanist or the lumberjack or for a Druid priest in a primeval Irish forest. For each of these the truth of the tree is what shows up for them in their experience of it. The least important thing is its dictionary definition. That tells us nothing vitally important about trees. Phenomenology opens up the possibility to experience the truth of the tree in a living way, it allows us to take seriously what the tree in its inexhaustible meanings might reveal to us. It affirms the importance of the subjective in what a tree actually means. 

The tree is in this sense a text, and the text as such is vulnerable to limitless interpretations, and that limitlessness, when taken seriously by anybody who is serious about knowing truth, tells us more about the nature of the truth than any statement about the genus and species of a tree can begin to uncover. To say that nothing exists outside the text is not to relativize what we know but to open up new possibilities for knowing. 

This limitlessness is akin to what Buddhism and the apophatic tradition in Christianity affirm about God, which is nothing. There is nothing that can be said that is THE truth about God, and analogously there is nothing that can be said that is THE truth about a tree--or of ourselves or one another. But that does not mean that the effort to say something truthful is futile or that our attempts to say something true have no value.

Because we can never know THE truth does not mean there is no truth. It only means that whatever we can know of it is perspectival, culturally mediated, and always incomplete, and so therefore provisional. That's the human condition, and many sane humans throughout history have been able to live rich, truthful lives within those limitations.

Nevertheless there is always somebody who is tempted to idolatry, someone who wants to put the truth in a straitjacket and keep it locked up in the attic. They are usually the kind of people whose obsessive need for control leads them into positions of power in a society's political and religious institutions. They're the ones who freak out when someone challenges their rigid ideas about what is true or not. They're the ones who close themselves off from the truth because it scares them. 

Language makes the uncommon common, Nietzsche says somewhere. Yes, mostly that's true, but not always. And in that statement, he affirms the possibility of experiencing the "uncommon". Cliches once weren't stale even if whatever vitality was first in them is doomed to become stale over time. Religious language is like that, too. But there is always in any text the possibility to take a hammer to it, to crack open what entombs it, and to discover the living thing in it to which such texts first gave utterance. But the utterance isn't the truth; it's just a provisional attempt to articulate some experience of the Living Real that is always inadequate to whatever the experience of it might have been. 

And for this reason language--and other symbolic forms--can work as a portal to the uncommon. It is not what is actually literally said in the symbolic forms, but rather what we come to see through them into something uncommonly bigger and more vital. Some statements are more adequate than others because they articulate more effectively something uncommon in a way that has the fresh smell of truth about it.That's why we still read--or should--Homer and the Bible and Plato and Shakespeare. Because the language we find there has this enormous potential to surprise us. We think we know already what we will find in these texts, but if we have an openness to them, we will be refreshed by something unexpected, something living. We have to cultivate a mood that Heidegger called, following Meister Eckhart, gelassenheit, which is similar to Keat's negative capability. Look it up. 

This approach leads often to an awakening of something dormant, to a memory of something forgotten. Heidegger says we moderns suffer from a forgetfulness of Being, and one way to remember what has been forgotten is to spend time with important texts. The disclosures that come if one makes the effort have the freshness of life about them, and we are refreshed by it. That is the kind of truth that is worth knowing about. It is not THE truth, but it points to it as an inexhaustible spring of vitality. 

This kind of remembering is something no AI will ever be able to do because machine memory cannot forget. It's the forgetting and then the remembering that is the peculiar human thing. And for that reason human memory is capable of resurrecting the dead. 

And so, while it might be that the symbolic forms that once articulated something living no longer live for us, it does not mean that what once lived is now dead. It's just gone underground. It can be remembered, resurrected. Those forms once steeped in uncommonness have become stale and common because of the human proclivity to be distracted by other shiny objects--in our case the produce of techno-capitalism. Nevertheless we still live in a society shaped by symbolic forms that retain their potency even if it is not something we have easy access to. A tradition dies because people let something die within themselves, and this is how I take what Nietzsche means when he says that God is dead. It is not really God who is dead, but we who are. 

And this is the value of Derrida's deconstruction--to break open the sarcophagi in which these once living texts lie because nobody who plays a significant role in shaping the culture reads them anymore--texts like those of Plato and Augustine, for instance, that D spends a good chunk of time with--and to find again what's living in them, and to critique what is not. What's important is not what Derrida finds there, although you might be surprised to learn what he does find. Rather what's important is to follow his method, to interrogate the great texts, and like Jacob wrestling with the angel to derive therefrom a blessing.

See also "Deconstructing God". 

Whither Scotland?

People have compared the U.K.-Scotland relationship, in the event of a split, to the United States and Canada, which of course is inexact and even absurd in all kinds of ways. But I will say this: whenever I’ve visited Ottawa and dipped a toe into the Canadian political experience, I’ve always come away impressed with the advantages of national politics on a different scale (however large and diverse in its own right) than the kind of experiment we have going in our increasingly imperial republic. True, those advantages don’t incline me to pick up and move to Vermont and throw in with the Green Mountain state’s separatists, and they don’t incline me, in the end, to desire the dissolution of Great Britain’s successful and rather extraordinary union either. But they do incline me to a greater sympathy for the cause of Scottish independence, a greater understanding for why ruling themselves from Edinburgh might seem preferable to being represented in Westminster, than a tabulation of financial considerations would allow. At the very least, I envy them the chance to cast so significant a vote, and I would find something to admire in either outcome. (Ross Douthat)

I'm not that acquainted with the particulars of Scottish separatism, but if the primary motive is nationalistic, it's silly. On the other hand, I think that more regional autonomy is desirable.

As the globe further centralizes, there will be, paradoxically, more regional autonomy. We already see the outlines of it in the U.S. The center cannot hold, and, really, we shouldn't expect it to. Nevertheless, there are minimal functions that a center should play, and this is the mistake the Scots make if they are hell bent on complete independence. Interdependence is the more desirable future, and that requires a weakened role by the center, but should not obliterate its role completely. 

I consider myself a social democrat, which obviously requires a prominent role for government in the shaping of our society. The change that I've experienced since 2008, especially after seeing the mess the Obama administration has made in its technocratic attempts to reform public school education, is to devolve government more to the local level. A national, one-size-fits-all education policy makes no sense, and certainly the idea of privatizing public education through charters, etc., makes no sense. 

Local or regional control doesn't get rid of the problem of local oligarchies controlling dominating the system, but such oligarchies are easier to deal with on the local level when their depredations become egregious. 

But centralized power is the only power that can effectively deal with issues like multinational corporate predatory behavior, environmental degradation, and it has an important role on the national and international level to play in setting fair labor standards, trade and transportation rules, and lots of other things that need coordination and regulation at a higher level.

Conflicts between the local and the center will always be thorny: Should locals refuse genetically modified produce exported according to rules determined by an international body? Probably. Because the bias should always be toward letting the locals alone, except where they prove themselves outrageously unable or unwilling to solve problems that clearly undermine the greater good. What that greater good means in reality will depend on lots of different, mostly contingent factors. Locals can always find ways to resist centralized regulations when they lose in these conflicts, through boycotts and other means. But such protests are easier to organize on the local level than on a national or international level. 

The Dismal Science

First this from Krugmnan'a NYRB  review of Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century:

But even those [economists] willing to discuss inequality generally focused on the gap between the poor or the working class and the merely well-off, not the truly rich—on college graduates whose wage gains outpaced those of less-educated workers, or on the comparative good fortune of the top fifth of the population compared with the bottom four fifths, not on the rapidly rising incomes of executives and bankers.

It therefore came as a revelation when Piketty and his colleagues showed that incomes of the now famous “one percent,” and of even narrower groups, are actually the big story in rising inequality. And this discovery came with a second revelation: talk of a second Gilded Age, which might have seemed like hyperbole, was nothing of the kind. . . . 

The big idea of Capital in the Twenty-First Century is that we haven’t just gone back to nineteenth-century levels of income inequality, we’re also on a path back to “patrimonial capitalism,” in which the commanding heights of the economy are controlled not by talented individuals but by family dynasties.

A revelation? I'm glad we have economists who now have received it. That', I'm sure, will change everything.

Then, there's this from this morning's NYT about a shift within the so-called "Washington Consensus":

But the newfound attention to income inequality isn’t just another facet of a more liberal, Keynesian economic worldview. The fund’s economists have been producing research that suggests that inequality could make the world economy less stable.

Ms. Lagarde echoes an I.M.F. staff paper issued in January, which suggested that policies recommended by the fund should also be judged for their impact on inequality. “Income inequality can be of macroeconomic concern for country authorities, and the fund should accordingly seek to understand the macroeconomic effects of inequality,” it says.

Jonathan D. Ostry, the I.M.F.’s deputy head of research, and Andrew Berg, another economist at the fund, published a study three years ago suggesting that inequality makes growth less durable: The average stretch of robust growth among relatively equitable industrial countries lasted more than 24 years. In Africa, a much more unequal place, the average was less than 14 years.

A flatter distribution of income, the study concluded, contributes more to sustainable economic growth than the quality of a country’s political institutions, its foreign debt and openness to trade, its foreign investment and whether its exchange rate is competitive.

I often wonder why anybody listens to economists. Their prestige far exceeds their usefulness. They exemplify the worst kind of rear-view mirror thinking. They are exceedingly conventional and reactive, and have little real insight to deliver that people don't already know from their knowledge of about history and human nature. There's this pretense that somehow it's scientific and objective, but it just isn't.  Whenever you hear some economist spouting off, ask what his politics are. That will be a clearer indication of his thinking. Economics is not science; it's ideology. 

Even Keynesianism was legitimated only as an ex post facto explanation for what happened in a kind of ad hoc experimental way in the U.S. during the 1930s and 40s. It was easily supplanted by voodoo economics and Laffer curvers when it seemed unable to explain the stagflation of the 1970s. 

Economics as a discipline ought to be demoted to a subdiscipline within university history departments. Let them gather their statistics, but make them stay away from theories that have the patina of a-political or "scientific" authority. The idea of giving the Nobel prize to economists is more an indicator of elite conventional thinking than it is about any economist having real objective insight into the world as it really works. It's about as silly as giving the peace prize to Henry Kissinger or Barrack Obama. 

So I post this about Piketty or the IMF not because it's startling news, but because it's an indicator of a shift within the precincts of elite thought. The establishment is worried about instability. Who'd of thought? Would that working and middle class folks in this country would give it more cause for worry. That's the only thing that will ever change their thinking further. It's the only thing that will create the conditions for the emergence of an economics that represents their interests rather than those of the One Percent. But let's not fool ourselves that it's anything more than a political ideology that seeks to bend theory to serve one set of interests rather than another. 

The Elite Center of Gravity in the Democratic Party

Michael Lind nails it this morning:

During the Progressive Era and the New Deal era that succeeded it, idealistic professional-class reformers were only one element of a coalition they were forced to share with the representatives of farmers and blue-collar workers — groups that made up a majority of the workforce in the mid-20th century. Take away the farmer-labor wing of the center-left, and you are left with upper-middle-class do-gooders like Woodrow Wilson and Eleanor Roosevelt. A progressivism based among college-educated professionals is going to be much more elitist, and perhaps much less egalitarian and effective, than one dominated by union leaders, urban bosses and agrarian politics. True, nonwhite and low-income Americans are important in the Democratic electorate — but they are grossly underrepresented in the organized center-left.

If there were a real progressive movement in the U.S., its attitude toward the professional class would be more skeptical than celebratory. In order to fund a decent-size welfare state, genuine progressives would demand higher taxes on Americans making more than $100,000 — or maybe more than $50,000 or even $30,000. Why not? Polls show that Americans are willing to pay somewhat higher taxes as long as they get better benefits like expansions of Social Security or Medicare. The pressure to exempt professional households that make between $100,000 and $250,000 a year is not coming from Middle America.

Genuine progressives would side with producers, of all kinds, against rentiers, of all kinds — including credential-rentiers like the members of professional monopoly guilds. If software can replace pricey lawyers, if moderately paid instructors can replace highly paid professors, if skilled nurses were allowed to do some of the things that only M.D.s now do at a fraction of the salary, the working-class majority would benefit immensely.

The proletarianization of the professional class should be welcomed and encouraged by the progressive movement. Already independent physicians are being replaced by doctors who are salaried employees of hospitals. Let prole lawyers work for legal services corporations and prole professors work for educational service companies. Unable to set their own incomes by means of guilds, many downwardly mobile professionals might belatedly discover the benefits of unions and legislation protecting workers against exploitation by managers and investors.

The bad news, then, is that the self-serving minority of credentialed professionals, rather than the majority of wage earners, is increasingly important in setting the agenda of the center-left. The good news is that the contradiction between progressive reform and the self-interest of the professional elite may come to an end as technology and economic reorganization eliminate the professions altogether.

This, in part, explains why Neoliberalism is embraced by so many Democrats. It is an ideology whose purpose is to sustain the interests of elites, and elites now define the center of gravity in the Democratic Party. Nothing changes until the center of gravity in the party shifts back to labor. 

I don't know if I can get up much enthusiasm for the proletarianization of anybody, but if that's what it takes to get a coherent, broad-based pushback against the way the top wealth percentiles have rigged the system in their favor, then so be it. Wage slavery is wage slavery whether your collar is blue or white.

What kind of society do I want? Might as well lay it out here in broad strokes.

In the long run, ownership of companies has to shift away from the rentier class to workers on the Mondragon model or other variations of it.

I support state ownership for a few enterprises that serve the common good, like healthcare, energy, and transportation.

There should always be room for innovative, small startups, and that requires capital, but there are ways of raising it and rewarding investors without their owning the company indefinitely. 

A few thoughts about the future of education and the professoriate:

I'm fine with the public-private mix in education. K-12 public schools should get state and federal funding, but should be governed locally.

Tenure as we know it should be abolished in post-secondary education, but there should be mechanisms in place to insure due process for faculty who are fired. But class distinctions between tenured and non-tenure faculty should be abolished. The criteria for accountability should be developed in faculty senates, and it should be possible for the faculty senate to overturn unjust firings.  

I don't know what's going to happen to the large state research universities regarding undergraduate education.They will not much longer be able to justify the large, impersonal lecture classes in the MOOC era. My guess is that they'll downscale and become heavily subsidized centers for graduate education for engineers, biotech, healthcare professionals, and other science/technical professions. 

While they are not going away any time soon, I think Law School and MBA programs are  credentialing scams. There are far less expensive and more practical ways to train lawyers and business people. Certificate programs in specialized areas make more sense, but a lot of that could be handled by MOOCs.

I would like to see a continued place for small, liberal arts colleges for undergraduates, but how that will work economically I don't know. Perhaps as an extension of the K-12 system. I suspect that the elite schools will survive because of their endowments and because there will always be an elite willing to pay the freight, but I wouldn't want anybody I care about to be just MOOC educated. Maybe people want to discuss that in comments. 

Race to the Top

This is the Obama Administration's name for its program to reform American education. Really. The Democrats' program suggests a Social Darwinian competition in which there will be winners and losers, and you better be a winner. At least the Republican program, entitled No Child Left Behind, suggested ithat we need to stretch out a hand to those who are losing. 

But I think the name can be given to a Democratic program because so many Democrats who make up its policy elite have become so unselfconsciously Neoliberal. 'Race to the Top' just sounds right to them. Don't we all love sports? Doesn't every poor kid want to be a star in the NBA or NFL? Race to the Top--it's supposed to inspire a desire for excellence. But there's a problem in that there's only so much room at the top, and very few of us have the talent to make it there. The top by definition exists because it sits on what lies below it. There is no getting to the top unless you climb over and leave behind those who remain on the bottom and the middle.  And who cares about the losers anyway? They had their chance. They deserve what they get, just as I deserve what I got because I'm more talented and work hard at it. 

Anyway, I was thinking of this when I read Tom Frank's piece this norming in which he talks about Democrats and Inequality reflecting on Obama's SOTU in which he deflected attention from inequality by focusing instead on "opportunity":

If you’re in the right mood, you might well agree with him. In the distant past, “opportunity” used to be something of a liberal buzzword, a way of selling welfare-state inventions of every description. The reason was simple: true equality of opportunity is not possible without achieving, well, greater equality, period. If we’re really serious about opportunity—if we’re going to ensure that every poor kid has a chance in life that is the equal of every rich kid—it’s going to require a gigantic investment in public schools, in housing, in food stamps, in infrastructure, in public projects of every description. It will necessarily mean taking on the broader problem of the One Percent along the way.

But that was what the word meant long ago. It’s different today. When people talk about opportunity nowadays, they’re often not trying to refine the debate over inequality, they’re trying to negate it. The social function of mobility-talk is usually to excuse inequality, not to change it; to persuade us that the system we have now is fair and even natural—or that it can be made so with a few more charter schools or student loans or something. Because everyone has a chance at making it into the One Percent, this version of “opportunity” tells us, there’s nothing wrong with letting the One Percent hog every dish at the banquet.

The well-known libertarian economist Tyler Cowen, for example, writes in his new book “Average is Over” that we increasingly inhabit a “hyper-meritocracy” in which “top earners” take home more than ever before because, duh, they’ve got the right skills and hence they deserve to take home more than top earners ever have before. The future might look bleak for less-than-top people like you, but if you fall off the ladder of opportunity there’s only one answer: Get used to it.

We're all in a race to the top'. It starts in preschool now. That's our new/old reality. Get used to it.

Neoliberalism and Public Education 3

This chart lays it out pretty well:

Neoliberalism and Public Education 2

It's interesting to me that whenever I do a post on public education, the pageviews go  down. My guess is that it seems like such a niche issue, and when people read me squawking about Charter Schools or the Common Core, they think that's my problem, but not theirs. But if anything I've been saying about Neoliberalism and its toxic effect on American society, then you need to understand how Neoliberal education reform is reshaping and reinforcing the dark, Social Darwinist angels of our nature. What's happening in our public schools right now is a perfect laboratory for understanding how Neoliberalism is reshaping American society in its image. 

Charter Schools are a perfect example. They seem innocent enough. I thought they were a great idea when I first heard about them. Why not give parents choices? Why not open up different possibilities for families? Why not fight the education bureaucracy? In theory nothing is wrong with that, and there may be a few school districts where charter schools actually perform that function. But it's not New Orleans, it's not New York, and apparently it's not Hoboken.

I'm glad Josh Eidelson at Salon is taking Neoliberal education reform on as part of his beat. The interview this morning can be very helpful in showing how Charters are a tool that seem innocent enough, but which create bigger problems than they were created to solve. The whole thing should be read, but this excerpt will give you a taste:

Supporters of charter schools have sometimes argued that offering a charter is a way to keep parents within the public school system who would otherwise just go to private school – or as some of the HoLa parents have suggested, leave the city entirely.

. . . I believe that the initial charter schools in Hoboken shook a lot of people up, and I personally had no problem with it. They have just reached a critical mass now, that they’re fostering white flight, and they’re bankrupting us …

The private school parents are great. They’re paying taxes, and they’re taking responsibility for themselves … But the fact is, when you want … local funds to subsidize what in some cases is essentially a private school, it just goes against, I think, the intent of public education.

When you say “essentially” in some [cases] is “a private school” – how so?

When you have massive fundraising drives where you can raise $100,000 … I wish the public school system had as much money to devote toward our children as at least one of the charter schools does …

They have tutoring … These parents are wonderful — they’re the best of the best. So in fact, I view them as a private school that puts [a] significant amount of their own money into it, while getting funds from the city …

They have the best of both worlds: They have some very, very active parents, involved parents, motivated parents …  And they have these incredible fundraisers. And they’re also able to get money from us …

Their demographic mix is certainly interesting, and their class – if I could use the word — classist mix, is certainly interesting.

How would you characterize that mix?

Some of the best and the brightest of Hoboken choose to send their kids there. And it’s a loss for us — both in terms of our demographic mix, and it’s frankly a loss in terms of the students …

They’ve created an alternative school system …

Exactly. In Seattle, we have alterantive or option schools within the public school system. There are ways to innovate and offer options to families that don't penalize those who stay in normal neighborhood schools. But the charter system creates ways for clever people to game the system, and for "winners" to take public dollars away from the "losers" to feather the already well-appointed nests. It only makes sense if you think that winners deserve everything they can manipulate the system to get, and that losers deserve to be losers. The intent of public education is to provide equity of educational opportunity to everybody. Charters undermine that intent whether intentionally or not. 

Neoliberalism and Public Education 1

I recently posted that the Democrats will be useless in supporting economic justice issues until being called a Neoliberal has the same stigma as being called a homophobe. Neoliberal ideology is just repackaged late 19th Century Social Darwinism, which is an ideological justification for social stratification that rewards winners and punishes losers, where the winners and their retainers compose the top economic quartile, and everybody else is a loser.

It's a system where the winners write the rules, and they write them in such a way to make sure that this pyramid stabilizes into a class system in which a small elite dominates, a somewhat larger retainer class benefits by enacting  and enforcing the elite will, and social mobility is granted to a few prodigies who come from the loser classes. There is nothing unusual about this. It's the way most societies have stratified into class and caste systems throughout history. It's just that as recently as forty or fifty years ago, the idea would have been shocking to most Americans that America could become that kind of society.

While this winner-take-all mentality is blatantly extolled among Republicans, it is abetted by Democratic elite policymakers as well, and nowhere is this more obvious than in the Obama administration's education policies. Even the name they give it--Race to the Top--is Social Darwinist.

While I realize that readers without kids in public schools see this as rather abstract and irrelevant to their concerns, it's a perfect example of the way the bipartisan elite opinion is captured by Neoliberal thinking, and if you are concerned as I am about saying No to Neoliberalism, then one place you can fight back is by learning about what's going on in your local public schools and supporting efforts of community activists there to push back against Neoliberal reform. It's one place where local efforts can make a difference in fighting a toxic national trend. We need to protect our local public schools from Neoliberal dismantlement.

If you would like to get some quick background on the issue, this interview this morning with Diane Ravitch is a good place to start, and my pieces here on Technocratic vs. Humanistic Public Education here and here is another--or just click on the education tag below.

I think that the hardest thing for concerned but uninformed people to deal with is the  spin given by Neoliberal reformers who make their efforts appear to be all about helping to overcome the achievement gap, to introduce reforms that provide innovation and choice, that hold teachers accountable, and that raise standards. Who could be against these things? And what kind of monster is Bill DeBlasio that he wants to close down a few charters in NYC? DeBlasio understands what's going on, but people of good will are confused because fellow Democrat Andrew Cuomo, a Neoliberal through and through, opposes him and stands with the pro-charter groups. Oh dear, Oh dear, the typical  liberal Democrat doesn't know what to think. DeBlasio has just gone too far.

But they were ok when Bloomberg closed down dozens of neighborhood schools, because they were loser schools. Charters are for winners. That's right, and they kick out any kid who looks like he's going to be a loser, when being a loser is measured by poor performance on standardized tests. Neoliberals don't care about losers; they want to redirect all resources to support winners, and charters are their tool of choice in the K-12 educational sphere.

I daresay there are  many advocates of Neoliberal education reform who sincerely believe their own propaganda. But charter schools, standardized testing, and teacher evaluations based on student performance are all tools being used to create a new system shaped on Neoliberal values, a system that is meant to privilege some and cast everyone else overboard. Ravitch does not use the term Neoliberal, but this is what's she's describing here:

And the move in Chicago, as well as elsewhere, to boycott standardized tests — where do you see that going?

The test that they’re boycotting — right now there’s just a couple different schools that are doing it — is a test that’s being phased out. So it doesn’t really have a lot of huge impact — and yet the Chicago public schools are reacting in a very punitive fashion.

In reading stories from the Chicago press, about how they keep sending out directives saying isolate the kids, tell the kids they have to sit and make an affirmative statement — it’s a hysterical response, about “oh my God, some child, somewhere, might not take a standardized test.” And you have to kind of step back and say, “When did Pearson and McGraw-Hill become the arbiters of privilege in American education?”

…It just goes on and on with the multibillion-dollar corporations determining who are the winners and who are the losers in American society. In effect, we have the standardized testing companies now as the arbiters of our meritocracy…

We’re doing to standardized testing what was done in “Brave New World.” And in “Brave New World,” the meritocracy was determined at conception. We use standardized tests as our means of sorting out kids, and saying “you’re at the top, and you’re at the bottom.” The problem with that is that suggests an end to social mobility. Because the one thing we know about standardized testing is that no matter what standardized test it is, those who have are at the top and those who have not are at the bottom…

There are a few kids who rise to the top despite all obstacles. And kids from really wealthy circumstances who fall to the bottom. But on the whole and consistently, the standardized test is a reflection of socioeconomic status. So in effect the standardized test then becomes a giving to those who have, and… certifying the have-nots as have-nots.

Neoliberals will protest that they are doing no such thing. But don't listen to what they say, watch what they do, and think for yourself. See how what's happening now leads to what Ravitch is talking about later. 

 

Problem/Solution

I found this interesting chart that shows how education reform is directed toward solving the education problems experienced by kids marginalized by the larger society. Suggests why the phrase 'education reform' in its current usage is oxymoronic (Source):

 

 

 

 

Democrat Establishment Wrong on Education Policy

Good piece today in Salon about how many Democrats who think of themselves as Progressive are really just "liberals", and as such have been conned into supporting corporate ed reform:

Writing at the Huffington Post, experienced political insider Mike Lux observed that the “battle” for the soul of the Democratic Party “isn’t between progressives and centrists” at all, but “between the biggest special interest corporations in the world … and those of us who want to confront and rein in their power.”

As with economic policy, America’s education policy has largely been driven by the big money of Wall Street and private foundations.

But now the real impacts of the education reform agenda are starting to play out on the ground. Americans are awakening to the catastrophic effects of the “reform” movement. And they’re responding by making the fight for public schools another front in the broad grass-roots struggle for equality of all kinds.

How will leaders in the Democratic Party respond?

The problem of course lies in the way so many people who think of themselves as Progressives have been seduced into thinking that political reality is defined by the Neoliberal frame. They will go out and enthusiastically support Hillary Clinton as the Progressive choice, when there is nothing progressive about her (or her husband's) policies when it comes to economic issues. They are exemplars of the Neoliberal elite consensus.

The uninformed are lulled into voting enthusiastically for corporate Democrats because these Dems are more in line with their cosmopolitan cultural values, even if they are in the pockets of the one percent. Cory Booker is an exemplar of this kind of Democrat. He's black; he's charismatic; he's right on all the cultural issues. He's a win for the D column. But he's a corporate hack. And all these corporate hacks support corporate ed reform.

As the article points out, It's not even clear where Elizabeth Warren stands on ed reform. She is no corporate hack, but It wouldn't surprise me if she were an ed reform supporter if it's not something that has been a priority for her. Why? If for no other reason than because like so many other Dems, she has assimilated unconsciously the elite consensus about it (i.e, the consensus of elites whose kids go to privat schools)  and doesn't understand its toxic effects. Obama himself doesn't seem to understand the implications of his own policy because he often says he's for things that are being directly undermined by his administration's Race to the Top policies. I see this all the time with local politicians here in Seattle who should know better. The Neoliberal frame is so strong, and  it dominates the mindset of the local "donor class", whom they must take  seriously. But they are educable. 

A very interesting, but long an technical post, eviscerating ed reform as it has been implemented in NYC under the Bloomberg regime is laid out here. It's a good resource for readers here who are new to the subject. 

 

 

 

Our Public Schools Lead the World

The idea that our public schools are failing is a manufactured myth meant to create a sense of crisis that justifies corporate reformers demanding that our public schools as we have known them be dismantled and privatized. For those of you who have uncritically absorbed  the corporate media narrative that our public schools are failing, then you should read this post on Diane Ravitch's blog:

For every administration of PISA and TIMSS, when controlling for poverty, U.S. public school students are not only competitive, they downright lead the world.

Science literacy

U.S. schools with less than 10% free/reduced – score=556 [1st in the world]

Finland – ranked 4th in the world

Reading literacy

U.S. schools with less than 10% free/reduced – score=559 [1st in the world]

Finland – ranked 5th in the world

Mathematics literacy

U.S. schools with less than 10% free/reduced – score=540 [5th in the world]

FInland – ranked 11th in the world

The problem is poverty, not failing schools or incompetent teachers. The writer makes an interesting analogy later in the same post:

The reports continue to be all about our failing or “mediocre” schools and incompetent teachers. I like the simple observation made by researchers in the past – if the argument is to be made that U.S. public schools and teachers are failing, then we have huddled all of our incompetent teachers and principals in our urban and rural schools, for they are the ones that struggle or “fail” – this is evidenced in the PISA data I provided and appears at every turn when outcomes are disaggregated based upon child poverty. Or are our urban and rural schools and teachers “failing” or “struggling” any more than our urban or rural police forces? Response times are higher in urban and rural areas (for different reasons), and crime rates are higher in our urban areas, so does this mean that our urban and rural police officers are failures? Can you imagine police unions if we were to erase officer tenure, step ladder structure for pay increases, LIFO, and bust their unions – and then demonize them because they can’t seem to solve the crime problems of our urban areas? Can anyone say value-added modeling for police officers estimating their effects on crime rates during their beat? The difference between police officers and teachers, specifically in this analogy, is that we [teachers] are push-overs, ah-hem, I mean caretakers.

You can't solve a problem unless you understand its causes. The best indicator of academic achievement is zip code. If you took the teachers in an affluent school district and swapped them out with the teachers in a poor school district, do you think they would get better results with the poor kids they'd be teaching? Do you think the kids in the affluent district would begin to fail?

Teachers aren't to blame, and neither are the kids. It's the larger society that is to blame, and insofar as that larger society accepts the Neoliberal conventional wisdom that markets and privatization will solve everything, it is just making things worse. 

Read the entire post. He does some interesting comparisons between public schools, Catholic and Lutheran Schools, and Conservative Christian Schools. 

Jerry Brown on the Common Core

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- Gov. Jerry Brown blasted the notion of government-imposed standards for public schools, saying he opposed efforts from Washington and Sacramento to dictate education policy.

Using "data on a national or state level I think misses the point -- that learning is very individual, very personal," Brown said during an onstage interview with The Atlantic's James Bennet at a Silicon Valley Summit at the Computer History Museum. "It comes back to the teacher and the principal. The leader of the school is by far the most important factor."

When asked if he supported national education standards, Brown said, "No. That's just a form of national control."  (Source)

The goal is to educate our kids, not train them. The goal is to help them become competent human beings, not just competent workers. Doing good work is a part of living a good life, but it's not the most important part, and it should be subordinated to other concerns.

Brown gets this, but I would offer one caveat to his point about principals: Principals can be an important factor (never the most important, IMO) if they are genuine educators, but too often they are not. There are some men and women who are very effective principals and school leaders, but most are not. If you know an experienced teacher, ask them how often they've been in a school where the principal actually helped them to do their job better. 

In contemporary public school systems principals are more often middle managers more worried about test scores and performance numbers than they are about the welfare of their kids or their teachers. They are very often people who started off as teachers but didn't like it, or thought it was too small-time for them. They wanted more money or to be the boss rather than to work with the kids. They too often do not understand what motivates teachers because their own motivations are so different. They too often don't have a clue what the teachers are doing, so they rely on the numbers, and we all know that numbers don't lie, right?

The kids are the most important people in the school--everything about a school should be directed toward giving the kids the resources they need to become competent human beings. The teachers are the second most important people in the shcool, because they are on the front lines working with these kids. Everybody else in the system is there to support the teachers in their work with the kids. More often than not they would do both a favor by just getting out of the way. That's the way it should be, but it isn't. And if there is a problem with public schools these days, that's it. Could we do a better job of putting better trained educators in the classroom. Yes, but that's not what corporate education reform is ppushing for. The reformers want better trainers. 

Learning is something we all want to do; it's something that comes naturally to us. For too many kids "school" is what kills that desire to learn, and it happens around middle school. And a big part of why that happens is that when kids begin to feel that they have their own sense of agency and freedom, they pick up on whether they are there for the system or the system is there for them. And a school regime of teachers and principals obsessing about meeting their numbers sends a pretty clear message about who's there for what. They see that they are being trained to perform for the system. And spirited kids know it's all b.s.

If you are reading this blog, chances are you are someone who did pretty well in school. That means that you were successful in giving the system what it wanted, even if you weren't particularly interested in the subject that you were being taught. You saw, or were made to see, that it was in your self interest to give the system what it demanded of you. You probably grew up in a world where giving the system what it demanded was continuously reinforced at home.

So it might be hard for you to imagine why some kids, especially smart, talented kids  don't do well. "Why don't they apply themselves?," you may ask yourself. Well, why did you? Why did you bother, especially when it came to studying something you weren't particularly interested in? Well, it's probably because you didn't want to disappoint someone who was important to you.

But what if you grew up in a world where learning and academic achievement wasn't important? What if there was no one in your life who was a model for you of having applied himself and succeeed in giving the system what it wanted?  What if there was no one in your life who is living the results of having applied himself and succeeded?  What if there was no one in your life to help you imagine a better future or to give you the support you needed to get there? What if you lived in a world where all your friends thought that school was b.s.? What if since middle school you did poorly on standardized tests, which just reinforced what you already knew--that you and the system didn't match up  well? 

Well, if you're a corporate ed reformer, you don't think about the answers to these questions. It's much easier to blame the teacher for not doing a better job. Because the corporate ed reformer is only interested in measurable results. Poor results = poor teacher. Somebody's got to be held accountable, right? So he looks at the teacher as an assembly line worker, the kid as a widget, and tests as quality control to insure nothing defective is put out on the market. And when the corporate ed reformer thinks about improving the quality of teaching, he doesn't want better educators in the classroom, but better trainers, people who will more effectively train to the test, because the only thing that matters is getting a higher percentage of kids to pass quality control. This is all so dehumanizing, and that is why so many spirited kids hate school and don't learn anything in it. There are far more interesting things to learn on the street. 

 

In Other News about the Common Core . . .

The Pearson Foundation has agreed to pay $7.7 million to settle allegations that the nonprofit broke New York state law while attempting to profit from Common Core-aligned products. An investigation by New York state Attorney general Eric T. Schneiderman revealed the charitable side of Pearson spent years wooing the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in hopes the two would partner in creating Common Core courses. The Pearson Foundation and Gates Foundation joined together in 2011, creating 24 online courses that were then sold to the for-profit side of Pearson for $15.1 million.

As for the $7.7 million settlement, the Pearson Foundation has announced it will donate the money to 100kin10, a company that focuses on developing science, technology, engineering and mathematics education. Interestingly, the Gates Foundation has also pledged $7 million to 100kin10 over the next six years along with several other partners Pearson works with. Clearly, the new standards mean big business and big profits.

America’s most recent education reform, the Common Core State Standards, has divided teachers and parents across the United States. Whether or not the standards mark a step in the right direction for the education system, one thing is for sure. For the first time in American history, businesses are able to freely tap into the K-12 market on a large scale, and they aren’t waiting. (Erin Osborne)

This topic seems to be coming into the public spotlight, and that's a good thing. The Common Core, like the Pearson Foundation, is all about appearing one thing and being substantively something else. The article by Erin Osborne is a very good summary for readers who need background on corporate ed reform and how education is perceived as a "market" within the Neoliberal frame. This kind of con perpetrated by Pearson/Gates was utterly predictable because it's the whole point.

Big business in education isn’t new. Pearson and McGraw-Hill have dominated the textbook market while the College Board, makers of the SAT and Advanced Placement courses, are the veritable gatekeepers to higher education. The entire U.S. education system has been valued at nearly $1.5 trillion, second only to the healthcare industry. As media mogul Rupert Murdoch said after acquiring education company Amplify (previously known as Wireless Generations), “When it comes to K-12 education, we see a $500 billion sector in the U.S. alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed by big breakthroughs that extend the reach of great teaching.”

 Yes, it's all about what's good for the kids. From Seattle Education: 

This spring students, parents, and teachers in New York schools responded to administration of new Common Core tests developed by Pearson Inc. with a general outcry against their length, difficulty, and inappropriate content. Pearson included corporate logos and promotional material in reading passages. Students reported feeling overstressed and underprepared—meeting the tests with shock, anger, tears, and anxiety. Administrators requested guidelines for handling tests students had vomited on. Teachers and principals complained about the disruptive nature of the testing process and many parents encouraged their children to opt out.

Back to Erin Oborne:

Here is the key issue. These companies see success in terms of dollars and profit, not academic success and achievement. Education start-ups fail all the time, including ones backed by the giants like Pearson. Once investors start to see diminishing returns or trouble on the horizon they will pull the plug regardless of how well students may be performing with their product. Vetting new teaching methods for success takes years of research, observation and review. Plenty of businesspeople, big and small, will have profited from Common Core even if all the states move onto the next education reform in five years’ time, but at what cost to students in school today?