Same-Sex Marriage: yes or no? A Hypocritical Confrontation?

You might just recall that someone once suggested, "Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's. Render unto God that which is God's." Following that advice we Americans might really separate Church from State and stop confusing two different situations: civil union and Holy Matrimony. Following the example of other countries we might leave Holy Matrimony up to the individuals concerned and to the (religious) community willing to recognize their bond as such.

Civil union should be solely a secular affair: let it deal with legal responsibilities, property, and privileges of worldly association. Whatever responsibilities and obligations Holy Matrimony entails should remain solely within the community that recognizes it and not involve the State in their enforcement. What the State should enforce is whatever the laws with respect to civil union entail.

Americans, like citizens of many other countries, should be required to go through an independent process of civil union, if they want the legal benefits of civil union for the matrimony their religious (or other) community recognizes.

So what's the argument about? It is little more than a distraction that diverts our attention from the fact that many Churches in the United States have traditionally used their secular influence to dip into the public treasury -- and into the pockets of others outside their congregations -- particularly by avoiding paying taxes, even when their "religious" activities compete with secular businesses. The way things work today, the State grants civil union privileges to the participants in matrimonial ceremonies of some -- but, prejudicially, not all -- religious communities. In the name of justice, that should be stopped. And those privileged denominations should be made to pay taxes besides.

If the Power Player churches who have traditionally exercised secular privileges would be forthright enough to say, "It is a truth of our Faith that those outside our congregation are rightly compelled to render their worldly possessions for our support," we might look less askance at their hypocrisy, even though such has been the Faith of every oppressor humankind has had the misfortune to experience.

For more on State-Church issues see, Religion, Intelligent Design and the Public Schools: serving God to Mammon?
.


Cordially,
-- EGR

The Bigger the Bolus, the Better the Brain: education as Trivial Pursuit

In the name of school reform, millions of students spend more and more of their life swallowing down and regurgitating ever larger masses of "fact." To what end?

If our knowledge of the world distracts us from our knowledge of ourselves, what good is it? Really, other than a university medievalist, who cares that Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor on Christmas Day, A.D. 800? If our abilities at problem-solving enable us to "construct a reality" that is merely self-aggrandizing or self-flattering, what good is it?

Really, other than railroad engineers, who gives a damn about where one train starting in Chicago and traveling east at sixty miles per hour meets another starting in New York and traveling west at eighty miles per hour? In and of themselves, neither answer nor process nor "deep meaning" has any meaning at all.


To examine these issues further, see KNOWLEDGE IS GOOD: some misgivings


Cordially
---- WAC

What Does a Consensus Mean, Anyway?

It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. – Baudelaire

We might be inclined to agree with Baudelaire. In many situations, people caught up in the enthusiasm of a crowd or hypnotized by the rhetoric of a ceremony claim to be in agreement with one another -- and, they often fervently believe it to be so. The bride and groom at a wedding ceremony may agree to "love, honor and obey." But question them privately afterwards and you will find discrepancies between what each of them explains is their understandings of those words. If no discrepancies initially turn up, ask them after the honeymoon is over.

However, what Baudelaire seems to overlook is that an agreement is often little more than an expression of concession or acquiescence. Faced with a potential impasse, parties may make concessions or acquiesce in a formulation of mutual responsibilities that none really find optimal.

Why would they do such a thing? Because, by conducting a cost-benefit analysis parties to a negotiation find out that concession or acquiescence is less costly than disrupting relationships with their opponents by, say, walking away from the bargaining situation. You don’t sever relations with someone you might need to depend on in the future, even if, for the moment, you might strongly disagree with them.

To examine these issues further, see The Indeterminacy of Consensus


Cordially
--- EGR

Getting Down to Facts: can we avoid making assumptions?

A host of philosophers, scientists and scholars have long trekked after a mirage: presuppositionless knowledge, that is, knowledge not based on any kind of assumption. However, because we humans are limited beings with bounded capacities, constrained in space and time, whatever we believe about what we know rests upon important epistemological presuppositions.

These are not assumptions of the ordinary kinds that we commonly discuss. Rather, they are things we take for granted unless something unusual, even bizarre happens. Examples of epistemological presuppositions are assumptions that our senses, memories and understandings do not majorly mislead us; that they are at the very least, somewhat consistent.

Facts are knowledge. But what is knowledge? Knowledge is that honorific title we give to those beliefs we feel meet whatever criteria we are committed to for distinguishing what is true from what is false. This could range from a scientific procedure to a reading from a holy book, depending upon what it is we are committed to.


To examine these issues further, see Questionable Assumptions in Social Decision Making


Cordially
--- EGR

Looking for a Principalship? Come “Reform” a School!

The Philadelphia Inquirer of Wednesday, February 18, 2009, reported that the superintendent of the School District of Philadephia intended to “reform” 30 to 35 of its “worst-performing” schools by shutting them down and possibly outsourcing their administration and teaching staff to whoever want to try to make a go of it.

Does anyone remember the great fiasco of the 1970’s and 80’s called performance contracting? Has anyone ever heard of “grab the money and run?”

Aside from the School Board’s avoiding its responsibilities under the contract with the teachers’ union, does anyone think pumping fresh blood into cadavers will bring about their resurrection?

But just think of the job opportunities – there will be quite a few!

Just think again!

During the period of my employment with the School District of Philadelphia, 1965 – 1992, recruiters invariably embellished or downright misrepresented job conditions to seduce new staff into the schools, particularly after 1970. Administrators as well as teachers suffered a rude awakening when problems came up; they were offered little support from a governing body who could not tolerate even a mention of any of “elephants” that inhabited the boardroom, for example, political hacks receiving salaries as “ghost” teachers; a high level of violence in many schools; theft of equipment right under the noses of the “security” staff, contracts with local universities in exchange for quickie administrative certifications, etc.

School administrators, whose top officer had no experience as a principal, even joined the Teamster’s Union to protect themselves! ( to little avail since they were reluctant to take any action, even when they were being punished by forced transfer for resisting the whims of the Superintendent.)

School reform is unlikely to come from the top down, especially when it is taken for granted that the political structures that really govern the district are not to be disturbed.

But when is “reform” really needed? And possible?

To examine these issues further,
see The Need for and Possibilities of Educational Reform

Cordially
-- EGR

Maintaining Safe Schools: How? Metal Detectors? Zero Tolerance?

Metal detectors alone will not keep the school safe. People can find ways around them. If some schools are so bad that zero tolerance is necessary, we suggest that the central office should consider closing them entirely.

Just as Erasmus of Rotterdam suggested that a pupil who really requires corporal punishment probably doesn’t belong in school, we suggest that a school which really needs zero tolerance policies probably shouldn’t have children.


We propose the following criteria for distinguishing desirable from undesirable risks in schools: we think schoolteachers and administrators can approve

1) intelligent risks for which there is a
2) reasonable likelihood of success from an application of
3) realistic effort, and in which there is an
4) acceptable loss if failure does happen, a
5) charitable opportunity to recover, and a
6) worthy reward when they do succeed.

To examine these issues further, see Safe Schools: weighing the options

Cordially
-- EGR

$100 Billion for Ejikashun: Fix What Ain’t Broken and Break the Rest?

The New York Times of Tuesday, February 17, 2009, reported (p. A1) that our new education czar had $100 billion at his disposal to do something with. If he wants to show something for the money he had better put it into repairing old school buildings and building new ones; or feeding kids who come to school hungry.

Any other goal, for example, “reforming education,” “producing effective teachers,” “preparing students for lifelong learning,” “strengthening the connection between school and the world of work,” is a wild bet on a mostly empty slogans. Pursue such goals and damage will result. Not only will there be wild disagreement as to whether they have been achieved, but the credibility of educational planners, already low, will suffer yet more skepticism.

If real and necessary improvement is wanted, then what has to be done first is to recognize what isn’t the matter with public schools – they are generally far better in most ways than the ones I attended a half century ago.

The so-called “problems” of public schools are the consequence of misplaced expectations and the carefully incubated dementia (called “teacher education”) that brings public educators of all sorts to believe two major falsehoods: 1) Science is on their side; and 2) happy faces and high expectations bestow them with Omnipotence.



To examine these issues further, see Public School Reform: Mired in Metaphor

Cordially
-- EGR

Hard Wired Choice?

Intelligence, wisdom, circumspection, delay of gratification, strategic skill: it looks like it all might be a matter of neural growth. What, then, about our practices of reward and punishments for the choices people make?

Or, to take it from the other end, what if supporting healthy development in children is crucial? Can we continue to pretend that one person’s poverty is not our general concern?

But maybe we are just mechanisms, generating text and uttering sounds, living in the delusion that we are in control. We do what we do and we don’t what we don’t. End of discussion. Permanently.

To review the article which prompted these conjectures , see Separate Neural Systems Value Immediate and Delayed Monetary Rewards

For practical application, see PAIN VERSUS ANGUISH:
Is There No Need For Corporal Punishment?


Cordially
-- EGR

How to Plan, Set Up and Run a Conference

Is your organization thinking of running a conference? And have you been “honored” with the task of planning, setting it up and running it? If panic is your first thought, calm down. Help is at hand.

If on the other hand you think, “No problem,” you have a problem: hubris. Unless you are very experienced and somewhat lucky, something will come up that makes the situation much less than pleasant.

The two basic rules of the Universe that govern conference planning, etc. are

a. Murphy’s Law – If something can go wrong, it will; and

b. The Lost Utopia Rule -- you can’t satisfy everyone, ever.

But you can still get a pretty good conference going, despite these axioms.

To examine these issues further, see HOW TO RUN A CONFERENCE: 
Headache Relief for Planners

Cordially
-- EGR

Still Rushing to Nowhere; Still Competing for ...?

Two years after the 2008 TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study), little of educational note has changed. Particularly missing is the cataclysmic impact that study was supposed to predict for our society.

US eighth graders (average 508) were beaten out on math tests by eighth graders from South Korea (597) , Singapore (593), Hong Kong (572) , Japan (570), England (513), and Russia (512). So, what did TIMSS top-rankers win? And what did the U.S. lose? The greatest damage done in the United States has been by people, bankers and speculators, who, you can bet, would themselves be top-rankers on the TIMMS.

If you worried about these scores, did you ask yourself, “What do these numbers mean?” Anybody who claims to know whether they justified anything but the mildest concern – along the lines of “Will my tomatoes yield better next Summer?” – is bluffing.

Of course you will hear the eternal, “Down the road,” or “in the future,” or “in the long run this lack of (what?) could hurt us.” Chicken Little with a crystal ball. Where was this crystal ball when the economy was falling apart?

To examine these issues further, see U.S. Students Reported to ‘Lag’ in the TIMSS: another bulletin from Chicken Little?


Cordially
-- EGR

Specialist Positions: does your school really need a kluge-maker?

A very common misconception in many organizations is that creating a special position means getting something special done: a confusion of role with function. Clearly role and function are not the same. A principal who picks up a piece of trash does not thereby become the janitor. But not everything, if anything, a principal does is some special kind of “principal-activity” that couldn’t be done by anyone else.

Public school systems tend to be top-heavy with administrator roles whose functions could often be better served by distributing them among staff closer to the arena of action. Only political taboos would be violated.

To examine these issues further, see
On the Viability of a Curriculum Leadership Role: avoiding confusion of role and function

Cordially
-- EGR

“Sacred Values” in US Public Schools: pretending there is no conflict.

In a pluralistic, democratic society, important values will be frequently thrust into conflict with one another. It is here that the question, "Whose important values?" arises. The desire to dodge this question, generates avoidance behavior of the following sort -- I give slogans typically associated with such strategies --:

a. slow recognition, if any, that core values clash -- "We all want what's best for our kids!";
b. methods of reckoning and comparison that gloss over or miss differences among options -- "Preparing students to be life-long learners";
c. "dissonance-reduction" strategies to cope with values clashes they do recognize -- "A manifestation of a disability" --;
d. decision-evasion tactics such as buckpassing, procrastination or obfuscation -- restructuring the system, re-"visioning" outcomes, or reconceptualizing purposes.

Are schools unique in dealing with such problems in such ways? No. All large or pluralistic organizations do likewise.

Controversies over sex education, evolution, and religious symbols represent such conflicts among different constituencies of the school community. There is a deep issue here: sacred values from different communities may be incommensurable.

Just as it makes no sense to ask how many pints there are in a mile; or how many pounds there are in an acre, so does it approach nonsense to ask, "How many First Holy Communions are equivalent to a Briss?" or "How many dollars is salvation worth?"


To examine these issues further, see Trading-Off "Sacred" Values: 
Why Public Schools Should Not Try to "Educate"

Cordially
-- EGR

Cloning Citizens: mission accomplished … mostly.

The main product of the newsmedia has been and continues to be … anxiety. – Eric Sevareid.

Remember the fuss raised by religious and political personalities (generously referred to as “leaders”) when cloning first made it appearance in the media? Why has it died down? Who worries about cloning anymore now that new forms of life have been created in the lab?

We have been cloning “educated” minds for millennia. What do religious leaders want? Doctrinal clones. What do political leaders want? Political clones. What do ethnic leaders want? Ethnic clones. What do parents want? Clones of themselves.

What do educators lust after? Cultural, informational, and behavioral clones. Even "deviant" or “revolutionary” educators try to self-replicate: self-actualized clones, EST clones, inner child clones, Iron John clones. And how those miserable humans do resist! In spite of dungeon, fire, and sword. In spite of morality, patriotism, and rationality!

Forget Rousseau; educators look to clone. We pursue not the noble savage, nor do we indulge the feral child. We clone; not, genetically (yet), but much more effectively: mentally, intellectually, emotionally. Our cloning is the incarnation of our “ideals” into the recalcitrant flesh of homo sapiens.

To examine these issues further, see Cloning Student Voice

Cordially
-- EGR

School Improvement: Will Parental Involvement Help?

They say that it takes a village to raise a child. To be what? Village idiot? Village prostitute? Village drunk? Village ne'er do well? These are not failures of village education but roles integral to certain kinds of community life. Without the fallen, the at-risk, the tempted, those we celebrate as moral leaders would have little to do in a village.

Comfortable educators purveying their wares to an increasingly comfortable clientele sentimentalize beyond historical recognition the outcomes of village life. These outcomes were usually not very good for the majority of village dwellers.

The modern school is desperately seeking the glue to hold it together. What were previously the byproducts of achievement -- self-esteem and other good feelings -- are now directly pursued, independently of any concerns for merit. But there is a consequence: the loss of self-esteem and other good feelings as motivators. If you can get the pay-off without doing the work, why do the work?

We have seen a great unwashed skepticism become the moral substrate of our society: Everything is not only suspected of selfish contamination, but is often celebrated for it. "Deferred gratification" -- the driving force of the famous Protestant Ethic -- is now an oxymoron; indeed, a threat to the very economic stability of our credit-card civilization.

Involving parents in schooling sounds positive at face value, but before calling for a mass parental march into schools, should we not examine the values parents bring with them to determine if school-parent partnerships are really a good idea?

To examine these issues further, see School and Family: A Partnership for Educational Success?

Cordially

Are “Best” Practices Really the Best? What is the evidence?

Imagine walking into a Cadillac dealer and saying, “Don’t waste my time with long-winded explanations, just tell me: what is the best car?” If the dealer responded, “The best car is a Cadillac,” would you be surprised?

Educators are more subtle. Ask an eight grade science teacher what the best teaching method is and she will likely reply, “For what kind of student.?” You pull out your list of pigeonholes and say something like, “A middle class, eighth-grade, male student not in special ed.” If the teacher responded, “The best method is the one I use,” would you be surprised?

Interestingly enough, you will occasionally get the reply, “The best methods are ones we not permitted to use in this school.” This happens especially in foreign language or math where parents or school board members insist that the kids be taught as they, twenty to fifty years earlier, were taught; educational research, or whatever, be damned.

Why do we lust after “best” practices? Why not be satisfied with ones that are “generally good,” or “adequate” and the like. After all, to be literally a “best practice” something has to be proven to be better than all alternatives for a particular kind of student, with a particular kind of learning history, in a particular schooling environment studying a particular subject.

Consider this: if there were only 5 possible kinds of students, with 5 possible kinds of learning history, with 5 possible kinds of learning environment, studying one of 5 possible subjects, then for a single subject we would have to test and compare 5x5x5 = 125 possible situations to determine the best of the 125. Being too costly and time consuming, such research is not being done. Given parental concern that their own kids always get the best the school has to offer (Test new methods on someone else’s kids!), it is unlikely it will ever be done.

If you are interested in pursuing this further, see

Cannonfodder: Preparing Teachers for Public Schools

-- EGR

Teachers: to make things clearer, talk less, much less and, instead, …!

In the course of his or her professional preparation, every teacher has had the experience of having to listen to a long lecture on the evils of lecturing. Lecturing is a high status activity: not only do professors do it almost exclusively; but, generally so do teachers down through middle school.

Why do teachers at all levels talk so much? Isn't a picture "worth a thousand words"? Not only do teachers tend to underutilize visuals in their teaching in the middle and high schools, but university faculty (and students, too) tend to react to the use of visual aids with hardly disguised condescension. Rapid-fire loquaciousness is mistaken for profundity of thought. Lips move and heads bob and understanding remains untested.

We are trapped in antique metaphor. For example, when we understand something, we say that we "see" it. As teachers we chatter away to make things "transparent" to our students. We take joy in a "bright" student, who is a "clear" thinker. But these visual metaphors are misleading, the rubble of ancient philosophies. Something else is needed.

To examine these issues further, see The Mind’s Eye and Pedagogical Practice

Cordially
-- EGR

Politics in Schools: does it affect productivity?

Politics is practically inevitable in most organizations.

Politics is the accommodation of individual interests by means not normally sanctioned within an organization. Needs often arise which cannot be handled within given rules and practices, so "adjustments" are often made with an eye to "discretion" and the avoidance of "setting a precedent."

But productivity, too, is far from being an absolute good. Productivity narrowly conceived and overenthusiastically pursued, particularly where resources are scarce, may cripple important organizational capacities.

To examine these issues further, see Productivity, Politics and Hypocrisy in American Public Education


Cordially
-- EGR

Perpetual School Reform: an American Insanity?

“You can always make something better,” says the guy who doesn’t have to pay the bill.

Efforts for perpetual reform rests on the belief that all good things are compatible: that ever more of everything desirable is sustainable. Overlooked is the possibility that good things may be competitive: to pursue one may undermine our ability to obtain another. Yet most people can understand that you can't drive fast and at the same time save gas -- the shorter trip in time may not offset the gas wasted in fighting wind resistance. Athletes know that you can't build up for extreme strength and endurance at the same time.

The basic mechanism of perpetual reform is easy to understand. It takes a disregard for history and unending complaint about the present situation proclaimed in newsmedia much more concerned to attract the greatest attention than to report fact.

The costs of the present, since they are with us, look so much worse than the costs of any future alternatives, which, being future costs have the benefit, at least, of not existing.

The benefits of the present, taken for granted and oh! so boring!, look much less attractive than the benefits of some alternative future. And so we blunder into yet another here-today-gone-tomorrow “revolution.”

So it goes with teacher certification efforts. On the one hand we hear much talk about the need to upgrade teacher training. This concern to "improve the quality of teachers" generally comes from those seen as having a “vested interest” in extending and complicating the certification process, e.g. teachers' unions, universities, professors of education and certification organizations. In the scandal mongering that characterizes many editorial columns "vested interest" easily becomes "selfish desire to exploit" therefore something any upright citizen ought to oppose and undo.

Yet this undoing is blindly pursued by school boards who, for example, facing teacher shortages, look for ways to put warm bodies in classrooms. Or, by the legislators who assist the downgrading of teacher preparation by allowing, even recommending, alternative routes into teaching. Seldom, however, do the media suggest that such school boards or legislatures are merely self-serving.

To examine these issues further, see The Dynamics of Teacher Certification: mythologies of competition

Cordially

-- EGR

GoodSpin: The Basic Rules of Public School Hype

Because public educators must deal not only with their students and colleagues, but also with parents, reporters and assorted busy-bodies, in other words, with the wishful thinking, the ill-informed and the near-delusional, they, the educators, tend to adapt that maxim so eloquently articulated by Thumper's mother in the movie, Bambi: "If you can't say something nice, don't say it at all." In the name of motivation, tact or good publicity, we become casual liars.

There is, in addition, an aspect of advertising culture that has been picked up by the hyperbolists of American public education: the reversal rule, parts A and B

The Reversal Rule, part A is this: if it's true but unpleasant, treat it as false. Better yet, don't even mention it.

The Reversal Rule, part B: if it's false but pleasant, say it anyway.

Thus rather than recognize the ancient maxim, "Impossibility negates obligation," we are encumbered with "All children can learn!" or "No child left behind!" The santimoniousness of this blather is supposed to make us forget, perhaps, that the concerned public servants who have foisted off over-exacting special education legislation on the schools are the very ones who have reneged on their promises for adequate resources.

To examine these issues further, see What Works? Under What Conditions? And Who Really Cares?


Cordially,
-- EGR