Jerry Kirkpatrick's Blog

Peddlers of Ideas

2008-07-17T13:18:00.000-07:00

Teachers are peddlers of knowledge and ideas. Well, that’s what they would be in a free market in education and that’s how they should think of themselves in today’s government-run and government-controlled system. In a free market in education teachers would be sales reps for their schools. Some might even be owner-entrepreneurs who hang out their shingles and then must recruit, i.e., sell,

Caterpillars into Butterflies

2008-06-13T09:32:00.000-07:00

I don’t know where I’ve been for the past several decades but I had never heard the expression “turning caterpillars into butterflies” used in relation to teaching. That is, until this spring when my daughter’s softball coaches used it several times to explain their goal of coaching twelve eight-and-under girls. Add to this the coaches’ commitment to “no child left behind”—meaning every girl on

Rules vs. Principles

2008-05-16T10:41:00.000-07:00

In chapter 4 of Montessori, Dewey, and Capitalism, I wrote: “Rules are commands to act or not act a certain way. Obedience may be rewarded; disobedience is certainly punished.” The context was the regulation of child and student behavior and my point was that “rules have no place in a theory of nurture.” Rules call for obedience to authority. Principles, on the other hand, teach abstract thought

Because the Stakes Are So Small

2008-04-14T09:11:00.000-07:00

In academia there is an adage that says disputes among professors are bitter precisely because the stakes are so small. The statement has been attributed to various people, including Henry Kissinger and Woodrow Wilson. In print the more general conception is known as Issawi’s law of social motion, specifically: “In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the

Dewey in Context

2008-03-16T16:03:00.000-07:00

In my book Montessori, Dewey, and Capitalism I treat favorably a number of ideas from philosopher John Dewey, which may come as a surprise to admirers of Ayn Rand. The key to understanding why I do so is to see Dewey as an Aristotelian who rejects intrinsicism without resorting to skepticism or subjectivism. During his years at Columbia University, Dewey came under the influence of Aristotelian

Postmodernism and the Next Failure of Socialism

2008-02-21T06:06:00.000-08:00

Socialism, and more broadly collectivism, as Ayn Rand pointed out, died as a moral ideal in 1945. As a practical ideal, socialism died with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Yet socialism and the principle that government might is required to make right is still with us. How can that be? Answer: epistemological errors of Enlightenment thinkers, specifically their failure to identify the

On Judging the Quality of Today’s Students

2008-01-25T09:22:00.000-08:00

A favorite pastime of today’s teachers, especially college professors, is the trashing of their students. “My students are terrible,” is the common complaint. “They can’t write, they can’t calculate, and they can’t think. They are woefully ignorant! They just don’t measure up to the standards of the good old days when I was a student.” And those “good old days,” depending on the age of the

Sound or Independent Judgment?

2007-12-26T08:31:00.001-08:00

Sound judgment means sensible—i.e., rational or considered, not impulsive—decision making. Many parents and teachers value this process as a primary skill that children and students should possess upon reaching adulthood. In contrast, independent judgment, which presupposes sensible decision making, is not often cited as a valued goal of either education or adulthood, yet this is the personality

"It's Just Being Turned into a Business"

2007-11-26T14:09:00.000-08:00

This lament is often heard today about medicine and education, among other fields. Business, however, is the last thing medicine and education have been turned into. Bureaus of the government would be a more accurate description. Why the confusion between bureaucracy and business? The simplest answer is that most people do not understand the difference between the two. A bureaucracy, as Ludwig

The Ethics and Epistemology of Peer Review

2007-10-24T07:18:00.000-07:00

In a previous post, I argued that academic peer review is a gatekeeping process brought about by the post-World War II growth of government involvement in research and scholarship. Though it may control quality in a narrow, conventional sense, one significant consequence of this process is the suppression of innovation. The present post takes a look at the underlying ethics and epistemology of

Go Fish!

2007-09-26T19:06:00.000-07:00

No, not the card game. I occasionally use this phrase—he or she needs to go fish—as metaphor for what some so-called problem children in elementary schools should be allowed to do. My source for the phrase is Daniel Greenberg’s Sudbury Valley School (1, 2, 3), which is located on a ten-acre estate in Massachusetts. One of the essential features of the school is that the children, ages four to

The Dangerous Admiration of BS

2007-08-30T10:48:00.000-07:00

Why is BS’ing admired, almost to the point of being “cuddly and warm,” as philosopher Harry Frankfurt put it, whereas lying is considered morally repugnant? Frankfurt examined BS in his 2005 monograph On Bullshit (BS) and distinguished it from lying. The liar, Frankfurt argued, is focused on facts so he or she may state the opposite, but the BS’er is an entertainer or artist who uses words and

Curiosity for Subtle Detail

2007-07-27T06:26:00.000-07:00

As a young man I accepted the wisdom of doctors and their prescriptions without question, never bothering to learn the names of the drugs they ordered. After reading Jerome Groopman’s book How Doctors Think, I am not so sure I want to go back to a doctor! The ten to fifteen percent error rate in diagnosis and similar percentage in the misreading of x-rays and MRIs does not give one confidence in

Privilege, Peer Review, and Piracy: Q & A

2007-06-26T05:38:00.000-07:00

Three recent posts produced several questions and comments. Follow the Government Intervention. In “The Market Gives Privilege to No One” I stated that certain groups of professionals do not usually work weekends and that the computer industry’s “24/7” indicates the ultimate in free-market service. “But I work weekends,” protested one doctor and one professor and shock was expressed that I was

The Market Function of Piracy

2007-05-21T09:37:00.000-07:00

In marketing the most effective way to introduce new products is the free sample. In 1978 Lever Brothers spent $15 million ($47.55 million in today’s currency) delivering a free sample of Signal Mouthwash to two-thirds of all US households. The strategy was a success and the product remained on the market well into the 1990s. The significance of the free sample is product trial; it gets the

Describe, Don't Evaluate

2007-05-03T15:35:00.000-07:00

“Superlatives belong to the marketplace,” says David Ogilvy, founder of the Ogilvy and Mather advertising agency, not in “serious advertisement; they lead readers to discount the realism of every claim.” The same could be said about praise given to others: superlatives should come from the recipient of the compliment. What Ogilvy means is that describing what a product can do for the customer,

Drop Errors and the Trouble with Peer Review

2007-04-11T12:31:00.000-07:00

In product development there are two kinds of errors. A “go” error occurs when the green light is given to a product that eventually fails. The Edsel, a $250 million write-off by the Ford Motor Company in 1959, is one example. The “drop” error occurs when an idea that could have been highly profitable is eliminated from further consideration. How do we know that the idea could have been

The Market Gives Privilege to No One

2007-03-13T08:42:00.000-07:00

“Bankers’ hours” is an old phrase that actually reflects monopolistic privilege. The 10AM to 3PM that banks formerly were open to serve customers was made possible by government regulation and the consequent lack of competition to force bankers to be more available when customers needed them. With modest deregulation (and the electronic bookkeeping that deregulation encouraged) banks today are

Why Does Capitalism Need To Be Defended?

2007-02-15T17:39:00.000-08:00

I admit that I have not heard this question in precisely that form. After the hardcover edition of my book In Defense of Advertising: Arguments from Reason, Ethical Egoism, and Laissez-Faire Capitalism was published, I did hear the question this way: Why does advertising need to be defended? As advertising is the point man and product of capitalism, the two questions are intimately related. The

Healthy and Unhealthy Competition

2007-01-21T07:31:00.000-08:00

Education and social critic Alfie Kohn is an exhaustive researcher and engaging writer. I have not read all of his eleven original books, but I do highly recommend these two: Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes and Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason. The titles and subtitles make clear his

Does Subliminal Advertising Exist?

2007-01-01T06:46:00.001-08:00

Starting a new blog—and especially since the paperback edition of my book defending advertising has just been published—I suppose I should begin with a post about advertising. So let me deal with a question that frequently arises: “What about subliminal advertising?,” to which I typically respond, “What about it? It doesn’t exist!” That’s the short answer. Some elaboration is required. The term