The Burning Schoolhouse

Peterson on the Ed Schools

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Roney) — Sun, 05 May 2024 20:58:00 +0000

You want the truth? Resentful radical leftists took over the Faculties of Education in the 1960s.

Now they control the entire K-12 system and half (half!) of all state budgets.

The Ed schools are among the worst faculties in the increasingly demented universities. Every bit of the "research" they have conducted in the last sixty years was a lie: whole word reading, multiple intelligences, self-esteem. Nothing but destructive.

Their students are by and large lazy, unintelligent, uninterested and ideologically captured.

The worst of them become administrators.

These are the people to whom we give our children, and much of our tax money. And we've done it for four generations, with no end in sight.

The Faculties of Education should be eliminated. They have done a worse than terrible job, and they are destroying our culture. Intentionally. Starting with your kids.

Jordan Peterson on X (Twitter)

All true; I agree 100% and have been saying the same thing for some years. We must abolish the Ed Schools. Having graduated from one should be a disqualification, not a qualification, as a teacher. They deliberately teach how to teach badly, so that any homeschooler can actually produce better results than their "professionals." And this is measurable.

The Need for Smaller Class Sizes

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Roney) — Sun, 10 Mar 2024 12:10:00 +0000

A new study suggests that classroom size does not affect student results: smaller classrooms are not better. But this has been known for years. Many previous studies have shown the same. It is an eternal surprise only because teachers’ unions eternally assert the opposite.

They do so, I imagine, because a larger class demands the lecture format, whereas a small enough class can be run as a seminar, a group discussion.

The currently fashionable education philosophy, “constructivism,” holds that truth is not a constant, there is no objective truth. Knowledge is “constructed” in groups, making the seminar approach mandatory. If the group decides that China is in Europe, then it is in Europe. If they decide the sun goes around the Earth, then the sun goes around the Earth.

Constructivism does not account for what happens if groups in contact with one another arrive at different conclusions. Might makes right seems the inevitable, necessary approach: you pass a law or fight a war and force submission.

This is how fascism works. And this is how our schools currently work. Increasingly, under the influence of the schools and constructivism, this is how our society works.

The attraction for the teaching tribe, however, is that running a seminar takes no effort on their part. There is no need for them to either actually know anything about the subject, or know how to explain it. They just get to sit in judgement over the conclusions the students come up with in their seminar. And on what basis can they judge, given that there is no truth? The only possibility is to object if any group comes to an opinion that differs from that of the teacher. Meaning the teacher has no responsibilities, but gets to be the absolute dictator in the classroom.

It's a good life, as long as the money keeps pouring in.

The Joy of Learning

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Roney) — Sun, 15 May 2022 14:48:00 +0000

Remarks from a Beaches-East York All-Candidates Meeting on May 12, 2022:

I have spent my life in and around education. You’d think by now I would have learned something.

More than that, I’m a father. Education matters to me deeply.

Simply spending more money on schools is not much help.

As of 2022, Ontario spends $14,821 per pupil. That’s in line with other provinces, more than the US, more than Finland or Korea or Singapore, all of which do better on the OECD’s measures of student success.

Yet the schools are in crisis.

Why do the rich send their children to private schools? Why do private schools consistently get better results with less money? Why do homeschoolers get better results?

The most urgent matter is to get Critical Theory out of the schools, and keep it out.

New Blue has been the leader in alerting us to this issue. Every other party endorsed Bill 67 on second reading, and Bill 67 would actually mandate Critical Theory in our schools and colleges at every level.

Aside from destroying civil society, Critical Theory makes education itself meaningless. If you believe there is no objective truth, there is nothing to teach, and nothing to learn. Everyone just makes up whatever they want to believe, and tries to impose it on others.

Or their students.

This is the emergency. But over the longer term, the way to improve education is to introduce competition.

New Blue wants tax credits to allow more parents to choose their children’s education.

Since at least the early 20th century, our public schools have not been designed to produce excellence. They have been designed to produce workers for industry. The rich can sent their kids to private schools that teach leadership, and this perpetuates class divisions.

Most of the work of my own online academy is teaching students the skills the public schools will not teach.

We need to level this playing field.

Could we not fix the public system? To some extent, no doubt; but this will take more time, tears, and sweat. The forces against this are entrenched and powerful. In the meantime, too many young minds will be wasted.

And even if we can, school choice is needed in a pluralistic society.

Our founders and our constitution understood this. Diversity is our strength. So we have the separate school system, originally one system for Catholics, and another for Protestants.

But two systems are hardly adequate any longer. They are laughably inadequate. We need to extend equal rights to other faiths and life philosophies. Values are the core of education, and parents must be able to pass their values on to the next generation. This is what parenting is about.

Let’s bring the joy of true learning to the schools.

Shut Up and Think for Yourself

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Roney) — Thu, 25 Nov 2021 21:01:00 +0000

Christina Wyman has written a piece for NBC decrying parents who want to interfere with their children’s education. She laments that “parents think they have the right to control teaching and learning because their children are the ones being educated.” “It’s sort of like entering a surgical unit thinking you can interfere with an operation simply because the patient is your child.” After all, “Teaching, too, is a science. Unless they’re licensed and certified, parents aren’t qualified to make decisions about curricula.”

This is eleven different kinds of wrong. It is wrong on every point. And not list a little wrong on them.

To begin with, overseeing their children’s education is the primary duty of parents.

"The role of parents in education is of such importance that it is almost impossible to provide an adequate substitute." The right and the duty of parents to educate their children are primordial and inalienable. – Catechism of the Catholic Church

Wyman cites the analogy of medicine. Fine. Here the patient has the right to choose their own doctor, and then to refuse any given treatment—for themselves and for their child. Let it be so in education. Let parents choose the school and curriculum.

And make the teachers liable to be sued for malpractice, as doctors can be.

I’m good with that.

But unlike medicine, teaching is not a science. It is not evidence-based. There is no empirical—which is to say, scientific—evidence that certified teachers teach better than a random person off the street. In fact, the evidence shows the opposite. Those who are homeschooled do better than those who come up through the public schools on standardized tests and in university—literally, then, a random member of the public can do better. Those who attend private schools, where teachers do not have to hold professional qualifications, also do better. Sending your child to a “qualified teacher” is the worst available option.

Wyman goes on to assert that “An educator’s primary goal is to teach students to think.” This is an odd thing to say to justify refusing parents the right to think about their children’s schooling. The public schools deliberately repress this, and were designed to do so in the early 20th century. One of the great attractions to private schools is that they, unlike the public schools, do teach students how to think. That means teaching them philosophy, logic, rhetoric, formal debating. Subjects definitive of the private schools, and rarely seen in public schools. It would mean teaching using the Socratic Method. What public school does?

The question: is Wyman that stupid, or that corrupt?

And how stupid or corrupt are our politicians if they accept this?

Root and STEM

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Roney) — Thu, 04 Nov 2021 18:55:00 +0000

When I taught in China back in the early 90s, I was appalled to learn that the university had no Department of Humanities. Purely a mechanistic view of the cosmos and of human life, it seemed. When the Berlin Wall fell, the countries of Eastern Europe understood the problem: their scholars rushed to the West to get a grounding in the Humanities.

I am alarmed to see that Humanities is now also no longer taught in high schools in Tennessee. A list of subject areas ESL students must be prepared for gives Language Arts, Math, Science, and Social Science.

A disease is spreading, and it is deadly. It is deadly not just to democracy, but to civilization itself.

If our culture were sane, Humanities would be the entire high school curriculum.

After the basic skills of Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic, taught to mastery in elementary school, the Humanities is the one thing everyone needs to study. It is the reason and grounding for everything else. If you do not pass it on, individuals despair and civilization dies.

Today, we waste our students’ time for four to six years, years when they are full of energy and desperate to learn. Many turn off at just this point.

Math? It is a common observation, a truism, that we never use our high school algebra, trigonometry, or calculus again. So what is the justification for teaching it? Geometry would be useful—to teach logic. But it is never presented in those terms; just as a set of axioms that obviously do not relate to the real world.

Science as taught in the schools is the antithesis of science. It is taught as a body of knowledge; stuff to memorize. This specific knowledge, taught as certain in high school, is probably false and will probably be shown by science to be false in time. Much of it is already known to be false while the textbook is still in circulation. The essence of science is to doubt you know anything, and to test everything; it is the scientific method. That is not taught. If experiments are done, the result is always predetermined. Anyone genuinely likely to excel in science is only likely to be turned off it in high school.

Language Arts? The grammar of English should have already been learned in elementary school. As to other languages, if it is a matter of learning to speak them—our current emphasis—the classroom is the worst place to do so. The place to learn a language is by speaking it regularly, something the classroom is designed to prevent. Language, when taught as a Humanity, is an exercise in logic: the old grammar-translation method. It is no longer taught in such terms.

Social Science? A mathematician back in the fifties made the observation that anything that has ever been discovered by the Social Sciences is either trivial, or it is wrong. This is still true, and will forever be true. Rather than adding to our knowledge, the social sciences have subtracted from it, by introducing serious errors to the popular mind. Human beings are not objects, and cannot be studied as objects. Even if this were possible, it would be morally offensive. And teaching Social Science is therefore teaching immorality.

The wealthy and the upper classes pay huge sums to educate their own children at private schools that do concentrate on the Humanities: on logic, philosophy, rhetoric, debate, history, classical literature. They know what they are doing. The British Empire was built on the quality of its private schools. The modern public school systems of North America were intentionally designed, in the early twentieth century, to produce cogs for the industrial machine. What they teach is submission and acceptance. The Humanities teach leadership; for they teach how to think. As Confucius said, “a superior man is not a tool.” Without the Humanities, the schools are turning out workers, meant as a means, not an end.

The world may need more STEM. But the problem with STEM is that whatever is taught today is obsolete tomorrow. To teach it at the high school level is a waste of time. Even to teach it later, at university, when specialization is possible, is probably too soon. It needs to be taught continually, over one’s professional career. Something now entirely possible, with distance education.

But what is needed even more than STEM, and all the more so in times of rapid change, is minds that are adaptable, have initiative, and know the ultimate goal.

The TED Commandments

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Roney) — Mon, 10 May 2021 23:34:00 +0000

TED Talks is reviving the vital art of the lecture. People commonly think that lectures are boring. That is because we've lost the art of lecturing.

Each prospective TED speaker is send these ten "TED Commandments." A decent guide for any lecturer. This is how to make a lecture interesting.

Thou Shalt Not Simply Trot Out thy Usual Shtick

Thou Shalt Dream a Great Dream, or Show Forth a Wondrous New Thing, Or Share Something Thou Hast Never Shared Before

Thou Shalt Reveal thy Curiosity and Thy Passion

Thou Shalt Tell a Story

Thou Shalt Freely Comment on the Utterances of Other Speakers for the Skae of Blessed Connection and Exquisite Controversy

Thou Shalt Not Flaunt thine Ego. Be Thou Vulnerable. Speak of thy Failure as well as thy Success.

Thou Shalt Not Sell from the Stage: Neither thy Company, thy Goods, thy Writings, nor thy Desparate need for Funding; Lest Thou be Cast Aside into Outer Darkness.

Thou Shalt Remember all the while: Laughter is Good.

Thou Shalt Not Read thy Speech.

Thou Shalt Not Steal the Time of Them that Follow Thee

Their Truth

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Roney) — Fri, 19 Mar 2021 17:26:00 +0000

At the supermarket checkout, I saw the cover of People magazine had a photo of Prince Harry and Megan Markle, with the heading “Our Truth.” (If I recall correctly, it was “Our Lives, Our Truth.”

To speak of “our truth” is simple insanity. Truth is truth, unconditionally, one truth cannot contradict another, and you cannot declare yourself Napoleon Bonaparte as “your truth.” What Harry and Megan Markle claim is either true, and the Royal family is guilty of racism, or it is false, and the Sussexes themselves are guilty of slander. It is unjust to the innocent to leave the matter ambiguous, and say that anything said must be true. Nor can Hitler escape censure by declaring that Aryan superiority and Jewish depravity is “his truth.” People magazine is either endorsing insanity, or endorsing evil.

This same day, I witness a video clip of Don Lemon on CNN objecting to the Vatican refusal to bless gay marriage because “God would never judge us.”

Judgement is what we are here for.

Did God not judge Adam and Eve in the Garden? Is Jesus not coming again to judge the living and the dead? Why then did God create us? Just as cute pets? With no responsibilities? And if everyone gets to heaven, why did he not create us in heaven, and instead leave us to suffer here on Earth?

And why does the Bible condemn Pontius Pilate for refusing to judge Jesus? Why is Pilate the villain, and not the hero of the piece?

Why do we condemn the neighbours who reputedly let Kitty Genovese be stabbed to death in a stairwell rather than intervene? Who were they to judge?

As infuriating is the often-repeated claim that parents are supposed to show their children “unconditional love,” and never discipline.

That’s a perfect way to raise a psychopath or a narcissist. Or a helpless house pet.

Unconditional love is not love at all. It is ownership.

Critical Theory in Fairyland

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Roney) — Tue, 16 Mar 2021 21:24:00 +0000

The Wicked Queen and her magic mirror.

Critical theory is the hottest thing in academia and in education. As “critical race theory,” it has drawn fire in the US, condemned by Trump.

The name suggests it is about teaching critical thinking. It is not; although the name seems to have been chosen to encourage that misunderstanding. It is about being critical of all established culture and social structures. Why? Because they foster oppression. The underlying premise that all human interactions are power relationships, and so culture and social structures are inevitably designed to oppress.

This means there is no conceivable social structure that is not oppressive; for it is ruled out of court that this might be true of any existing structure. Either we must go back to the law of the jungle, or else the only issue is who gets to dominate whom. Which amounts to the same thing.

Put another way, the terminal point to critical theory is to justify any conceivable action by whomever is currently in power. It is the lifting of all restraints on the powerful.

The doctrine has now filtered down to the kindergarten level. One of my Korean grad students today brought in an article on teaching fairy tales in Korea; it is part of the prescribed Korean national curriculum for three to five year olds. It is overtly based on critical theory. Last year, I was obliged to teach a critical theory interpretation of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf,” because it was part of the prescribed US curriculum.

Actual fairy tales are not taught, except for context. The premise is that they are already known by the children. Instead, the plan is to attack “stereotypes” and “concepts” in them “that have been taken for granted.” This is done by reading and teaching “parodies,” in which the premises of the original tale are inverted.

In the US case, the wolf turned out to be a vegetarian.

There seem to be several dubious ideas here. To begin with, a three-to-five-year-old takes precious little for granted. They have had little time to develop stereotypes about anything. If the original tales seem old and formulaic to the teacher, they will be much fresher to the students.

Secondly, by their nature, fairy tales are unlikely to produce stereotypes or encourage taking anything for granted. It is the essential premise of fairyland that it is where magic happens, and nothing can be assumed.

It also seems dubious that the children really do know the original fairy tale that well. They probably know the Disney version, not the classic version of the tale from Perrault or the Brothers Grimm. Even few adults have read the latter. Why not read them, rather than these parodies?

Given this, what are the stereotypes that critical theory finds oppressive?

One cited “parody,” “Tomboy Snow White and Stylish Prince,” addresses gender roles; which, apparently, the original story of Snow White reinforced.

Yet there is little interaction described in Grimms’ story between Snow White and the prince. Here is their entire history together:

And before long she opened her eyes, lifted up the lid of the coffin, sat up, and was once more alive.
“Oh, heavens, where am I?” she cried.
The King’s son, full of joy, said, “You are with me,” and told her what had happened, and said, “I love you more than everything in the world; come with me to my father’s palace, you shall be my wife.”
And Snow White was willing, and went with him, and their wedding was held with great show and splendour.

Is the problem that Snow White stays home and keeps house for the dwarfs? In the original story, she is seven years old. Should she be working down the mines?

Meantime, Snow White’s stepmother, the Wicked Queen, is shown in command of the realm—a husband, the King, is not mentioned. She commands the huntsman, and he must obey.

Usually, fairy tales have female protagonists. They are told from the female point of view.

The paper that my student brought in asserts that the problem is “stereotypes of wolves and stepmothers.” “Absolutism of the good and bad characters.” “A dichotomous way of thinking.”

Stereotypes of wolves and stepmothers? Using a talking animal as villain actually avoids stereotyping anyone. It is not prejudice against wolves to see them as carnivores. Nor is prejudice against dwarfs, giants, witches, or trolls a clear and present danger—these are, as they appear in the tales, imaginary literary creations to personify the character traits being condemned. Can you stereotype a stereotype? Is it prejudice against Cookie Monster to say he is a glutton?

Absolutism of good and bad characters? The original stories never present their hero or heroine as absolutely moral. Goldilocks is a fable warning against theft and trespassing. Red Riding Hood is a fable warning against dallying and talking to strangers. Cinderella stays too late at the ball and loses her shoe.

Conversely, characters that appear to be bad often turn out, in fairy tales, to be good or sympathetic: Beast, in Beauty and the Beast. The huntsman or the dwarfs, in Snow White. The giant’s wife, in Jack and the Beanstalk.

A dichotomous way of thinking? Making distinctions, as Aristotle showed, is the essence of thinking itself. A thing is either A or not-A.

Rather, there seems to be one particular dichotomy that is under attack: not the premise that any character can be absolutely good or all bad, but the idea of an absolute difference between good and bad.

This is, as Chesterton pointed out, the underlying theme of all fairy tales: the need to discern between right and wrong. It explains why critical theory has singled them out for attack:

Cinderella may have a dress woven on supernatural looms and blazing with unearthly brilliance; but she must be back when the clock strikes twelve. The king may invite fairies to the christening, but he must invite all the fairies or frightful results will follow. Bluebeard’s wife may open all doors but one. A promise is broken to a cat, and the whole world goes wrong. A promise is broken to a yellow dwarf, and the whole world goes wrong. A girl may be the bride of the God of Love himself if she never tries to see him; she sees him, and he vanishes away. A girl is given a box on condition she does not open it; she opens it, and all the evils of this world rush out at her.

Such moral constraints protect the weak from the strong; codes of chivalry, noblesse oblige. To the powerful, they are of course troublesome.

The subtitles of “parodies” cited in the Korean study tell the tale: “The Story of Cinderella as Told by the Wicked Stepmother.” “The Story of Snow White as Told by the Dwarfs.” “The Story of Red Riding Hood as Told by the Wolf.” “The Story of Jack and the Beanstalk as Told by the Giant.” “The Story of Goldilocks as Told by the Baby Bear.”

Accusing the tales of supporting the powers that be is perverse.

Where do these stories come from? All accounts, from earliest times, attest that they were collected originally from poor working class women.

They express, in other words, the voices of the voiceless: women, the illiterate, children, the poor, the weakest members of society.

This is why the protagonist is usually female. This is why the protagonist is usually a child. This is why in them, Kings and Queens are usually bad sorts—the one social class regularly criticized. See “The Princess and the Pea,” “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” “Puss in Boots,” “Hans the Hedgehog,” “Rumpelstiltskin.”

This is the voice critical theory wants to silence: the weak. This is who civilization and morality exists to protect.

Word Art

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Roney) — Wed, 03 Mar 2021 23:04:00 +0000

Someone at last has really done word clouds up right. A great tool for presenting lists of related words.

Classics Illustrated

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Roney) — Sat, 29 Aug 2020 16:35:00 +0000

A thrilling discovery: Classics Illustrated comics are now available at the Internet Archive. These are superb for giving a student a fast education in English literature or cultural literacy.

Ancient Rome on a Bright Summer Day

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Roney) — Mon, 25 May 2020 14:48:00 +0000

Scott Adams on the Future of Education

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Roney) — Mon, 25 May 2020 13:59:00 +0000

Teaching What They Already Know

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Roney) — Sat, 29 Feb 2020 14:44:00 +0000

Image from Tom Brown's School Days

A common lament in contemporary education is that we need to reflect the diversity in our classrooms. We need aboriginal materials, written by aboriginal authors, because some students are aboriginals. We need to teach aboriginal languages. We need heritage language classes of all sorts. We need materials on black history, because some of our students are black. We need gay materials, because some have gay parents; materials must be "relevant to their daily lives," and so on and on.

One teacher writes, “It would be a wonderful world in which teachers had time and energy to tailor curriculum for the kids they actually have in their classrooms: by ethnicity, skin colour, national origins, interests, gifts, learning styles, family situations . . .”

If we stop and think, this makes little sense. It is saying, “we should force kids to sit in the classroom for hours every day to tell them things they already know.” And quite likely know more about than the teacher does.

The classic idea of education is rather different: it is that school is for learning things.

This is why, in the really old days, it was ancient history that was taught, and not modern or local history. Not “even though,” but because none of those little towheads were Athenians, Romans, or Trojans, and familiar with that lifestyle. It was Latin, Hebrew, Ancient Greek, or Sanskrit that were taught, not “even though,” but because none of them would already speak it at home.

When did we invert things so completely? When did we kill school and stop educating our young?

Unreal Conditional

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Roney) — Thu, 31 Oct 2019 01:08:00 +0000

The Ontario English Curriculum

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Roney) — Sat, 19 Oct 2019 22:58:00 +0000

Looking over the Ontario high school English curriculum. It’s changed a fair bit from my student days. As it should have. Back when I went through, it was heavy on literature, and on narrative and poetry specifically. That suited me, but it was not practical. We were never even taught how to write an academic essay. We did not read any essays. Let alone the varieties of writing important in business and technical fields. We were taught nothing of rhetoric; outside Shakespeare, we did not read any great speeches. We did not debate or study argument. And no film or TV or radio or newspapers or magazines or comic books or songs. That was already out of touch with reality then—for this, not hardbound books, was where we absorbed the largest part of our English and English lit. It would be far weirder now, with YouTube, the Internet, and so on. And Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize.

You may argue that, from such a historically smaller sample, it is less likely for truly fine literature to be found in these newer media. Fair point; but at the same time, if you want fine literature in the future, you want to train upcoming writers in these living forms. Train them to write poetry and short stories, and they will live and die in garrets unread.

So it is good to see the curriculum expanded in this way:

“The reading program should include a wide variety of literary, informational, and graphic texts that engage students’ interest and imagination – for example, novels; poetry; myths, fables, and folk tales; short stories; textbooks and books on topics in science, history, mathematics, geography, and other subjects; biographies, autobiographies, memoirs, and journals; plays and radio, film, or television scripts; encyclopaedia entries; graphs, charts, and diagrams in textbooks or magazine articles; instructions and manuals; graphic novels, comic books, and cartoons; newspaper articles and editorials; databases and websites; and essays and reports.”

However, I suspect this has been done for the wrong reason, and so probably not well. The curriculum is now entirely skills-based; the point is to develop the skills needed for employment. This is no doubt why literature has been de-emphasized. This sounds reasonable, but E.D. Hirsh Jr. has demonstrated that learning only skills and not the specific content of a culture leaves one, by college level, illiterate. One needs a certain body of shared knowledge to make sense of a new text.

So it makes sense to pare this back to make more room for skills; but this makes the precise selection of the texts to be read all the more important. They had better be the real classics.

And for the rest, the curriculum is badly wrong.

Another of my frustrations back in the day was that the literature we got was always from England or from America. We did not get to see much Canadian writing, and I thought and still think that was alarming. Again you could argue that, with a much smaller pool from which to fish, the quality of Canadian materials would be lesser. But there is a second consideration: that was pretty discouraging for a Canadian kid who wanted to be a writer. The natural inference was that such things were not possible here. And it becomes a hard claim to sustain now that Alice Munro has won the Nobel Prize. Canlit has long seemed to be more popular abroad than at home. It’s the colonial mentality at work.

But that, sadly, has not changed. The curriculum now acknowledges the narrowness of featuring only British and American writers. So where does it go? Anywhere but Canada. “They should be exposed to literary works drawn from many genres, historical periods, and cultures.” Likely leaving even less room for the Canadian experience. The colonial mentality dies hard.

No wonder the damaging myth that “there is no Canadian mainstream.”

There is also an obvious problem with building an English curriculum on writings from non-English-speaking cultures. Valuable as they might be in some ways, they are in translation, and so are not models of English.

Okay, so what if you just have English writing set in other cultures, or featuring non-Anglophone protagonists?

Fine—cultural appropriation. You can’t win on that one.

Or choose pieces written by a tiny minority in the given country who are fluent in English. To begin with, you are automatically not getting an authentic perspective, then, but that of a Westernized elite who are just as likely to be out of touch with the real culture and ordinary life as any Western visitor. And you are fishing in a very small pond; quality is sure to be less.

And this need for diversity is an entirely fake problem. There is no need for intervention to make sure classes include texts reflecting unfamiliar backgrounds. Everywhere and at all times, an exotic locale and exotic characters are things readers automatically seek. Why else did Shakespeare set so many of his plays in Italy or Greece instead of Sussex? Why did Coleridge wrote of Xanadu? Why did Gulliver set sail instead of stay in Middlesex? Why are the James Bond movies always set in some exotic locale? Why do people want to read about cowboys or knights errant or Hobbits or Wookies and Ewoks? Because they reflect so well their own life experiences?

The likeliest result of the current curriculum is to introduce worse writing along with a boring sameness.

And that is only the beginning of the troubles with this new curriculum. Along with wanting to have something to reflect every race and culture, it also wants to balance selections to appeal to both males and females. That is, in principle, a good idea. Most things in schools today are cruelly biased against boys.

But they get this so wrong it is hard to believe it is not malicious.

“Resources should be chosen not only to reflect diversity but also on the basis of their appeal for both girls and boys in the classroom. Recent research has shown that many boys are interested in informational materials, such as manuals and graphic texts [they mean charts and graphs], as opposed to works of fiction, which are often more appealing to girls.”

This is just not credible to anyone who knows any actual boys. Both boys and girls equally like works of fiction. Girls like romances and fairy tales; boys like stories of adventure and hero legends. Both boys and girls find manuals, charts and graphs boring; but they both equally need to be able to read them for employment purposes.

Image from The Boys' Book of Adventure. Note the exotic locale.

So what this imaginary division suggests in practice is that all the interesting stuff is chosen for the girls’ taste. The boys get nothing.

Inevitably, the curriculum also wants to put something in for the LGBTQ lobby as well as feminists. “In inclusive programs, students are made aware of the historical, cultural, and political contexts for both the traditional and non-traditional gender and social roles represented in the materials they are studying.”

This is contradictory. By definition, non-traditional gender and social roles are not going to be commonly represented in the tradition. Forcing them into the curriculum will mean using inferior materials that do not reflect the cultural or historical context. Catch-22.

Inevitably, modern critics have decided Huckleberry Finn and Nigger Jim were having gay sex on their raft.

Of course, this means that any fictional girl who dresses as a boy to be with her lover is now going to be declared transgender; and every story of a close male friendship is to be read as implying gay sex. Aside from doing serious violence to the texts, this is going to make sex seem far more important than it really is to students at an age when sex is already likely to unduly preoccupy them. And, with all due respect to homosexuals, a kind of sex that is unlikely to lead to a happy life. Gays themselves commonly make the point that the gay life is not a gay one: leaving aside any possible discrimination or vulnerability to disease, it becomes inestimably harder to find a life partner. And one has no children.

Another of the problems with the high school education I got is that we were never taught to think. I always thought that was deliberate. We were being indoctrinated instead, to make us useful cogs in the machine. We were never taught debate, or logic, or the logical fallacies, or parliamentary procedure, or the real scientific method. We were never taught to question what we read. If it was in the textbook, it was so.

So it is initially heartening to see the new curriculum refer to the need for “questioning the text.”

Unfortunately, this is only mentioned as one in a string of other “comprehension strategies”: “predicting, visualizing, questioning, drawing inferences, identifying main ideas, summarizing, and monitoring and revising comprehension.” That looks like lip service.

One of these things is not like the other ones. Studies show an average student can pick up how to predict, visualize, identify main ideas, and summarize from any text in one class hour. One lesson. Doing this tired little routine again and again with every class is just tiresome, tedious and brain-numbing. Great way to teach a kid to hate reading…

And later we learn what “questioning” means. It is not following and testing the logic, or close observation of the details for hints of deeper meanings—the two things that make reading worthwhile. It means “to look beyond the literal meaning of texts and to think about fairness, equity, social justice, and citizenship in a global society.”

In other words, it is not questioning the text at all, but imposing politics on it. Far from being taught how to think, the students are being more aggressively indoctrinated, in a particular political point of view.

This is a lazy way to dismiss a text without having to address it: you call it “racist,” and then you do not need to consider what it is saying. And it is again too easy to do to merit class time. Anyone can probably learn to do it in another hour.

And seeing everything as political is totalitarian.

Comprehending a text turns out not to be, according to this curriculum, discovering its meaning. Instead, such comprehension skills “help students understand that reading is a process of constructing meaning.”

Which means you get to decide it means whatever you (or the powers that be) want it to mean. That’s a trick that does not need to be taught at all. Anyone can do it without any training. You don’t even need to be lucid.

Teacher prompt: “How might audiences of different backgrounds listening to this radio drama interpret it differently?”

The goal of comprehension should be to establish the correct, or most plausible, understanding of the text, not to examine different ways it could be misinterpreted; at least without acknowledging that one or another reading must be a misinterpretation.

In evaluating a text, students are supposed to consider

“What information is omitted in order to sustain the point of view? Whose interests are served by this point of view?”

This seems to omit the possibility that any statement might actually be true. There is no truth, apparently, and all statements are to be accepted or rejected purely on whether they serve your interests. Or those of the powers who run the school.

So why have English studies abandoned meaning and comprehension? Why have they given over to what Jordan Peterson calls “cultural Marxism”?

I think the component of the Ontario curriculum on “media studies” gives us an essential clue.

Note, to begin with, that the term “media studies” is illiterate: text is a medium, just as is film. Whoever wrote the curriculum is just throwing everything that is not print into one undifferentiated barrel, without considering it properly.

When the document speaks about print, it specifies the need for “correctly applying the conventions of language – grammar, usage, spelling, and punctuation.” But when it turns to non-print media, the only concerns mentioned are:

“Students must be able to differentiate between fact and opinion; evaluate the credibility of sources; recognize bias; be attuned to discriminatory portrayals of individuals and groups, such as religious or sexual minorities, people with disabilities, or seniors; and question depictions of violence and crime.”

“Students’ repertoire of communication skills should include the ability to critically interpret the messages they receive through the various media.”

There is no special reason to study non-print media for this. All of these considerations are equally relevant to written texts. Why is this under “media studies”?

On the other hand, each medium has its own distinct grammar and vocabulary, comparable to but different from that of print: the mechanical and rhetorical considerations. Things like composing a page to draw the eye in a natural movement; or how to suggest the passage of time in a shot. And these are not even mentioned.

Why is this? Two reasons, I suspect, or two aspects of the same reason. First, in all probability, whoever put together the curriculum, and no doubt the average high school teacher too, figured they had to feature all these new high-tech things to be hep and look as though they were the authorities. At one point, the author of the curriculum explains,

“Skills related to high-tech media such as the Internet, film, and television are particularly important because of the power and pervasive influence these media wield in our lives and in society. Becoming conversant with these and other media can greatly expand the range of information sources available to students.”

This is pathetic. It implies that, without the far-seeing leadership of the Party, the average young person might be utterly unaware of things like movies, television, the Internet, video games, or graphic novels. Rather than the Party being roughly a century behind them.

But even in comparison to the average student, the average teacher, and the author of this curriculum, has no idea how to make a film, or lay out a web page, or design a video game, or compose a newspaper. They need to b.s. their way out. Politics and political correctness serves to cover for the fact that they do not know what they are doing; that they have no idea what is correct in any other sense.

At the same time, like everyone, they no doubt fear the unknown. They do not understand these media. And so they automatically suspect them of being nefarious: uniquely likely to lie, too subvert, to do evil. Comics are depraved. Television is depraved. Video games are depraved. They are a tissue of lies promoting racism and violence. Good reason not to have to teach about them in detail.

Now we can perhaps zoom out, to use the grammar of film, and see that the same is true, to a lesser extent, of the English curriculum generally; indeed, of the Humanities and the Social Sciences generally. Although not because of new technology. The problem is that in general, the people in charge in these fields do not know what they are doing or what they are talking about. Few people can write well, and few classroom teachers have the first idea how to write. Nor is it easy to understand Shakespeare. So it is safer to talk about politics, and suspect all authors of racism.

Beyond this, all the Humanities lost their proper raison d’etre a couple of generations ago when the schools and the academy dropped religion. The point of the Humanities is to form a human soul, a human character. They are training for a human life. But without an established system of values, one has no destination. With no destination, one has no idea in which direction to proceed.

So what to do? Postmodernism and political correctness. There is no meaning anywhere anyhow; it’s all politics.

So too, for a slightly different reason, with Social Sciences. Social Sciences emerged, in effect, as a non-religions replacement for the Humanities, supposedly based on science instead of theology/philosophy. Year after year, however, this new scientific approach has produced no useful and reproducible results. The reason is simple, and should have been predictable. In fact, it was predicted by Kant. Humans are not objects; they are independent subjects. They cannot and will not be passively studied as might a rock formation. So again you cover the nakedness of your field with easy and arbitrary political shibboleths and virtue signaling.

Nor does this curriculum actually evaluate anything.

The curriculum explains that evaluation should be in five categories: “Works Independently, Teamwork, Organization, Work Habits, and Initiative.”

Basic rule for good teaching violated: you do not evaluate on anything you did not teach. That is fundamentally unfair, and not related to learning. The curriculum does not include anything about teaching teamwork; this would be, essentially, parliamentary procedure, and it is a valuable skill. It is not clear that it teaches much of anything about how to work independently, or about developing good work habits, or developing initiative either. If it teaches organization, it is only in the limited sense of how to organize a sentence or a paragraph.

And, glaringly, there is no category included for evaluation the skills supposedly taught: say reading comprehension, or correct grammar.

The evaluation as given is only, it seems, of not causing the system any trouble. Given they exhibit the desired character traits, any student should be able to coast along through the system without developing knowledge or new skills. This conceals any possibility that they are not learning.

There are other flaws here.

“Effective teaching approaches involve students in the use of higher-level thinking skills and encourage them to look beyond the literal meaning of texts and to think about fairness, equity, social justice, and citizenship in a global society.”

Leave aside, this one time, the demand for political correctness. What is meant here by “higher-level thinking skills”? Who knows what that means?

They are presumably referring to Bloom’s Taxonomy.

This is a misunderstanding of it. By “high” and “low,” Bloom meant that “higher” forms of thinking were based on “lower” forms, as a pyramid would be based on its foundation. He did not mean that “higher” forms of thought were somehow better than or preferable to lower forms. He could not have; this would require a value judgement, and you can’t get there without an underlying religious assumption, of what the purpose of mankind and of life really is.

It follows that the LOWER forms are of greater utility. So the most time and the greatest emphasis should be on them. This curriculum, instead, calls for a concentration on the HIGHER forms, reading “higher” in ignorance to mean more valuable.

That is, in effect, standing a pyramid on its head. If Bloom is right, it is not likely to be a solid educational foundation.

Note too here the call to look beyond the “literal” meaning of texts. This too is ironically illiterate. In literary theory, looking beyond the literal means looking for metaphor, symbolism, unspoken implication, or allusion. This is difficult—the ability to do so, Aristotle says, is the sign of genius. Unable to do so, the curriculum designers yet again substitute politics.

It must be soul-crushing for any student who is particularly bright.

And one more thing, that sticks out like a sore tongue to any language teacher:

“Teachers need to encourage parents to continue to use their own language at home in rich and varied ways as a foundation for language and literacy development in English. It is also important for teachers to find opportunities to bring students’ languages into the classroom, using parents and community members as a resource.”

This is politics interfering with education. The consensus in the field of language learning is the reverse: one learns a new language fastest through total immersion. Ironically, the best research that this is so comes from Canada. In most language schools, use of the first language is prohibited.

To appease the current dogma of multiculturalism, the curriculum says the reverse.

How to Evaluate Schools

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Roney) — Sat, 28 Sep 2019 21:19:00 +0000

PISA rankings of education systems by scores on standardized tests. Green is top third.

A lot of our opinions on what schools and school systems are best are based on the results of standardized tests. This is true of the PISA rankings of OECD countries, currently treated as the gold standard. On this measure, East Asian schools do particularly well.

But critics point out that this is artificial. Standardized tests are not real life. Striving for high test scores can mean teaching and studying to the test, and this may steal time and effort from more valuable learning.

Chinese and East Asian schools have their critics. Some complain that the Chinese method, heavy on memorization, which works so well for standard tests, does not teach independent thinking or creativity.

I agree with these criticisms. Standardized testing is a factory method. The acquisition of skills is not the primary goal of education. Traditional education has always considered it more important to teach morality, character, good judgement, and the ability to think independently.

But how then do we measure this?

There is actually a good and simple measure available: graduation rate.

The schools considered most successful should be those that have the fewest students dropping out short of completion.

To begin with, this is a measure of the value the actual consumer finds in them. We sell students outrageously short if we imagine they do not have any interest in or ability to evaluate their own education.

You might argue that it is easy enough for any school to lower academic standards so that nobody fails and everyone finds it easy and fun; and so everyone stays in school.

But I doubt this would work in practice. I did say dropout rate, not failure rate. I warrant that few students drop out because they find a school too tough academically. If they do, arguably, that school is not doing a good job of educating, only of weeding out. It would be like a doctor who accepted only healthy patients. In my experience, students drop out because they find school boring, or corrupt and dishonest, or disrespectful, or a waste of time.

But even if this issue of logrolling or grade inflation is a consideration, it is easily met by controlling for student scores on the standardized tests. Given, then, two groups of students who score in the same range on these tests, coming from different schools, which group has the better retention rate?

Surely, after all, a large part of a school’s or teacher’s job is to inspire.

And producing students who stick to the task of getting their high school graduation is a good quick measure of their morality, character, and good judgement.

Compare schools on this metric. The school that comes out higher is a better school.

Not incidentally, private and charter schools consistently score better than public schools on this metric.

How to Write Good

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Roney) — Wed, 18 Sep 2019 12:46:00 +0000

Just uncovered a cache of my old writings from high school, ages 12-16. Some good bits, but the prose was embarrassingly purple at times. And too much reliance on cheap thrills: sex and violence.

I could have used some guidance.

But I also noticed that, whenever there were markings in red from some teacher’s hand, they were wrong.

For example, I began one story:

“Mr. Bones watched the violent plaid socks silently follow each other down the stairs. He was in the habit of wearing socks to bed …”

And the teacher writes:

“opening is misleading at first reading – would be improved by changing the to his.” (Meaning the socks—“his violent plaid socks.”)

And that would 1) kill the little surprise or puzzle that lures the reader into the story; and 2) remove the introduction to the theme of the story--which is the protagonist’s detachment.

And wouldn’t anyone of average intelligence be able to grasp that I must have deliberately avoided “his”? And that there must be a reason?

And wouldn’t anyone of average intelligence have been able to work out what was actually happening by reading the second sentence? Did that really involve a great mental challenge?

Next teacher’s note: I had written

“He sat down in front of the window and placed his victim, a jar of pickles, on the counter before him.”

The teacher’s red hand had struck “victim” and inserted “target.”

That ought to do it—authors should always strive for the blander word, right? Avoid anything that might spark any mental images?

Exactly wrong, of course.

As a matter of accuracy of meaning, too, “target” is incorrect. You do not need to take aim to get a pickle in a jar. The image is absurdly wrong, like that of shooting fish in a barrel.

And “victim” foreshadows what happens next—looking through the pickle jar, Bones witnesses a rape outside the window—as if it were happening in the jar. So “victim” here conveys the idea that the rapist is treating his victim just as Bones does the pickle. “Target” breaks this careful thread.

All frustratingly lost on this reader.

I can only remember two teachers at any level who ever gave me useful guidance in writing. I adored both of them, perhaps for this reason.

Dr. Smith, in grad school, caught me mixing metaphors.

Mr. More, in grade 6, wrote “stop using big words just to show you know them.”

Great advice, which I have never forgotten, and which I still struggle to follow.

But there is obviously something fundamentally wrong here. We are hiring people to teach our children to write who instead mislead them. It is like hiring French teachers who cannot speak French.

But then again, come to think of it, I had that too.

This is a notorious problem among editors, who spend much of their careers fixing the result. There is a stock phrase among editors, also the title of a book, “Miss Thistlebottom’s Hobgoblins,” to describe the many writing “rules” people are taught in school that make their writing bad.

We need to do a better job at hiring teachers.

In the meantime, as the reader has perhaps also noticed, there is a huge market for remedial writing courses.

Schools: A Manifesto

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Roney) — Thu, 02 May 2019 11:29:00 +0000

Adam Smith remarked that “there is a lot of ruin in a nation.” Sometimes it amazes me that Canada or America manage to stand, considering how badly we get things done. This gives at least the impression of a civilization in decline. I thought that when I first left to wander, first to China, imagining that they must surely do things better elsewhere.

I have since learned, through my travels, that as utterly screwed up as everything is in North America, it is exponentially worse everywhere else.

At the same time, if we could only start to do a few things a little better, it could make a vast difference. And, if some other more innovative society does so and we do not, the current dominance of America could end swiftly. We have no cause for complacency.

One key to a successful society, perhaps the sole key, as we have said here before, is shared values. This almost goes without saying: if we have a shared goal, we will work together. If we do not, we will not. But, remarkably, the educators and the scribblers and the artist of our time and place are busily dismantling any found shared values.

But then, how does one get to shared values?

That would be the second key to social success: proper education.

As a good general principle, the society that gets education closest to right is the society that will have the most success in all its endeavours. Education is the system or method of passing accumulated knowledge and wisdom on to the next generation. It is the sine qua non of civilization. Do it wrong for one generation, maybe two or three, and civilization is gone.

And we are doing it wrong.

Not only is our present system, in North America, not reliably passing on the information; it seems to be spending most of its energy encouraging students to reject any established cultural norms, knowledge, or traditions whenever encountered.

Unless there is some innate higher civilization underneath and concealed by our own—an utterly improbable premise—this can only end in rubble and ruin.

How can we fix this?

First, abolish the teachers’ colleges.

Unfortunately, as soon as I say “the schools are in a mess and they need reform,” I simply join a chorus with every professor teaching at every teacher’s college in existence, and more or less with every teacher in every classroom. That the schools are a mess is the eternal and fundamental premise of all teacher education already. As a result, as we see no results from any of this agitation, school reform itself has been given a bad name. It always seems to be a massive expenditure of money that ends up making everything worse.

There is a reason why all the “educators” say this, and it is opposite to my reason for saying so.

It is a simple and obvious truth that anyone who has themselves sat in a classroom daily for fifteen years or more—as anyone who enters a teacher’s college almost necessarily has—has a very good education in what works and does not work in the classroom. Nothing they can now be taught in one or two years is going to make a difference.

In order to justify their existence, however, the teachers’ colleges must necessarily teach their students something they do not already know. Which can mean, necessarily, only one thing: they must declare that whatever we do now, everything we do now is wrong. And they much teach their acolytes something else, something utterly counter to either tradition or intuition or common sense. In sum, to justify their existence, they must deliberately teach them how to teach badly. And insist on this as the one “correct” way to teach.

This result was demonstrated rather well by “Operation Follow Through.” A few decades ago. The US federal government sank a large amount of money into a very large trial of various proposed new approaches in the classroom, fitting the latest educational theories, in hopes of improving the chances of disadvantaged students. The result: every approach sponsored by a school of education turned out to do worse than the control—worse than the way the randomly selected “ordinary” classroom of the time was conducted. The one approach that did better, and consistently, was proposed not by a professor, or even a teacher, but an advertising copywriter.

As a result, the results of the study were generally ignored. They left no place for the ed schools, after all. The approach that was proven best, “direct instruction,” basically a good old fashioned lecture with Socratic elements, testing for comprehension, has never been generally implemented. Those fashionable educational theories persist, unaffected by all evidence.

The current success of Khan Academy, however, is based on the same method of direct instruction. Khan, unsurprisingly is another ad man, not a teacher or professor of education.

Salman Khan

Similarly, home-schooled students consistently do better on standardized tests than those who attend a public school. In what other profession would you expect such a result? What would it say, for example, if patients did consistently better if they kept away from doctors or hospitals? If accused parties did consistently better if they did not hire a lawyer, but represented themselves in court?

It is not just that the ed schools force their graduates to deliberately teach badly. The truth is, any bright student or any student with common sense, including the teachers, knows at some level it is a scam. To a bright student, at best, ed school looks like a frustrating waste of a year during which they could instead be doing something interesting, like thinking. And going to one will lose them much respect among their intellectual peers. But worse than that, realizing that it is a scam, and still going, means that the system selects out teachers for proven dishonesty. Given that the chief value of an education is in teaching good morals, and the most important part of imparting morals is setting a good example, this too selects out for the worst teachers.

Self-evidently, those who will make the best teachers will be those who have been the best learners. It is those who know best how to learn who can teach others how to learn. Next to that, and equally self-evidently, those best qualified to teach a certain subject are those who know that subject best.

And so it is obvious how we should select teachers, and it is not how we do it now. It is, however, how they do it in Finland. Funny that—Finland pretty consistently leads the world in student results. It is also how they traditionally do it in China, Singapore, Hong Kong, or Korea, with their Confucian traditions—rounding out the list of world-beating education systems.

We should hire the best students from the most rigorous programs, holding the highest degrees, in the subjects they are actually going to teach.

What, you will ask, about those teaching in lower grades? After all, how much higher math do you really need to know to teach grade three arithmetic? Surely this is all wasted. They need instead to understand children and how they learn, right? “Pedagogy.”

Good question, to which there is a good answer.

Did you never wonder what the Humanities were all about?

People scoff at students who go into the Humanities as layabouts, saying there is no job at the other end. Indeed there is not, but that is our big mistake. The job is teaching.

The whole point of the Humanities, obviously, as the name itself says, is to teach someone how to be human. They constitute the bedrock knowledge and skills everyone needs, whatever else they subsequently do with their lives. Accordingly, it is what should, no must, be taught at the lower levels.

There is a lot of solid evidence that not doing so is harmful in a very direct sense. E.D. Hirsch has shown that it results in functional illiteracy at the college level. Another recent study demonstrated that the single best predictor of high later academic achievement is having been read to as a child—having been read, that is, the traditional stories.

Instead of teaching them to everyone, we are now teaching them to no one. In fact, we are not even teaching them any longer at the college level, in course labelled “Humanities.” This is a fairly inevitable consequence, a generation on, from not teaching them in childhood—nobody is now competent to teach them at college level, and so the thread of civilization has been broken. A perfect way to destroy not only uncounted individual lives, but the entire civilization.

Accordingly, to restore our education system is now going to need to be a two-step, and at least a two-generation, process. First we need to restore expertise in the Humanities. We need to form a new professoriate.

The best way to do that is, presumably, the way it was done the first time, back in the Middle Ages. Expertise was established by public lectures and public debate. The good news is that this is immensely easier to do now than it was then, thanks to wider dissemination over the Internet, and its interactive possibilities. It is indeed liable to happen spontaneously, as people shop for individual courses from individual instructors online.

A 13th century debate between Catholics and Oriental Orthodox scholars.

Only the Humanities, you may ask? What about STEM? Isn’t that what we need to be concentrating on?

We only do harm by teaching science in elementary school. What they need to know is the scientific method: specific scientific “truths” we teach now are only too likely to be found wrong well before they graduate college. Or even before the science texts themselves go to press. It is a bit of a cottage industry among scientists to point out how many things in the current school texts are flatly wrong. By teaching science as a body of knowledge instead of as a method of inquiry, we have also only fostered the damaging but now endemic popular notion that science is a cosmology, a religion, a body of received truths. This is profoundly anti-scientific, and must later be un-taught if they are ever going to accomplish anything in the sciences.

Of course, nominally, there is often a dutiful attempt to also teach the scientific method. Students are made to do “experiments.” But these are not experiments at all. The expected result is always known beforehand, generally explained beforehand, and if the experiment does not produce this expected result, the student is informed he must have done something wrong. This perfectly inverts the scientific method, as well as being an obvious waste of time to any thoughtful student. A great way to queer them on the scientific method.

It hardly needs to be said that teaching technology is even more futile. Technology is changing quickly enough that anything taught in this regard in grade school is almost certain to have been a waste of time by college graduation.

What about teaching basic math? Granted, a hundred years ago, you could make a case that everyone should be able to “do their sums.” Even at the time, there were actually simpler methods available than the memorization of sums and times tables and such that we used: there was always the abacus, or the Japanese string method of multiplication. But today, even the poorest of the poor, even in a poorer country like the Philippines, generally carries a computer in their pocket. Few even bother to do a calculation in their head, when it is so much easier and more reliable to pull out their smart phone. Even if they don’t, the next guy can for them. Knowing basic addition is no doubt still marginally useful, but probably not the best use of everyone’s time, in terms of any practical utility.

What about higher math? Yes, it cannot so easily be done by calculator, but, at the same time, it is not something everyone needs to know. There is, for most of us, the inevitable question: when was the last time you used your high school calculus, or trigonometry? If you actually had call to do so, were you actually able to remember it?

In other words, for the majority of students, even higher math is wasting their time. For those who need it, the computer is again the answer. They can actually now look it up, including any relevant formula, as needed. They can go to Khan Academy or the like for an explanation, if needed, and are more likely to be paying attention now that it has some practical value.

The one branch of math that probably should be a part of everyone’s education is the one branch of math that always was: geometry; or as it used to be called, “Euclid.” Not that everyone will have any pressing need to calculate the radius of a circle in their future life, but solving geometric problems in Euclidian style teaches logic.

Languages, on the other hand, have always been a part of the Humanities. But we also have it all wrong on teaching languages. We now teach only modern languages, with the idea that being able to speak French, say, will be useful for any Canadian, or Spanish to an American, or Chinese to some future importer or exporter.

But how many of us, in English Canada, actually graduate high school able to converse in French?

Almost no one.

Odd, that, because competent polyglots insist anyone can pick up spoken French within three months.

Even were this not so, we are on the verge of having reliable live translation available for multiple languages on any cell phone. Such products are already being widely advertised.

In other words, again, we are simply massively wasting student time, and taxpayer money.

Languages have always been taught, but it is folly to think one can best learn to converse in another language in a regular classroom, which by its nature can offer few real opportunities to converse.

Notice that the languages traditionally taught were always “dead” languages, classical Latin or Greek or Hebrew or Sanskrit. Nobody alive actually knew how to properly converse in them. That was not the goal.

The goal of learning a foreign language was that consciously learning a language and how it works, as if it were a watch mechanism, is learning how to think. Language is almost functionally coterminous with thought. For this, the ideal approach was the old “grammar-translation method,” which forced you to analyse the logic of each sentence, rather than memorize vocabulary. It is rank heresy to suggest or recommend teaching the grammar-translation method today, of course.

Other things are not taught that obviously should be taught. Mnemonics, which is to say, how to memorize something. It is true madness, for example, to try to teach a modern language, involving a large new body of vocabulary, without ever teaching students how to memorize. No wonder nobody ever ends up learning the language. As a language teacher myself, it is endlessly frustrating how the typical modern language course spends each new semester teaching almost entirely the same things taught the previous semester, with little evidence that the students have remembered any of it. But being able to remember things is also an essential life skill. If you cannot remember, you cannot learn. Anything.

Far from teaching it, it is now rank heresy to ask a student to memorize something. A wonderful teacher at my son’s school was fired for it.

Also essential and generally taught at private schools, yet suspiciously ignored at public schools, are the skills needed for leadership: parliamentary procedure, which is to say, how to run a meeting. Rhetoric—notice that it was an ad man who did so well at conveying information in Operation Follow Through, and an ad man who built Khan Academy. Instead of teaching this, our schools are busily teaching that all advertising is evil: their supposed courses in “media literacy.” Debate; most importantly, logical fallacies. Most people have no idea, and this leaves them open to constant manipulation and disastrously bad decisions. These are skills we all need, and society itself needs to function, and we do not regularly teach them.

These all fall under the Humanities. The Humanities are, in essence, the corpus everyone needs to know: the fundamentals of history, philosophy, literature, music, art.

On top of this, and crowning this, of course, the essential foundation of any true education is values--religion. There is no way around this: if you do not know what your goal is, the meaning of your life, you cannot come to any further conclusions about what should or should not be taught or learned or known or done. Without knowing your destination, any path is as good as another.

Ideally, given that we are committed to religious freedom, rather than imposing some state creed—an awful idea, surely—this means a system of school vouchers rather than having state-run “secular” schools with all religious references carefully laundered out. Such a school is not religiously neutral—it is anti-religious. It teaches students it is necessary or advisable to have no values. Which is destructive not only to themselves but to society as a whole.

Infinitely better if parents can enroll their students in religious schools of their choice, run by religious institutions.

To prevent social fragmentation, the core values expressed in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms are, by definition, the core values to which we all must subscribe as Canadians. They need to be taught, systematically, as well as honoured in practice, in all schools. The government’s role should be to ensure that this is done. In the US, the equivalent would be the values of the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence.

A New Mechanics' Institute

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Roney) — Tue, 26 Mar 2019 08:33:00 +0000

Oxford Union

Few seem to understand that a functioning democracy, and a well-functioning civil society in general, including businesses that work, depends crucially on the skills of parliamentary procedure and formal debate. And few seem to understand that these do not come to us spontaneously, but actually go against natural instincts. The natural instinct, after all, is to get upset if anyone disagrees with you.

The English are so good at this. It fits the politeness and decorum of the national character; although which came first is hard to say. Englishmen out for a pint together will debate in these terms; and will deliberately insult one another to harden each other up. Nothing beats the Oxford Union; but watching debate in the British House of Commons, after being used to Ottawa question period on C-Span, is itself a revelation.

We are foolish to suppose that this can be easily and automatically ported to any other culture and society at will. It does not work nearly so well even in Canada or the US. Let alone, say, Vietnam or Iraq. Yet the US government, for one, never seems to get this. It was striking wisdom for the Emir and government of Qatar to understand, and begin the long work of introducing their people to democracy by first setting up debating societies everywhere, hosting the Doha Debates, and sponsoring Al Jazeera. That is the way it must be done, and it will take at least a generation.

More troubling is that, through ignorance or design, the skills of parliamentary procedure and formal debate are rarely taught in the public schools, and never as a core subject, even in Canada or the US. They are, of course, taught rigorously in the British or Canadian private schools.

House of Commons, Ottawa

This is the best way imaginable to create and perpetuate a class system. It means that only the upper classes, who can afford to go to these exclusive schools, learn how to organize and run things. There is also good evidence that it was deliberately done, back in the original “Progressive” era of the 1920s and before. “Progressivism” was always, and still is, about creating and protecting a North American ruling elite.

And this suppression of essential knowledge, as well as being discriminatory, is destructive to society as a whole. Because there is no way any longer that we can keep the unfashionable masses out of management; we need more managers, and progressively fewer dumb and obedient robot helots, as technology advances. And the general population also has the right, in our system, to decide essential matters for all of us, through the ballot box. For the sake of all, they (we) had better know how to make good decisions.

We are seeing the bill come due now, with Antifa goons rioting in the streets and shouting speakers down. And these Antifa goons, note, are generally the nominally better-educated among us. We let the previously unprepared, after all, go to university, opened those gates wide, and flooded the higher levels of the system with folks who have no idea what the various buttons and levers do.

Well-intentioned, no doubt, itself an attempt to end the class system, but ill-informed.

All of this is brought to mind by a unit I am being asked to teach at the moment, on how to write an opinion essay. Something I know something about. I am doing it now.

Mechanics' Institute, Toronto.

Good thought; good idea. But the person who wrote the curriculum, the subject expert himself or herself, obviously has no idea how to do so, let alone how to teach it to someone else. Their instructions are incoherent; they cannot seem, in their own mind, to even distinguish claims from counterclaims, pro from con. They do not grasp the actual structure of an argument.

Their assigned essay topic illustrates the problem: “What can be done about China’s pollution problem?” Following, inevitably, a little lecture about China’s pollution problem and its supposed causes.

In other words, rather than getting to form and express an opinion, the student is being told the “correct” opinion in advance. On a topic on which there is essentially no disagreement. Raise hands, everyone: who here is in favour of pollution?

And no, this is not a Chinese thing. This is an American curriculum.

Isn’t this also what has happened to our current politics, and isn’t this a pressing problem?

Over a century ago, wealthy philanthropists launched “Mechanics’ Institutes” in major cities, where the poorer among us could learn skills needed for the new world of industrialization.

Mechanics' Institute, London, Ontario

We need something like that now again. We need a movement to teach and study debate and parliamentary procedure; how to run a meeting. We need it on the night-school model of the Mechanics’ Institutes, too, because even if the public schools were to instantly reform and introduce the subject, that still sacrifices all the adults who have already completed school. Worse, these same adults are the teachers we have in the schools today. Until they learn it themselves, as we see from my current curriculum, they cannot competently teach it.

Qatar is way ahead of us on this one.

The Factory School

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Roney) — Mon, 13 Nov 2017 09:49:00 +0000

To fix the schools, we need better teachers. We need a better curriculum. But there is one more thing we need, and it is also easy to get, if we have the will. We need better classrooms.

The schools we have now are basically modeled on factories. This is supposedly for efficiency. It does not work. Children are not identical, like car parts, and cannot be treated as such. Worse, treating them as though they are identical objects is an awful lesson in civics in a free democracy.

It is not possible to pitch a lesson properly to all the students in a large class. The dumbest will not get it, and will be left behind. The smartest will be bored out of their minds, and tune out. Most teachers worry only, if at all, about the dumb kids, and tend to slow it all down. Making it worse for the smartest ones.

There is no way around this, in a large class.

Ironically, it was probably better in the old one-room schoolhouse. With a mix of students at different levels, there could be no attempt to have them learn in lock-step.

We used to stream students, to reduce this problem: there were dumb classes and smart classes. This has become politically incorrect. By this system, kids were consigned when young to permanent failure. So we threw them all together into one class, making the problem worse.

The current “efficient” system is insanely wasteful. Properly, no student need fail. Everyone can learn anything; it is just a question of how long it will take them. We end up putting kids through twelve years of schooling, and they come out the other side, and perhaps have learned little or nothing. We have wasted their childhoods.

Fortunately, we now have a simple solution: we teach with computers. With computers, each lesson can be automatically paced to suit each student. If a student does not get the point of a lecture or explanation, he or she can watch the video again, or watch another video on the same topic.

Down with STEM. We Need ROOTS

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Roney) — Sun, 12 Nov 2017 08:14:00 +0000

Improving the quality of teachers is not the only thing we need to do to improve the schools. The curriculum is also a problem, and as much of a problem. We are endlessly perverse in what we choose to teach.

I know there will be howls of protest over this, but the truth is, we waste kids' time in teaching them so much science and math. Everyone but the kids loves STEM. But STEM is not the way to go.

Yes, these fields are important for a lot of good jobs; and important for the advancement of our physical comfort. But for the majority of students who will not go on to STEM careers, it is pretty much a waste of their time. As the old saw goes, how much of your high school algebra did you use today? When today did you need to work out the circumference of a circle? Yet the time lost studying these things kept you away from learning things that might have been important to you in your real life and real career.

If, on the other hand, you do need these bits of knowledge in your job or your life later on, you have almost certainly forgotten them by then. You must pick them up again on the fly anyway—which, fortunately, is easy enough, when and if they are important to you.

Teaching science is an even worse time sink; at least the way we teach it now. We teach it as a set of known facts and “laws.” This is really the antithesis of science, which relies on taking nothing on authority. Inevitably, a significant portion of the “facts” and “laws” the typical student learns in public school are disproven a few years later—sometimes before the text goes to press. The student then wastes his time not just filling his head with useless information, but with things he will later need to laboriously unlearn, or look a fool.

We ought to teach the history of science, to show what science really is: a method, not a set of conclusions. And, of course, we ought to teach the scientific method. We claim to do that sometimes now, but we really never do. We will assign the class an experiment with a known, pre-ordained conclusion. Then, if the experiment does not produce the intended results, we require the student to explain why it failed. This is still teaching the opposite of the scientific method. Moreover, it seems deliberately pointless and boring.

At the same time, there are a lot of essential things, things everyone needs, that we do not teach. Most important among them are ethics and religion. They are, and have always been understood to be, the essence of an education. Unless you understand your goal, nothing else makes any sense.

But these are things we cannot teach in public schools. We do not want government teaching ethics and religion: that way totalitarianism lies. The only solution seems to be either funding all denominational schools, or school vouchers.

Aside from this, we need to teach basic skills: reading, writing, and arithmetic. Which we do, but not very well. Unfortunately, the best way to teach such basic skills is through direct instruction, or as teachers currently call it disparagingly, “drill and kill.” Memorization is itself an invaluable skill, and we ought to teach it deliberately: the practice of memorizing things is of value over and above the value of the things memorized. Unfortunately, far from teaching it, we currently tend to prohibit it.

Beyond and after this, we need to teach rhetoric, parliamentary procedure, and logic, which we do not currently teach at all. For any position in life, it is important to be able to think, to persuade, and to avoid being conned or manipulated. And it is important to be able to work in groups. Yes, we currently make students work in groups, endlessly, but then we do not show them how—or more often, we set up the groups so that they will not work. They become no more than tools for conformity and bullying. Kids need to learn how to run a meeting.

We need to teach basic bookkeeping—vital to any business, but also vital to anyone else, for personal finance.

On top of this, as I think E.D. Hirsch has demonstrated, there is a good case that we need to teach a core of shared cultural knowledge. Without it, you are left outside the cultural dialogue. You cannot read a good newspaper or a college text. This is where history and literature, in particular, come in. And that does not mean some recent book by a “minority” author, for the sake of supposed diversity. And it does not mean the history of some “minority” group. By the logic of the need, that means looking at the most familiar and established authors, and the aspects of history everybody has been most familiar with over the past generations. All those dead white males. Otherwise the exercise is pointless, and another huge waste of students' time.

Teaching a second language might be a good idea, but certainly not the way we teach it now. Growing up in Quebec, we all studied French from grade 3 through high school. And I doubt anyone ever became fluent in French as a result.

The problem was with the goal. It is crazy to try for conversational fluency in a classroom. Conversational fluency comes with speaking practice. It is almost impossible to manage this in a classroom. At best, it is a wildly inefficient use of student time and resources. If you want fluency, you get it on the streets, in the playgrounds, watching TV, hanging out with friends, shopping in the stores. In a classroom, the only useful approach is the old, now always disparaged and condemned “grammar-translation method.” It is universally condemned because it will never make you fluent in the language. True enough, it that is what you want. But it will give you a reading knowledge. This gives you access to all the most important thoughts and all the most important conversations in that language. That is not such a small thing in itself. More importantly, in having to analyse grammar, it will teach you how language works. And to understand how language works is to understand how thought works.

For the same reason, even apart from its own utility, and perhaps even as a suitable replacement, it would be immensely valuable to teach all students how to program. Unlike geometry or algebra, programming skills have an immediate practical payoff. You can make things, right away.

These are the things that everyone can benefit from knowing. If a student then decides to go into some STEM field, that is the time to learn what is specific to that field.

Of course, we are all charging full steam ahead in the opposite direction.

The Light that Failed

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Roney) — Fri, 10 Nov 2017 08:44:00 +0000

One of the saddest things is the world is to see the light of learning go out. Especially in your own children. And I have seen it several times.

At age three or four, kids always seem to be looking forward with great excitement to at last going to school. Certainly my kids were.

By about grade three or four, they always hate school.

Something is wrong here. Love of learning is spontaneous. All of us naturally love to learn.

And that craving for knowledge does not disappear: it is redirected outside of school to learning how to skateboard, how to twerk, how to beat some video game, how to solve Rubik's cube, how to photoshop a picture, how to do almost anything. Learning something new is one of life's great joys.

Only in school is learning considered subversive. Children are actively discouraged from learning, and only “bad” kids fail to get the message. Time taken learning something is seen as time taken away from school.

How could we manage to screw things up so badly?

To begin with, without a free market, any enterprise soon comes to be run for the benefit of the employees, not the customers. Our schools are there for the teachers and the administrators.

Notably, the dumbest university students end up in education, excepting only those who major in public administration—and therefore the dumbest run the schools.

One test in Massachusetts showed that most aspiring public school teachers in that state--73%--could not achieve math standards required of their grade 5 students. The students are on average smarter, and know more, than their teachers. How's that likely to work?

There is a simple principle here: you cannot teach what you do not know.

And another: the best students will be the best teachers. These are the experts at how to learn.

Currently, we are recruiting the worst.

It may be, as many argue, that the best students do not want to be teachers. But it might be worth testing that hypothesis. It may be instead that the best students do not want to go to ed school.

By all reports, you learn nothing there. It is just a lot of busy work. This would be especially frustrating to anyone who is a good student and who loves learning. The educational theories they promote are usually pop psychology: right brain-left brain, “learning styles,” and other notions that never have any scientific basis, nor any basis in the humanities. They have all been pretty comprehensively disproven in the massive “Operation Follow Through” project in the 1970s: every technique sponsored by an ed school did worse than the control.

On the other hand, anyone who has survived classroom life as a student for 16 years or more, particularly at an academically rigorous college, necessarily has a thorough grounding in teaching techniques: in what works, and in what does not work. He or she is not likely to learn anything more of value in a few weeks of classroom observation at ed school. Nor is there any scientific basis for believing classroom observation tells us anything of importance.

In order to justify their existence, the ed schools must continually come up with new theories to teach their students something they do not already know, something that would not have occurred to them naturally, or that they would already have been exposed to in 16 years of classroom attendance. Almost inevitably, these tend to be extremely bad teaching ideas--things no competent teacher would have done. Which the ed school graduate then feels required to introduce to the classrooms of the wider world.

How would that work?

And there is another problem. Any self-governing profession is in essence a cartel, in which the members get to choose their competitors. They have a vested interest in not selecting someone much better at the job them themselves. Accordingly, once the teaching profession established itself as the special preserve of the academically inadequate, it began to work hard to keep good students, and good teachers, out; out of the ed schools, and, if they survive, out of the schools themselves. My daughter, who has been going to a private school, asks, “Why do the best teachers always get fired?”

It is true. And obvious enough to a ten-year-old.

The best prescription for improving the schools is 1) do not hire grads in education, 2) bust the teachers' unions, 3) do not put hiring decisions in the hands of teachers.

Hire the candidate with the best marks from the best school, measured by SAT score required to get in, with a major in the subject they will teach. A grad degree in the subject if available. This is not complicated.

How to Teach History

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Roney) — Mon, 16 Oct 2017 09:04:00 +0000

When I was a kid in Montreal, the city featured a great private history museum, “Le Musée de Cire Historique Canadien.” “The Wax Museum of Canadian History.”

It was a great idea for teaching history, and I feel it is a pity that it is gone. The problem with museums often is that it is just not that interesting to look at some artifact in a glass case. And it does not tell you much of anything. This was probably a less expensive way to go—the museum was run as a profitable private enterprise—and was more useful.

This museum, instead, was well designed to be memorable. No doubt this was done primarily to pull in paying customers, not to be pedagogical about things—but as it turns out, the customer is usually right. The wax figures brought history to life, left you with a vivid image in the mind’s eye of some event. This could then became a hook on which to hang your otherwise perhaps dry historical facts.

Most wax museums are mostly portraits in wax of famous people. This, to me, makes them boring and useless. If they are currently famous, you already have a good image in your mind of what these people look like. So you are learning nothing, seeing nothing new, by seeing their portrait in wax. All you get is a sense of how close the resemblance is. Big deal. A test of skill, I suppose. And usually the resemblance falls well short of being convincing, leaving only a sense of disappointment. An “uncanny valley” effect leaves many figures looking ghoulish, zombie-like. You feel as though you are looking at someone’s cadaver.

I went to the wax museum in Dublin a few years ago. Mostly wax figures of famous writers and politicians, sitting around in chairs, which is about all a famous writer or politician ever does, moderately well done. Nothing visually interesting there. There was no chance to suspend disbelief: what is the thrill in seeing James Joyce done as a wax dummy? And certainly the wax dummy left no clearer image in your mind than the photos in the history books or on the dustcovers. With one exception: an image of Grace O’Malley, the 16th century Irish pirate, standing and pointing a finger at the horizon, really looked shockingly alive, and has burned itself into my memory.

Statue of Grace O'Malley, Mayo, Ireland.

Here, the trick was in the choice of subject. The artist was not constrained to compete with the camera. Neither I nor the sculptor had any idea what the breathing Grace O’Malley looked like. So he was free to create something really lifelike and striking.

This was the approach taken throughout the Musée de Cire Historique. No attempts to reproduce famous people whose features were already familiar to anyone, except perhaps Saint Andre Bessette. Creating something far more interesting, compelling, and worthwhile.

The other thing the Musée de Cire Historique did right was to put in lots of blood and gore; lots of drama. Most scenes implied action. This is just the sort of thing that gets carefully cut out of our schoolbooks and our stories for children, ensuring that they are boring and the kids will remember nothing. Instead, we throw all the blood and gore into things we present to parents, who at least ought to have grown out of such stuff.

Here is a sample of some of the dioramas that fixed themselves in my memory. I recently found them shown on a web site (https://studiopluche.blogspot.ca/2011/07/le-musee-de-cire-historique-canadien.html). These are the ones I instantly recalled. I was probably not older than 12 or 13 the last time I saw them.

A rather interesting experiment, then, in what is mnemonically, meaning educationally, sound:

The funeral of a dead child in the early Christian community. This is obviously going to be gripping to a child—seeing a child about their own age dead. The palm implies martyrdom: a story is evoked.

Christians waiting to be fed to the lions. Note the children included.

Roman gladiators. For what it is worth, this, with the previous diorama, are the two I seem to best recall.

Cartier lands at Gaspe: the discovery of Canada.

Note that the event is shown from the Indian perspective. This informs us, I think, of an important truth. Contrary to what you often hear, Canadians have never considered Indians some despised foreign “other.” In our hearts, we have always thought of ourselves as the Indians.

Americans are the same.

Saint Marguerite d’Youville conceals an English officer and misdirects an Indian warrior looking for him.

You might see this as a negative portrayal of Indians. The Indian certainly looks scary and threatening. But that is historically accurate. The whole point of Indian war paint was to look scary and threatening. And the women are plainly not afraid. There is no visible concern here that the Indian might massacre unarmed women. Rather bad form, if he is indeed a bloodthirsty savage.

The women are showing mercy by protecting their sworn enemy, the Englishman, against their ally, the Indian.

Ever wax museum I have been to ever since has been, by comparison, a disappointment.

These pictures are taken from https://studiopluche.blogspot.ca/2011/07/le-musee-de-cire-historique-canadien.html and I hope count as fair dealing for review purposes. Please do go to the link to see more. The original page is in French, but remember, if your French is rusty or nonexistent, there is always Google translate.

The Holocaust of the Mind and Heart

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Roney) — Fri, 25 Aug 2017 13:23:00 +0000

A good friend told me recently that a blog post I wrote was over his head. He has now, perhaps, told me why.

He asked me what my evidence was for the case I was making.

Which seemed odd, since I thought I had laid it all out pretty systematically.

So I repeated the list of literary references I had used:

Heracles
Moses
Romulus
Cyrus
Telephus
Gilgamesh
Lohengrin
Siegfried
Perseus
Sargon
Paris
Karna
Tristan
Danae
Agaea
Andromeda
Ophelia.

His response was that he had only ever heard of one person on that list, Moses, “but never read his work.”

This, I think, says something important.

This is not a man off the street. This is a guy with two degrees, a college instructor. A college English instructor, an instructor in the Humanities. How much worse the case must be for the average Canadian or American.

Moses, of course, wrote the Bible. Or at least the first five books of it.

Moses rescued from the rushes--Dura-Europos

I think this shows we have stopped educating our rising generations in any meaningful sense. We stopped some time ago. These stories and texts used to be the entirety of our education, in terms of its content.

For good reason. These stories told us what we most needed to know.

There is no way to talk about non-physical experiences of any sort without using either metaphor or narrative or both—an “objective correlative,” as TS Eliot calls it. Like these stories.

Yet ALL of our experiences are non-physical. All of them. As Berkeley rightly pointed out.

Without this common language of symbol and myth, we can no longer communicate with each another, on anything other than a caveman level.

“Gimme meat.” “Sex now.” We can talk only about physical wants.

No wonder modern life feels increasingly empty and meaningless. No wonder there is a “spiritual catastrophe” going on, as Leonard Cohen called it. No wonder the statistics for depression and for mental illness generally are scraping the stratosphere en apparent route to infinity and beyond. No wonder America, Europe, “Western civilization,” and civilization generally (it is a mirage to suppose there is any intact civilization outside the West that might take over. They all fell earlier.) seem to be coming apart. No wonder we can no longer talk to one another, but only swing our fists. Even in the bedroom, between men and women.

This is where it began.

People have solid grounds, of course, for thinking studying literature, myth, religion, philosophy, and history is a waste of time. There are no jobs to be had there.

But this is tautological: there are no jobs there, any more, because nobody any longer values myth, literature, religion, philosophy, and history. There is not even any puzzle here involving chickens and eggs: the devaluation had to come first, and then there were no jobs.

Granted, these stories may not give you much practical help currently in finding or even performing a job.

But a job is not much good when everything else is falling apart; especially if you are psychotic, drug addicted, and hopelessly alone. You may not be making it in for work anyway.

And those jobs that need have nothing to do with the Humanities are exactly those jobs that are easily replaced by a machine. And that is already happening, rapidly.

I am not talking here of the “Western canon.” “Western” is a red herring. We would do as well to study the Vedas, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Confucian classics and those two vast literatures, of India and China. (I do not speak here of the Quran and Muslim literature, because it is already a part of the larger West). In fact, we really should study them all. But the same myth motifs and plots tend to be found all over the world. So do the same philosophical issues, and the same philosophical positions.

Dragons are in folk tales everywhere.

Besides giving us a common language of narrative, allusion, and metaphor, so that we can communicate our own thoughts and feelings to one another, necessarily, most of the best thinking of the past ten thousand years or more have been expressed in this language of myth and story.

If we do not know or understand it, all of that is lost.

This is, taken together, the myths, the stories, the fairy tales, the philosophy, the recorded history, the literature, the rock upon which all civilization is built. It is what our passage through the cosmos on this strange round rock has been about, as sentient beings.

You don’t think anyone figured out anything important or useful in those thousands of years?

You think it is better to smash all the statues, forget it all and start again from scratch?

Clearly, many people do.

These are what is properly known as bad people.

And this impulse seems to be deep within the culture now. My friend’s protest that he could not understand in the end still seems odd. He did not really need to know any of these characters or their stories. I had not been relying on allusion: I think I had given the relevant details when I referred to them.

It was as if he saw a myth or a word from literature or history, and a lamp in his mind at once went off.

There is worse. When I noted that the typical fairy tale involved a wicked parent or step-parent, my friend queried this. He said he could think of only one example, Cinderella.

I would have thought that Disney had preserved at least a decent selection of the traditional fairy stories. Perhaps, however, they pass over us in flickers of light and are forgotten, as the typical movie seems to be. It is only a few hours entertainment, and in most cases we cannot remember much about them a few days later. Eye candy, but leaving nothing to ponder about.

Fairy tales do not belong in that medium. They were orally transmitted for unknown generations. This means they were composed to be memorized, contemplated, thought about in our solitude and leisure.

Here is the list I offered him, more or less off the top of my head, of familiar fairy tales that seem to include some version of the theme of a wicked parent.

Briar Rose

How many of them do you know well enough that you could retell the basic story to your child? This, after all, is the medium, memory and oral transmission and retelling, for which they were intended.

Snow White
Hansel and Gretel
Rapunzel
Little Red Riding Hood
Cupid and Psyche
Puss in Boots
The Ugly Duckling
Dick Whittington and his Cat
Aladdin
The Gingerbread Man
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
The Little Match Girl
The Musicians of Bremen
Sleeping Beauty (Disney version of Briar Rose)
Briar Rose (Grimm version)
Rumpelstiltskin
Beauty and the Beast

Perhaps it was here, in the nursery, where the holocaust began. This is when and how we began seeing ourselves and other people as objects.

Steve Jobs on School Choice

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Roney) — Tue, 25 Jul 2017 08:26:00 +0000

He gives a good argument for ending the government schools monopoly:

https://fee.org/articles/steve-jobs-wanted-to-break-up-the-education-monopoly/