Take Five: The Real Legacy of John McCain
How John McCain’s funeral reunited the squabbling wings of the American Left.
Author: Thomas Fleming
Sweatshops of the Mind: The Rise of Bureaucracy
Community control of schools run by dedicated teachers who looked after each child individually runs counter to the modern assumption that every human endeavor can be turned into a science. Every real “science” requires a theoretical framework, hence the need in educationism for theories of cognitive development and child psychology. Even the acts of learning and teaching must be analyzed, broken down into their components, tested, measured, and graphed with all sorts of coefficients and Greek letters that really mean very little more than up and down, more and less. In the years when I was reading grant proposals...
The Wilsonian Empire
The empire of our good friend Clyde Wilson is spreading. Not only does it encompass Shotwell Publishing but it now includes Reckonin, a Southern political website developed by his daughter, which just put up a revised and expanded version of my off-the-cuff piece, “What is To Be Done?”
Crazy Town
In Fear, the latest spasm of gossip and fear-mongering by the infamous (among people of sense and decency) Bob Woodward, the gullible American public is given a portrait of the Trump White House as a cross between Bedlam and the palace of Caligula. Trump supporters are outraged.
Take Five: The Scandalous Pope
Then said he unto the disciples, It is impossible but that offences [that is, scandals, stumbling blocks] will come: but woe unto him, through whom they come! It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones.
Sweatshops of the Mind, Part II: The Schooling We Have Lost
During the 1990’s, in Rockford, Illinois, an appointed federal magistrate usurped the authority to decide what schools should be opened or closed or built, how much tax money should be spent on which programs in which schools, and how many white children could be admitted to the gifted programs. I was among those who condemned the magistrate’s power-grab as both unconstitutional and immoral, and, although the local powers-that-be–including the newspaper and big business interests–condemned the magistrate’s critics as racists, a federal judge ruled in our favor.
Sweatshops of the Mind: The American School Bureaucracy, Part I
The most significant conclusions of the National Education Goals Panel was the familiar complaint: Further study is needed. More data needs to be collected in every area… and most of the panel members agreed that the main emphasis in the ongoing crusade to improve our schools should be on assembling data and devising new instruments for testing and measuring progress. This has been the burden of that same old song that was sung before John Dewey had ever corrupted the first mind of a student.
What Is To Be Done?
The flaws in such [conservative] strategies are pretty obvious. Most obvious is that they are rooted only in nostalgia or folklore, not in the realities of power or the realities of human nature. This leads to the second flaw: They simply don’t work. They never have, they never will.
