“If you can read this,” goes a popular bumper sticker, “thank a teacher.” And if a bumper sticker is all you can read, and if your idea of citizenship is to vote for the politician who promises the most, you can thank a teacher for that too.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why would a kid attracted to AltRight fall for Jim Morrison, Freud, and Nietzsche? Why wouldn’t he? Morrison is simply a latter-day Peter Pan on acid, the perfect model for displaced white kids who don’t know who or what they are
Morgana King died in March. Born in the province of Catania (Sicily), she moved to New York with her family at an early age and, with a clear if wispy voice, she enjoyed a fine career as a singer of popular music with a strong jazz orientation. Her recording of the Kern/Wodehouse standard “Bill” is a classic performance. Those who do not have an ear for popular music may recall her as Mamma Corleone. Since “de mortuis nihil nisi bonum,” should be the rule for normal human beings (which excludes politicians, journalists, and academics), I’ll say nothing about the late...
These days, when they tire of texting and tweeting, mental incompetents take to the streets and pretend to be political activists.
