February 27.   at Ran Prieur (Wednesday, February 27)

February 27. Related to bees, some good news: Sting leads to charges for illegal chinese honey importation.

February 26.   at Ran Prieur (Tuesday, February 26)

February 26. Short new post on the landblog/houseblog, linking to a big new page about a project I've been working on for months: building two Top Bar Hives so I can start beekeeping.

Una Buena Razón para No Construir el Oleoducto Keystone XL: La Justicia   Alan Furth at Center for a Stateless Society (Wednesday, February 27)

The following article is translated into Spanish from the English original, written by Jason Lee Byas.

El oleoducto Keystone XL ha inspirado una buena cantidad de controversia. Sin embargo, la controversia debería ser nula para los que estamos a favor de los mercados liberados. Cualquiera que se considere un libertario debería oponerse a su construcción enfática y definitivamente.

Sin embargo, la revista libertaria estadounidense Reason publicó un video en el que se detallan “tres razones para construir el oleoducto”. El editor Nick Gillespie nos explica que, “1. El petróleo no se va a quedar enterrado bajo tierra para siempre… 2. El oleoducto no es un desastre ecológico en potencia… 3. El oleoducto es bueno para la economía”.

Aunque sea tan solo en aras del argumento, concedamos los tres puntos anteriores. Aún así, los libertarios deberíamos oponernos a la construcción del oleoducto, porque los libertarios valoramos los derechos de propiedad — y el oleoducto tal como está concebido es un gigantesco monumento a la manera en que el gobierno viola los derechos de propiedad de la gente de común y corriente.

Desde que comenzó a planificar la construcción de Keystone XL, TransCanada Corporation ha utilizado doctrinas de dominio eminente para robarse más de cien terrenos solamente en el estado de Texas . Y si se le da la luz verde, el oleoducto correrá por la llanura como bandido en en el mejor estilo de película western.

Por supuesto, la empresa en principio ofrece a aquellos que están contentos viviendo donde viven la oportunidad de negociar su evacuación. Pero cuando eso no dé el resultado esperado, los dueños de las tierras recibirán cartas como la que recibió Julia Trigg Crawford, diciendo que “Si Keystone no puede negociar exitosamente la adquisición voluntaria de las servidumbres necesarias, tendrá que recurrir al ejercicio de su derecho estatutario de dominio eminente”.

Tal como una vez lo señaló Lysander Spooner, al menos el ladrón de carretera “no pretende tener ningún derecho legítimo” sobre la propiedad de su víctima.

“The Government is US?” Not Unless We’re Citigroup   Kevin Carson at Center for a Stateless Society (Wednesday, February 27)

Jill Lesser, head of the Center for Copyright Information (an intellectual property lobby  posing as an “educational” body), recently assured the public that “six strikes” provisions of an agreement between the music and motion picture industries and several major Internet Service Providers won’t adversely affect provision of free wireless Internet by public libraries, restaurants, coffee houses and other public gathering places.

Nonsense, responded the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Although, as Lesser argued, a small independent coffee house or brew pub might not have its Internet connection terminated over “infringing” activity by a customer, it could easily have its bandwidth cut back to 256kbps for days with every accusation — making it essentially unusable.

And anyway, it’s not like Big Content sees a major blow to free wireless as a bad thing. ISPs, which have been working with the RIAA and MPAA for years in lobbying for totalitarian digital copyright laws, hate free wireless as much as Chris Dodd hates The Pirate Bay. Any harm to free wireless — Lesser’s dodge notwithstanding — is a feature, not a bug, in “six strikes.”

This is fairly typical. In some cases — as with opposition to the draconian SOPA copyright bill by Google and other content aggregators — the corporate ruling clas temporarily divides against itself, and we can exploit those divisions. But more often than not, monopoly capital unites in  lockstep coalition.

Back in the 1950s, John Kenneth Galbraith and Daniel Bell depicted the American political system as one of “countervailing power” or “interest group pluralism.” If the nineteenth century liberal model of public sovereignty was obsolete and the individual no longer counted for anything, at least the state was forced to strike a balance between the major contending interests in society.

But interest group pluralism didn’t bear much looking into, as Power Elite theorists like sociologists C. Wright Mills and G. William Domhoff demonstrated. Interest group competition took place mostly on the second tier of policy-making. The commanding heights of the power structure were oases of cooperation, not competition: Interlocking directorates of large corporations, banks, regulatory agencies,  political appointees and think tanks, all headed by the same recirculating group of personnel.

Would Conscription Curb US Militarism? Thom Hartmann Thinks So   Dave Hummels at Center for a Stateless Society (Wednesday, February 27)

“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root…”

-Henry David Thoreau

Walden (1854)

Do you ever get the feeling that progressives have run out of ideas? This thought crossed my mind  when I read Thom Hartmann’s “The Draft: A War-Killer” on Truthout.   Hartmann advocates reinstatement of conscription in a “new and improved form.”  He proclaims that the military industrial complex “would finally be held in check if we were to re-instate a draft.” Hartmann seems oblivious to the fact that the military industrial complex grew and prospered with a draft in place.

The hook for Hartmann’s piece is the upcoming tenth anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq. “Would we still be in Iraq today,” he asks, “or even have gone to war with Iraq — if there was a military draft in this country?” He claims that the war in Iraq has lasted longer than other major US wars where a draft was in place, such as the Civil War, World War I, World War II, Korea and Vietnam.

Right away, Hartmann runs into problems.  The Vietnam war is generally described as having been fought from 1965 to 1975, so it lasted at least as long as Iraq has.  And in actuality the US was involved in Vietnam for years before that.

Hartmann further argues from several flawed premises.  For instance, he claims that conscription is “a great leveler,”  ensuring that people from all backgrounds  share in the sacrifice. But that claim contradicts much of what we now know about the Civil War (in which two out of three Union draftees were hired “substitutes”) and about Vietnam, the last war in which conscription was used.

Former US Vice-President Dick Cheney  received five draft deferments while flunking out of Yale, struggling through six years of college and impregnating his wife (in the nick of time, it turned out). Shotgun Dick famously told the Washington Post,  “I had other priorities in the 60s than military service.”

Cheney’s running mate, former US President George W. Bush (son of George H.W. and grandson of Prescott) protected the America South from a Viet Cong invasion while serving with (and apparently deserting from) Air National Guard Units in Texas and Alabama.

February 26.   at Ran Prieur (Tuesday, February 26)

February 26. Short new post on the landblog/houseblog, linking to a big new page about a project I've been working on for months: building two Top Bar Hives so I can start beekeeping.

Who Funds the Climate Denial Industry?   stuartbramhall at The Most Revolutionary Act (Tuesday, February 26)

According to the Guardian, a newly released Greenpeace study reveals it’s not just Exxon and the Koch brothers who fund the climate denial industry. In a recent article, they describe how a secretive charity known as Donors Trust enabled anonymous billionaires to donate nearly $120m to more than 100 groups campaigning to cast doubt on the science behind climate change. This money helped to build a vast network of thinktanks and activist groups dedicated to redefining climate change as a highly polarizing “wedge issue” for hardcore conservatives – as opposed to a neutral scientific fact. During the same period the oil billionaire Koch brothers, who are usually credited with financing climate change denial, donated only a fraction of this amount.

It’s no mystery why the oil, gas and coal industry wants to stymie efforts by the US and other governments to cut carbon emissions by subsidizing renewable energy, public transportation and other initiatives to cut fossil fuel consumption.

The study sheds new light on the so-called “scientists” Donors Trust pays to produce “research” proving there is absolutely no link between carbon emissions, increasing CO2 concentrations, melting ice caps and the recent rash of catastrophic weather events.

Greenpeace writes in more detail about this research (with links to the original data) in their February 15^th blog

Photo credit Greenpeace

Crossposted at Daily Censored

Bureaucratic Rationality #7: the Louisiana State Health Department vs. Health and Adequate Nutrition in Louisiana   Rad Geek at Rad Geek People's Daily (Tuesday, February 26)

From occupied Louisiana, here’s how a state Health Department is forcing homeless shelters to destroy demonstrably safe and healthy meat because even though they accept the safety record of the slaughterhouse that processed it, they don’t recognize the organization that donated it, and, even though venison is something that humans have subsisted on since before recorded history, it’s not an approved meat source to be distributed commercially.

SHREVEPORT, La. (CBS Houston) — Louisiana’s State Health Department forced a homeless shelter to destroy $8,000 worth of deer meat because it was donated from a hunter organization.

KTBS-TV reports that the Shreveport-Bossier Rescue Mission lost 1,600 pounds of venison because the state’s Health Department doesn’t recognize Hunters for the Hungry, an organization that allows hunters to donate any extra game to charity.

We didn’t find anything wrong with it, Rev. Henry Martin told KTBS. It was processed correctly, it was packaged correctly.

The trouble began last month after the Department of Health and Hospitals received a complaint that deer meat was being served at the homeless shelter. A health inspector went out and told the homeless shelter that deer meat was not allowed to be served and that is had to be destroyed.

Although the meat was processed at a slaughterhouse (Bellevue) that is permitted by the Louisiana Department of Agriculture to prepare and commercially distribute meat obtained from approved farms, deer are not an approved meat source to be distributed commercially, the department said on its Facebook page. And because hunters brought the deer to the slaughterhouse, there is no way to verify how the deer were killed, prepared or stored.

So, therefore:

Martin says that bleach had to be poured onto the meat in order to destroy it.

They threw it in the dumpster and poured Clorox on it, Martin told KTBS. Not only are we losing out and it’s costing us money, the people that are hungry aren’t going to get as quality of food, the hunter that’s given his meat in good faith is losing out.

While we applaud the good intentions of the hunters who donated this meat, we must protect the people who eat at Rescue Mission, and we cannot allow a potentially serious health threat to endanger the public, the Health Department stated.

— CBS Houston (25 February 2013), Louisiana Forces Homeless Shelter to Destroy $8,000 Worth of Deer Meat

“When it says Libby’s Libby’s Libby’s on the label label label”   Sarah Skwire at Bleeding Heart Libertarians (Tuesday, February 26)

The current online kerfuffle among libertarians (and Horwitz and I had nothing to do with this one!) involves labels. Glenn Beck has recently relabeled himself from conservative to libertarian. Alexander McCobin, the president of Students for Liberty, joined a lot of other long-time libertarians in questioning the sincerity of that relabeling, and in return Beck labeled McCobin a jerk, a Fascist, and a Nazi. It’s internet gold.

This kind of argument is one of the things that makes me nervous about labels. As nearly everyone involved in the kerfuffle has noted, labels that demarcate who’s in and who’s out have the nasty whiff of the purity test about them. The last thing libertarians need is to become more like the American Kennel Club than we already are. Debating whether one is insufficiently anti-state, too anti-state, or just anti-state enough seems to me to be about as sensible  as deciding whether a chihuahua’s expression is sufficiently saucy.

Now, I know which of these two guys I’d back if they were entering the Westminster dog show, but that’s not important for this post, because what I want to talk about is another way that labels can be a problem.

They’re too good at what they are designed to do.

Labels are designed to simplify things. They group people together on the ground of common characteristics. There’s nothing wrong with this. It’s remarkably efficient and—like the scientific taxonomy that groups life by kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species—it makes a lot of things possible that would not otherwise be. Imagine a discussion of religion where we couldn’t use the labels Christian, Muslim, Jew, and Hindu, for example, but instead had to describe—every time—the relevant differences in theology.

However, the precision of labels as used by scientists is not often reflected in non-scientific writing or in conversation. Instead we are treated to conversations like some I have had recently, where I’m asked if I’m a feminist, say yes, and am told that therefore I must be a socialist, or support the minimum wage hike and Obamacare. Or, I’m asked what kind of philosopher I am (a question guaranteed to make a poet’s head explode), and I say that while I’m not a philosopher, I’ve always thought that Kant had a point about not treating other people as means to your own ends. Naturally I am then told that I am a Kantian and must subscribe to a long list of beliefs that seem, to my interlocutor, to follow logically, but seem to me to be entirely unrelated.

What Sequestration Amounts to   noreply@blogger.com (Sheldon Richman) at Free Association (Tuesday, February 26)

Source: Congressional Budget Office

HT: Cato Institute

Big Bad Sequestration   noreply@blogger.com (Sheldon Richman) at Free Association (Tuesday, February 26)

Can More Government Coercion Curb U.S. Militarism? Thom Hartmann Thinks So.   Dave Hummels at Center for a Stateless Society (Tuesday, February 26)

We oppose conscription because we are internationalists,

anti-militarists and are opposed to all wars waged by capitalist governments.

We will fight for what we choose to fight for; we will never fight simply

because we are ordered to fight.

                                        –Transcript of Record: Supreme Court of the United States, Emma Goldman and      Alexander Berkman, Plaintiffs-in-Error, vs. the United States (Jewish Women’s Archive. “Manifesto of the No-Conscription League.” [Viewed on February 26, 2013] <http://jwa.org/media/manifesto-of-no-conscription-league>.)

Pipelines and Privileged Profits vs. Private Property Rights   Rad Geek at Rad Geek People's Daily (Monday, February 25)

Here’s a great op-ed from Jason Lee Byas at C4SS, in which he takes sometime libertarian Nick Gillespie to task for a recent pro-business op-ed in favor of the Keystone XL pipeline: One Reason Not to Build the Keystone XL Pipeline: Justice. From the column:

The Keystone XL pipeline has inspired a lot of controversy. For defenders of freed markets, however, it shouldn’t. Libertarians should emphatically and unequivocally oppose the pipeline. . . . Since beginning to plan Keystone XL, TransCanada Corporation has used eminent domain to steal more than a hundred tracts of land in Texas alone. If it gets the green light, the pipeline will run up through the plains like a burglar on a spree. Of course, the company does initially offer those who have what they want a chance to make the transaction voluntarily. When that doesn’t work, though, unsuspecting landowners receive letters like the one Julia Trigg Crawford got, saying If Keystone is unable to successfully negotiate the voluntary acquisition of the necessary easements, it will have to resort to the exercise of its statutory right of eminent domain.

As Lysander Spooner once remarked, at least a highwayman does not pretend that he has any rightful claim to your property.

If you’re like the Crawfords, any deviation from that final offer and you’ll hear nothing from TransCanada until your land’s condemned. As word spreads, landowners feel threatened. They scramble to agree with whatever crumbs they’re offered, before their land just gets taken instead.

. . . Whatever justifications are offered for a hypothetical, peacefully acquired pipeline do not justify the real world pipeline. At least no more than justifications for a hypothetical parking lot would justify one built by taking a wrecking ball to Nick Gillespie’s home. If the title libertarian is to mean anything, it must mean a defense of justice. It cannot, and must not, mean endorsing feudalism whenever it’s good for the economy.

— Jason Lee Byas, One Reason Not to Build the Keystone XL Pipeline: Justice, at the Center for a Stateless Society (23 February 2013)

February 25.   at Ran Prieur (Monday, February 25)

February 25. Unrelated links. A reader sends this inspiring article on India's rice revolution, a new growing method that increases yields without degrading the soil or feeding economic domination.

A Radical Alternative: Teaching Students to Think   stuartbramhall at The Most Revolutionary Act (Monday, February 25)

Lakeside School Seattle

This is final in a series of guest posts by Dr Danny Weil from an article (World Class Standards: Whose World, Which Economic Classes and What Standards?) he originally published in Daily Censored.

In the ninth section, Dr Weil describes the alternative – namely critical thinking standards – to neo-liberal education standards. This post summarizes a discussion that is robust in the academic literature but totally absent from the corporate media.

***

What Might Critical Thinking Standards Look Like and How Might We Link Them to Accountability

By Dr Danny Weil

“The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives.” - Robert Maynard Hutchins

There are no eternal facts as there are no absolute truths. - Friedrich Nietzsche

Although post-formalism is critical of the current conservative standards debate for the reasons discussed, post-formalists also recognize the need for authentic standards to assess and measure progress among students.  They too believe that teachers and students should be held accountable and responsible, but they also believe that society itself must be held accountable; that accountability must be shared between individuals and the social structures they live in and that both the objective and subjective conditions of society must be understood to create this shared accountability.

Post-formalism is interested in assessing how students think, not what they think, and they want standards and accountability tied to what it means to be a critical thinker.  Post-formalists are also committed to helping students develop the ability to assess themselves; the ability to develop and apply criteria to their thinking in the interest of self-improvement and continuous lifelong learning.  They begin with the human being—looking to define what it means to be human and intelligent and then develop “standards” to assess this humanness and intelligence.  Authentic standards, as they might be developed by post-formalists, don’t abandon the teaching of basic skills. On the contrary, they seek to teach basic skills within an environment of inquiry that enhances and assesses critical and creative thinking—not simply to teach basic skills in isolation as repetitive boring activities.  They are concerned that skills are best learned and internalized through their use in harmony with the construction of collaborative and individual projects.

Teachers who teach for critical thinking are interested in developing within their students their capacity to solve problems, develop empathy and humility; to make rational decisions and continuously assess their thinking to determine its strengths, weaknesses and limitations.  They seek to imbue in their students a sense of imagination and curiosity that calls on them to seek complex answers to complex questions in a world with others — to approach learning as an act of “figuring out what they don’t know.”  They are particularly interested in helping their students develop effective modes of thinking in the cognitive areas of abstract, systematic, evaluative, and collaborative thinking and they are aware of the affective dimension of emotional intelligence and its dialectical relationship to creative and critical thought.  They endeavor to create a curriculum that helps their students subject what they think they know to critical scrutiny in the interest of achieving the best results, the best decisions, the best thinking and the best solutions to human problems.   They understand that the real curriculum is life and they work with multiple intelligences and offer varied and interdisciplinary opportunities for students to develop these intelligences.  Finally, critical and creative teachers are concerned with all of the above as it affects good judgment, innovation, cooperative living, collaborative problem-solving, and a developing a more productive and happier life—not simply making better machines or consumer products.  The following are just some examples of what some critical and creative thinking standards might look like, but they are in no way meant to be definitive or universal.  As you will see, they are what we want our students to do and can be assessed only through performance or portfolio assessment.  They are not offered as a checklist or processes that must be taught in isolation, but as the type of mental processes that critical thinking might employ when solving problems and making decisions:

• Evaluate data and evidence
• Compare and contrast similarities and differences
• Explore actions, decisions, and conclusions of oneself and others
• Evaluate actions, decisions, and solutions of oneself and others
• Clarify generalizations
• Reason inductively, from the particular to the abstract
• Avoid over-generalizations and oversimplifications
• Recognize the logic of points of view
• Recognize arguments, analyze them, and then evaluate them
• Distinguish between relevant and irrelevant information and data
• Identify sources of information and develop a criteria for determining reliability of these sources
• Develop one’s own viewpoint, perspective and outlook
• Think about one’s thinking in the interest of transformative metacogntion
• Listen critically to others
• Transfer abstract insights into everyday life
• Reason interdisciplinary and synthesize subject-matter insights
• Recognize decisions, analyze them, and evaluate them
• Identify, develop, evaluate, and apply criteria to ideas, products, and performances of one’s self and others
• Make informed decisions by examining options and anticipating consequences of actions
• Recognize and describe systems and their interdependence
• Work effectively in groups to accomplish goals
• Reason historically, conceiving of places, times, and conditions different than one’s own
• Recognize the influence of diverse cultural perspectives on human thought and behavior
• Develop independent thinking and an investigative orientation
• Develop intellectual empathy
• Develop intellectual humility and an insight into egocentric thinking
• Develop intellectual imagination and curiosity
• Develop intellectual efficacy and confidence in their reasoning abilities
• Develop a tolerance for ambiguity
• Develop intellectual perseverance and discipline when confronting obstacles and problems
• Develop intellectual courage
• Develop intellectual civility when dialoguing
• Develop intellectual integrity

Discussing, questioning, and dialoguing about these and other critical thinking standards would serve to recast the debate regarding teaching as simply the transmission of information and ideas.  It would embrace and call attention to the fact that the act of education is at once an act of communication and dialogue in search of significance and meaning.  Critical thinking standards would allow teachers to engage in teaching as an act of love and creativity—as opposed to instrumentality and technological control.  And of course, since critical thinking develops and build character, these standards would help students manage their lives as opposed to having them managed, author their existence in favor of having their existence authored, and govern their personal and social behavior as opposed to having their behavior governed.

These critical thinking processes (I use this term to differentiate between these ideas as processes and these ideas as skills), can be seen as distinctly different than basic skills.  Both are important and both should be tested.  Yet many teachers have never thought about the difference between basic skills and critical thinking processes.  Understanding that these processes are uniquely different from what we are told are basic skills, is the first step in understanding how they might be taught and assessed.  It affords us a starting place from which to dialogue, discuss, and question the development of more authentic standards and assessment.

Developing a Public Language of Literacy and Tools for Assessment

“In teaching for thinking, we are not only interested in how many answers students know, but also in knowing how to behave when they DON’T know.  Intelligent behavior is performed in response to questions and problems the answers to which are NOT immediately know.  We are interested in observing how students produce knowledge rather than how they merely reproduce knowledge.  The critical attribute of intelligent human beings is not only having information, but knowing how to act on it.” – Art Costa, What Human Beings do When They  Behave Intelligently 1994

Much has been written within the last ten years about authentic changes in critical thinking assessment tools and techniques— from the use of portfolio assessment to performance assessment.  And there is no doubt that some of the most exciting work in authentic assessment today is coming from those who will and are using it—classroom teachers.  Utilizing such authentic assessment tools as reading portfolios, video portfolios, journals, and thinking and listening portfolios to assess critical thinking, can all call upon students to assess their own thinking and the work they are doing while providing the classroom teacher with a documented method for authentic assessment that meets the needs of parents and the public who correctly search for some accountability in education.  This has both the dual benefit of allowing students to take responsibility for their learning while at the same time freeing the teacher to become a facilitator of thinking as opposed to a routinized clerk.  Teachers who utilize authentic assessment techniques to assess critical thinking, know that it is based upon authentic learning that asks students to probe the cognitive and affective dimensions of how they come to understand what they think they understand.  Furthermore, with authentic assessment, teachers, students, and parents can observe student performance and infer concepts about their literacy from these performances; thereby enabling them to work with students in the interest of continual self-improvement.  This can vary from the observing the range of reading and writing skills that students employ, to what these performances show us as teachers.  From observing students’ strategies and what they do when they read and write, for example, teachers can deduce their attitudes and dispositions and help them develop emotional and affective dimensions of intelligence.  Authentic also assessment allows educators to continually improve their own instructional techniques, to collaborate as intellectuals as they find out more about how students learn, integrate knowledge, and attempt to develop their capacity to think critically about their curriculum and how they might work with students to develop knowledge.

How we assess students and what we assess, virtually drives, shapes, and influences what happens within the classroom.   Assessment shapes the curriculum as much as the curriculum shapes assessment.  Understanding the underlying assumptions and inferences that guide the current conservative approach to assessment and contrasting this with an active literacy, or post-formalist approach to learning and teaching is essential for increasing our understanding of how students learn.  What’s more, we must make our post-formal positions on assessment understandable and accessible to parents and the community.  We must feel compelled to denude the mythology employed by the elite merchants of prevarication and work with parents to construct a vision of what it means to be actively literate and educated in today’s society—what it means to think critically.  This means that the education of children simultaneously develops as the education of parents and communities, as we collaboratively learn to forge a partnership and dialogue within our communities regarding intelligence and learning.  We must look for venues to discuss new ideas, whether it is in our unions, our churches, mosques, temples, at the grocery store or in the mall.  We can never allow the mythology of market driven forces to script educational theatre. Instead we must struggle to pierce the veil of social and political mendacity and proclaim the conservative standards debate for what it really is—a mythology, a prescription and recipe that is not in the interests of either ourselves or our children.

We also must document students’ performances and provide open, public meetings and forums where parents and students are invited to engage in a dialogue about learning and assessment with their children.  This will assist parents in understanding what it truly means to be intelligent and how to provide for their children’s intellectual growth outside of school.  All of this will be essential if we are to rupture the hegemony of the standard mythology and institutionalize authentic procedures for student assessment.

Finally, obviously one cannot assess what one does not understand.  We should not take for granted that teachers themselves have been exposed to progressive dialogues regarding intelligence, critical thinking, constructivism, multiple theories of education or post-formalist principles regarding learning, motivation and teaching.  In fact, in light of the disconsolate state of teacher education programs and the demagogic media driven debate regarding assessment, we probably should assume the opposite.

Similarly, as stated earlier, students must be taught how to assess their own thinking and the thinking of others so they can become life-long learners.  They must be motivated to see the logic of what they are studying and see the relevance of education to their daily lives.  Helping students find relevant significance and meaning within a community of learning will not only help them become life-long learners, but will equip them with an ability to monitor their thinking in the interests of self-correction and critical reflection.  Students and teachers must understand that assessing is learning and learning is assessing– that these are not separate and distinct activities as they have been characterized but life-long, ongoing activities.

 I have thought to use the chart below to compare and contrast what I refer to as  inauthentic standards assessment and authentic standards assessment:

The implications of these different theories of literacy on assessment, teaching, learning, curriculum development, and praxis are paramount and cannot be ignored. A reading and writing social studies classroom, for example, that labors under the paradigm of inauthentic assessment or passive literacy, mightask students to read short texts, answer simple questions, select from multiple choice answers, and supply missing words in cloze exercises.  The implications of passive literacy are explicit: teachers spend less time on subjects not tested, lecture to students rather than dialogue with them, and are unwilling to stray from the mandated curricula for fear of humiliation, penalization and ostracism.  As such, passive literacy builds on the model of teacher as all-knowing subject and student as spectator.

For those teachers laboring under a paradigm of authentic assessment or active literacy, students would be asked to read texts with depth and interest, thereby seeking to understand points of views, assumptions, and how people arrive at conclusions and decide to act in a world with others.   Students would be animated to problematize their learning and create and answer complex questions that call on multiple intelligences and a host of cognitive and affective abilities in the service of creatively accomplishing a project, or recognizing and solving relevant real-life problems; they learn to become participants in their learning.  Multiple choice, or limited response examinations might not be abandoned, but their use would be minimal and only applied to test students’ understanding of important basic skills; while performance and portfolio assessment would be recruited in the service of assessing the development of critical and creative thinking and communication processes, along with students’ actual application of knowledge and basic skills.

Conclusion

“A school should not be a preparation for life.  A school should be life.” – Elbert Hubbard

From a post-formal perspective, what all this means is clear: we must begin to concentrate our efforts on a public language of literacy, authentic standards, intellectual diversity, and critical thinking assessment that will enable us to provide a vision of what it means to be actively literate as opposed to passively literate.  We must speak to issues of accountability and responsibility in education, but from a post-formal point of view.  It is important to recognize that institutional and societal support must be cultivated and nurtured in order to create an environment for the achievement of learner outcomes and goals; the current universal standards debate must be seen as inauthentic and antithetical to human development.   Once again, this specifically means that we as educators must come to understand that the debate regarding assessment and standards as it is defined in popular media is mythological, jingoistic, propagandistic, and disingenuous; that it does little to foster a healthy critical discourse regarding student achievement—that it is political.  We must reform this debate with a new language of assessment and learning; one tied to what it means to be a human being in search of liberation and subjective emancipation.  The standards we adopt should help students become global citizens, not simply global producers and consumers.  They should have as their purpose the promotion of healthy individual and social growth through critical reflection.  And they must truly be opportunities offered to all students, regardless of class, race, culture, or gender.

Societal support and a realignment of economic and cultural priorities and reality, on the other hand, also would serve as a means for accomplishing educational goals and commitments.  This would mean that the debate regarding education would need to confront objective reality— issues of racial, sexual, educational, and socio-economic equity, directly and honestly— to embrace the necessity for an acute paradigm shift toward general societal humanistic values and changes—from the classroom to the workplace, from the family to the state.  It would be perfidious to propose that equity can exist within the institutions of education while economic and social inequality pervades major societal institutions as a whole.  For this reason, teachers as intellectuals must become teachers as social activists, collaborating and re-oxygenating their unions with vision and struggling for a commitment on the part of society to make children the top priority, to preserve and strengthen public education, to provide adequate nutrition and health care to families, to furnish safe schools and neighborhoods, to assure the development and distribution of fair and adequate funding for public education, to equalize opportunity, and to support local decision-making by governing bodies.  As society and its institutions forge a partnership for critical thinking and educational opportunities for all students, the primary indicator of our effectiveness will be our ability to achieve our greatest goal: the education of all our nation’s children and the creation of a loving world of authentic agency and caring human beings.

Dr Danny Weil is a public interest attorney who has practiced for more than twenty years and has been published in a case of first impression in California. He is no longer active as a lawyer but has written seven books on education, has taught second grade in South Central LA, PS 122, taught K-1 migrant children in Santa Maria, California and Guadalupe, California, taught in the California Youth Authority to first and second degree murderers and taught for seventeen years at Allan Hancock Junior College in Santa Maria, CA. in the philosophy department. Dr. Weil holds a BA in Political Economics and Philosophy, a multi-subject bilingual credential in education (he is fluent in Spanish) and has a PhD in Critical Thinking. He is a writer for the Truthout Intellectual Project.

photo credit: mcoughlin via photopin cc

Bailout Capitalism, Episode 34721: Cyprus   David S. D'Amato at Center for a Stateless Society (Monday, February 25)

Reporting on the second round of Cyprus’s presidential election, the Wall Street Journal highlights the “headache for European and international policy makers” occasioned by the island nation’s domestic financial crisis (“Cyprus’s New Leader Will Pursue Aid Deal,” February 24).

The sordid world of bank bailouts and staggering government debt is by now nothing new to the front page. Since 2008, we’ve grown accustomed to the idea of bank execs, politicians and international bureaucrats sitting around tables, ostensibly navigating whole economies between Scylla and Charybdis.

The relationship between ever-burgeoning government debt and corporate plutocracy is misunderstood by most mainstream observers, their misapprehension tracking very closely to their acceptance of the myth that the state and big business work at cross purposes. A central piece of that myth is the general assumption that while government is benevolent, but clumsy and inefficient, powerful corporations are methodically streamlined and cost-effective, yet rapacious.

Among the failings of this view is that it abstracts the state away from its own basic, motivating influences, contra the analysis regarding self-interested behavior to which we subject other individuals and institutions. As a result, most of our politicians, bureaucrats, and public intellectuals — in both the “public” and “private” sectors, consciously or unconsciously — have the wrong idea about the role that government debt plays in economic class systems.

In Cyprus, as everywhere else around the world, government debt attributable to actual social welfare programs for the indigent, elderly, unable to work, etc. is dwarfed by debt racked up on military spending, and subsidies, bailouts, and stimulus plans for favored big business players with close ties to government.

The assets of Cyprus’s banks, which would now require almost $20 billion to save, equal more than 800% of the country’s GDP. Further demonstrating the perverse and incestuous character of the relationship between the Cypriot state and its banks, the latter hold almost nine-tenths of government’s outstanding debt.

Blogging at Libertarianism.org, part 5: More on Liberty and Property   Matt Zwolinski at Bleeding Heart Libertarians (Monday, February 25)

A few weeks back, I posted an essay at Libertarianism.org arguing that property rights necessarily restrict freedom. I noted in that post that I thought that property rights enhance freedom in certain ways too, and promised to go into that more in a future post.

Thanks to a skirmish with David Friedman (my parts of which are here, here, and here), that promise took me a little while to fulfill. But I’ve finally gotten around to it with my last two posts.

The first of those looks at the justifications of property rights given by John Locke and Robert Nozick. Both of them, I argue, implicitly recognized the coercive nature of property rights. But unlike G.A. Cohen, they believed that this coercion could be justified. And both of them attempted to provide that justification in a strikingly similar way – by pointing to the effects of a regime of property rights on productivity and social welfare. So does that make them utilitarians in natural rights clothing?

Not so fast. In my second post, I explain that the crucial difference between the Lockean/Nozickian justification of property rights and a utilitarian one is the individualism of the former, and the inherent collectivism of the latter.

For the utilitarian, all that matters in justifying an action (or an institution like property rights) is its effect on overall well-being. On the utilitarian view, then, property rights are justified if the overall benefits they produce are greater than the overall harms they produce, regardless of how those benefits and harms are distributed among different individuals. For Locke and Nozick, on the other hand, property rights are only justified if they benefit (or at least do not harm) each and every individual.

I then go on to show how Locke and Nozick’s apparently social-welfare based arguments attempt to meet this individualist justificatory hurdle. I also note that their arguments about productivity could be developed to provide an interesting rejoinder to Cohen’s liberty-based critique of property rights:

Opportunities for Graduate Students   Matt Zwolinski at Bleeding Heart Libertarians (Sunday, February 24)

The Institute for Humane Studies has some great opportunities for graduate students who might be interested in honing their research and teaching skills this summer:

• The Symposia on Scholarship & a Free Society bring graduate students together with leading classical liberal scholars from a range of disciplines for a weekend of discussion and research presentations. All applicants are invited to submit an optional proposal for a paper presentation. Applications to attend this summer must be received by March 15^th. Additional details: www.TheIHS.org/scholarship-free-society.

• The Liberty & the Art of Teaching Workshop  taking place June 28-30 at Towson University in Towson, MD welcomes teachers, both new and experienced, to discuss and experiment with best practices for the university classroom. IHS provides full funding, including meals, accommodations, and program costs. Participants are responsible for travel (limited scholarships are available to cover travel expenses). For additional details on faculty presenters, topics, schedule, and feedback from past participants, visitwww.TheIHS.org/teaching-workshop/liberty-art-of-teaching/. Application deadline: April 15^th.

IHS was a terrific help to me as a graduate student. And their programs have only gotten better since then. I highly recommend them!

Education Standards as Big Business   stuartbramhall at The Most Revolutionary Act (Sunday, February 24)

KIPP is one of the largest charter school chains

This is the eighth of a series of guest posts by Dr Danny Weil from an article (World Class Standards: Whose World, Which Economic Classes and What Standards?) he originally published in Daily Censored.

In the eighth section, Dr Weil describes how already in 1999 corporations were getting rich of the imposition of federal and state standards. He also describes of the dangerous and narrow way educational standards are used to define intelligence in an increasingly culturally diverse society.

***

Standards as Big Business

By Dr Danny Weil

Standards are also big business.  The math and reading lists, now linked to many state standards have a huge impact on what states can buy with citizens tax money.  The state of California, for example, which recently approved new state standards in reading and math, will spend more than one billion dollars of public monies over the next four years on textbooks for classrooms; purchasing texts from such from corporations such as Houghton Mifflin, Harcourt Brace, and McDougal Little.   Yet of this amount, the $250 million spent each year can only be spent on textbooks that the state has aligned with the new standards.  And districts in California may only spend 30% of their grants monies on texts not on the state-approved list.  And these textbook adoptions are done by a select few, not as a result of a lively community debate or critical examination by the teachers who are forced to use these texts.  According to Judy Anderson, the President of the California Math Council, a group that represents 10,000 math educators in California:

If we define mathematics as simply following the rules, that’s what this textbook adoption brings about.  There’s not any thinking going on here. (“California approves math, English textbooks tied to standards”, Education Week, June 23, 1999, p10).

Corporations love the new standards as well as the nanny state and federal governments that promise to assure that the costs associated with text book adoption are socialized, while corporations and their stockholders privatize the enormous profits.

Standards and the Definition of Intelligence

Critical inquiry, critical perception, and critical consciousness assists human beings to engage the world, to see the world as an object independent of themselves that is capable of being known, changed, and understood in relationship to themselves.  Education has as its responsibility the development of this critical consciousness and engagement, not the rote memorization and indoctrination of universally declared facts and behavioral norms.

As previously discussed, standardized tests, as presently constructed, are based on assessing whether students have digested a set of universally designated facts.  And facts are important to conservatives, for as Walter Feinberg noted:

Facts—uninterpreted naked facts—are a sign that the national identity is intact and that local cultural meanings and aspirations are under control.  When facts are challenged, when every ethnic and racial group wants its own facts taught in schools, when there are feminist facts, Afro-American facts, and gay facts—then conservatives worry that the school can no longer be counted on to transmit a unified national identity (Feinberg, Japan and the Pursuit of an American Identity, 1983, p86-87).

Universal standards equates the intelligent person with a jeopardy contestant; a person who is a repository of facts and information.  Intelligence becomes commensurate with having information and basic skills, not using information and skills to gain knowledge and then enabling oneself through its use.  For conservatives, any counter interpretation of facts, any critical inquiry, questioning or interrogation of these facts threatens the single conservative national unity; i.e., it threatens those in power by stripping naked their moral and mythological political claims as to what ideology is, its implications, and how it operates to preserve inequality and the status quo.

And of course, universal standards serve another more insidious role: they help to define and reinforce an undemocratic notion of intelligence based on solely Cartesian scientific, rationalistic claims to achievement.  Multiple intelligences, as developed by Howard Gardner, indigenous knowledge’s, women’s consciousness and cognitive processes, emotional intelligence, and multiple ways of knowing are discarded in favor of a logical-mathematical, cognitive intelligence.   Any deviation from the universal standard becomes a deviation from the norm; and the rationalistic, Cartesian norm becomes defined as what it means to be human, to be intelligent.

(To be continued.)

Dr Danny Weil is a public interest attorney who has practiced for more than twenty years and has been published in a case of first impression in California. He is no longer active as a lawyer but has written seven books on education, has taught second grade in South Central LA, PS 122, taught K-1 migrant children in Santa Maria, California and Guadalupe, California, taught in the California Youth Authority to first and second degree murderers and taught for seventeen years at Allan Hancock Junior College in Santa Maria, CA. in the philosophy department. Dr. Weil holds a BA in Political Economics and Philosophy, a multi-subject bilingual credential in education (he is fluent in Spanish) and has a PhD in Critical Thinking. He is a writer for the Truthout Intellectual Project.

photo credit: Florida Community Loan Fund via photopin cc

Your General Assembly will always be Incomplete.   Rad Geek at Rad Geek People's Daily (Sunday, February 24)

Last month there was a research report from Ruth Milkman, Stephanie Luce and Penny Lewis on the economic background of people who participated in some #OWS events in New York City. The New York Times and other press outlets picked up on one of the report’s findings — that More than a third of the people who participated in Occupy Wall Street protests in New York lived in households with annual incomes of $100,000 or more … and more than two-thirds had professional jobs. Over on Facebook, Thaddeus Russell’s quick commentary on the story was:

New York Times: In Occupy, Well-Educated Professionals Far Outnumbered Jobless, Study Finds

Thaddeus Russell: There has never been a political movement in the United States in which this wasn’t the case.

— Thaddeus Russell, near Los Angeles, CA., on Facebook (January 28, 2013)

Now as it happens, the authors of the study have complained about how corporate news media have reported on their findings.^[1] So I don’t want to lay much stress on what the study showed or did not show about participation in Occupy Wall Street in New York — let alone make any very definite claim about #Occupy in general or what it may illustrate about the whole history of political movements in the United States. Thaddeus has made some interesting points on this, but I think there are also important counter-points to be made (not least what terms like professionals, political, movement, etc. are even supposed to mean in context). But whether Thad is right or wrong on this particular point — or on the more general point he is trying to drive home — I think the reactions to him making this kind of claim have invariably been illustrations of something that it is really important to keep an eye out for. From the Facebook thread:

Joe Lowndes (28 Jan 13, 10pm): So?

Thaddeus Russell (29 Jan 13, 6pm): Joe, the tendency of political activists (and academics) to speak on behalf of others isn’t important?

. . . Joe Lowndes (29 Jan 13, 6pm): All political claims inherently involve speaking on behalf of others, unless you believe in some Rousseauian fantasy of authenticity through general will. Why does it bother you? In any case Occupy was many things in many places. In Eugene it directly involved hundreds of homeless people speaking and voting in GAs. But even if that weren’t the case, there is no reason why middle class folks should not engage in politics or make demands for fear of not representing everyone.

. . . Thaddeus Russell (29 Jan 13, 9pm): Paul, I am not talking about all political activism. I am talking about the common practice of making claims about the needs, desires, and ideas of people whose thoughts are not recorded — like the great majority of the poor, the working class, etc.

Thaddeus Russell (29 Jan 13, 9pm): Joe, what I am describing is often called cultural imperialism. Do you reject that concept or do you think I am misapplying it?

. . . Thaddeus Russell (29 Jan 13, 11pm): When Americans say the people of the world “need” or “want” capitalism it is cultural imperialism, right? But when Occupiers say Americans “need” or “want” New Deal liberalism or socialism it’s not?

Joe Lowndes (29 Jan 13, 11pm): By this overwrought logic, no one can assert or fight for any vision of collective life without it being imperialist.

Education Standards and Totalitarian Conformity   stuartbramhall at The Most Revolutionary Act (Saturday, February 23)

This is the seventh of a series of guest posts by Dr Danny Weil from an article (World Class Standards: Whose World, Which Economic Classes and What Standards?) he originally published in Daily Censored.

In this seventh section, Dr Weil argues that federal imposition of educational standards essentially programs children to be obedient subjects of a totalitarian society.

(I have bolded points that deserve special attention.)

***

Standards and the False Claim to Universality and Objectivity

By Dr Danny Weil

Human beings come to educational sites with different cultures, backgrounds, opportunities and constraints.  Post-formalism alleges that rationalistic universal standards are really socio-historical constructs, and at this juncture, peculiar constructs allied to the needs of a particular socio-economic system—post-modern capitalism.  They argue that they are little more than dominant-based claims, scientific, mechanical formulas and regulations that educational elites proclaim as immutable and non-transformational, but which in actuality are socially and historically created.  By masquerading as objective science, standards become a tool for imposing conformity and ideological servitude on people and communities by those in power—they become, what Foucault termed, a “technology of power” (Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, 1977) – i.e., a way to decimate difference in the interest of privilege and ideological domination by instrumentalist policing.  The current standard debate masks difference by failing to acknowledge the diverse epistemological ways of knowing and perceiving the world.  Difference, be it cultural, gender based, economic or otherwise, is sacrificed to a debilitating reductionism that must locate itself within the modernistic conception of scientific, rational Newtonian thought.

By casting standards as a form of scientific truth, a techno-rationality that is universal, standards furtively promise to abolish cultural and class differences by imposing a universal, scientific normative that is claimed to be “truth”. Imposing uncritical acceptance and passivity through universal assertions of truth, standardized tests cloak prevarication in the clothes of veracity.  They foment the idea that there is a pre-established, non-historical, universal standard for acceptance into the community of human beings and as such, they are an attempt to maintain a passive public that refuses to challenge the historicity of cultural norms and the social context and construction of knowledge.  Furthermore, current standards teach the hegemonic lesson of obedience by offering ecumenical rules and pre-ordained procedures that must be followed in order for both teachers and students to adapt.  In so doing, they serve to reduce education to a mere recipe that must be followed, as opposed to an artful process that must be created.

Standards as Instruments of Technocratic Control

Teaching is an act of love, a performance art involving creativity and intelligence.  Yet post-formalism argues that standards hold students and teachers hostage to an ideology and practice of inauthentic learning and being—a loveless, antiseptic relationship between students and teachers, a false dualism between the world as an object to be understood and the knower seeking to understand.  For this reason they serve as a straightjacket that binds both the heart and mind, for they impose teaching as an act of functional, instrumental control — of technological device—not of compassion, caring, and love.  Standards become a means of covertly managing people and knowledge for private ends.  John Fiske reminds us of this when he notes:

“Knowledge is never neutral; it never exists in an empiricist, objective relationship to the real.  Knowledge is power, and the circulation of knowledge is part of the social distribution of power.  ….  The first is to control the “real”, to reduce reality to the knowable, which entails producing it as a discursive construct whose arbitrariness and inadequacy are disguised as far as possible.  The second struggle is to have this discursively (and therefore socio-politically) constructed reality accepted as truth by those whose interests may not necessarily be served by accepting it (Fiske, Reading the Popular, 1989, p149-150).”

Critical consciousness and education for freedom asks men and women to critically examine and scrutinize their social order, not to blindly accept it—to expunge that which oppresses them and embrace that which promises to liberate them.  Yet post-formalists would argue that universal standards operate as way of maintaining the inequitable social order; a way of controlling both students and teachers and the production line they work on so that they might blindly and obediently reproduce their own oppression.

Standards as they are currently designed, are also a way of controlling, chloroforming, and policing curriculum to ensure that what is taught conforms to what the cultural conservative and economic conservative elites feel is important.  Teachers are mandated to teach to the test and those that do not are labeled “maladjusted”, in need of remediation, and punitively dealt with accordingly.   In Delaware, for example, 20% of the educational evaluation of teachers will be based on whether students make “progress” within one year with a particular teacher; regardless of whether students have come to the class ready or prepared to learn (CNN, September 2, 1999).

“Accountability” becomes the buzz word for those who embrace the need for universal standards.  Yet the accountability that is advocated is a one sided individualistic, accountability; not a shared socially collaborative, accountability— a mutual accountability between socio-economic arrangements and individual effort and responsibility.  Under the rubric of “accountability”, individual teachers and their students become solely blamed for poor individual academic student performance, regardless of the students’ history of achievement, their attitudes regarding learning, or their readiness to learn.  George W. Bush made this position quite clear in his elitist and cynical dismissal of social accountability and culpability when he smugly stated, “Pigment and poverty need not determine performance” (September 2, 1999).  The rhetoric appears equitable, responsible, and logical—as it seeks to remove issues of race, gender and social accountability from the debate while putting forth the hidden claim that we all operate on a level playing field.

Universal standards also impose psychological fear among educational community members while simultaneously de-skilling them by turning lesson plans into instrumentalist recipes and antiseptic and generic teaching formulas. The Mid-continent Regional Educational Laboratory, for example, is just one of many think tanks that now have lesson plans available on-line that are linked to any state standard (Mid-continent Regional Educational Laboratory, 1999), further de-skilling teachers by separating them from the conception of their labor and reducing them to simply technical instruments—objects in the service of education as training—slaves to the state standards.

America once proclaimed that education was a human right, a Jeffersonian legacy of a common democracy.  Yet  standards insidiously operate as instruments of power, secretly seeking to destroy public schools through economic strangulation in favor of private and religious schools and vouchers.   They do this ideologically by feeding the mythological claim that public schools and public school teachers are failing; that they are not living up to the universal standards that elites have imposed.  The former president of the Xerox corporation made this point quite vigorously when he stated:

“At a time when our preeminent role in the world economy is in jeopardy, there are few social problems more telling in their urgency.  Public education has put this country at a terrible disadvantage (Kearns Doyle, Winning the Brain Race, 1988 p1).

Universal standards are currently being used to belittle and destroy public schools and the students and teachers who work in them in a particularly disturbing manner, in Florida.  For example, school-by-school report cards have recently been released that assign each public school an A, B, C, D, or F based largely on how the schools and their teachers and students measured up to the state’s predetermined standards for competency on the reading and mathematics portion of the Florida Comprehensive Achievement Test.  Released on June 24^th, 1999, these school scores serve as an attention-getting aspect of the new statewide accountability system and foster in the public’s mind the notion that public schools are failing students and the public at large (Education Week, July 14, 1999); that teacher unions are dismissive regarding accountability and holding teachers responsible and interested in only higher wages and benefits for teachers, regardless of their level of competence.  The debate rarely focuses on the fact that that in Florida, there are 75,000 students who are foreign born, many of them living in situations of high poverty (Education Week, July 14).  From conservative perspectives, that would just be offering an cultural and class based excuse for individual failure and thus more apologies for lack of accountability and social responsibility.

According to the school reform measures backed by Governor Jeb Bush and passed by the Florida state legislature, the state will now offer vouchers worth $4,000 each to students attending Florida public schools that receive F’s two times in four years.  The students may use the vouchers to pay tuition at private or religious schools (Education Week, May 5, 1999).  This will in turn take more monies from public coffers—bleeding the public schools, economically strangling them, further reducing their ability to function and then hypocritically blaming them for low achievement.  This is how standards have become an insidious tool, an instrumentalist weapon in the political conservative fight to dismantle public education— stigmatizing schools and those who teach in them while simultaneously withholding funds and allowing them to hemorrhage to death.

Publicizing test scores is another attempt to publicly shame teachers, to humiliate them, to let low-income and minority students to see themselves as incompetent or less educable, while teachers are told that they are dysfunctional and in need of remedial adjustment.  It also serves to propagandize and concretize in the mind of the public that unions, in this case teacher unions, are to blame for the problem; that tenure, collective action, or job security rights shields poor teachers and prevents principals, now called CEO’s in the vernacular of privateers, from hiring good teachers and firing bad ones.  They want the public to uncritically believe that unions tie reformer’s hands, stand in the way of progress, and act in students’ worst interests.  Certainly this article will not serve as an apologist for all that goes on in public schools, from they way they are managed to the way they are operated.  However, the universal standards debate is a clear attempt to belittle, rather than intervene and fix, one of the last vestiges of public life in America today—public schools.

Standards, prescribed more like mechanical operations and procedures and stripped of all humanness also become unconscious, ideological features of instrumentalism and technological hegemony.  They become the extrinsic reward structures that children in the early ages ideologically internalize for the future needs of the capitalist work force and the economic bonus and incentive systems which will eventually be offered to them to induce them to produce more.  Corporate society needs this psychological internalization process to ideologically begin at an early age in order to prepare citizens for the competitive rigors and inequality of capitalist life.  Cast in this role, universal standards operate in the interests of an authoritarian construction of unconscious assumptions and patterns, as well as strengthening an insidious individualism so necessary to capitalism’s material and ideological survival.  They become the equivalent of Adam Smith’s invisible hand, guiding our privatized self-serving interests within a community of rapacious materialism; operating to diminish relationships, fomenting public distrust and disharmony, and inculcating the ideology of competition within the constructs of the human consciousness. Because of this, they are a form of theoretical, techno-rational control in the hands of a bureaucracy devoted to the desires and needs of a privileged few.

(To be continued.)

Dr Danny Weil is a public interest attorney who has practiced for more than twenty years and has been published in a case of first impression in California. He is no longer active as a lawyer but has written seven books on education, has taught second grade in South Central LA, PS 122, taught K-1 migrant children in Santa Maria, California and Guadalupe, California, taught in the California Youth Authority to first and second degree murderers and taught for seventeen years at Allan Hancock Junior College in Santa Maria, CA. in the philosophy department. Dr. Weil holds a BA in Political Economics and Philosophy, a multi-subject bilingual credential in education (he is fluent in Spanish) and has a PhD in Critical Thinking. He is a writer for the Truthout Intellectual Project.

photo credit: Pondspider via photopin cc

Media Coordinator Update, 02/23/13   Thomas L. Knapp at Center for a Stateless Society (Saturday, February 23)

Dear C4SS Supporters,

This week, I’ve made 10,066 submissions of Center material to 2,762 publications around the world, and have so far identified 11 pickups of Center material.

• Kevin Carson’s columns for the Center appeared in the Baltic Review and the Dhaka, Bangladesh New Nation.
• David D’Amato’s work ran in Florida’s Hernando Today and in Indonesia’s only English-language Daily, the Bali Times (so far as we know, this is our first pickup in Indonesia!).
• Nathan Goodman was published in the St. Martin, Netherlands Antilles Daily Herald, in the Dhaka, Bangladesh New Nation, and at Legal Pro News.
• My own stuff turned up at Counterpunch and Before It’s News, as well as in the Batesville, Arkansas Daily Guard and the Dhaka, Bangladesh New Nation.

We’re now past 715 pickups and set to pass 1,000 before the end of 2013. For the moment, I see our job as making sure we stay on pace to do that by producing a minimum of 4-5 globally relevant commentaries per week and putting them in front of editors everywhere. Your support makes that possible.

Have a great weekend!

Yours in liberty,

One Reason Not to Build the Keystone XL Pipeline: Justice   Jason Lee Byas at Center for a Stateless Society (Saturday, February 23)

The Keystone XL pipeline has inspired a lot of controversy. For defenders of freed markets, however, it shouldn’t. Libertarians should emphatically and unequivocally oppose the pipeline.

Yet leading libertarian magazine Reason has put out a video detailing “three reasons to build the pipeline.” Editor Nick Gillespie explains, “1. The oil isn’t going to stay buried … 2. The pipeline isn’t a disaster waiting to happen … 3. It will help the economy.”

Just for the sake of argument, let’s concede all three of these points. Libertarians should still oppose the pipeline, because libertarians value property rights — and the pipeline as conceived is a giant monument to political government’s disregard for the property rights of everyday people.

Since beginning to plan Keystone XL, TransCanada Corporation has used eminent domain to steal more than a hundred tracts of land in Texas alone. If it gets the green light, the pipeline will run up through the plains like a burglar on a spree.

Of course, the company does initially offer those who have what they want a chance to make the transaction voluntarily. When that doesn’t work, though, unsuspecting landowners receive letters like the one Julia Trigg Crawford got, saying “If Keystone is unable to successfully negotiate the voluntary acquisition of the necessary easements, it will have to resort to the exercise of its statutory right of eminent domain.”

As Lysander Spooner once remarked, at least a highwayman “does not pretend that he has any rightful claim” to your property.

If you’re like the Crawfords, any deviation from that final offer and you’ll hear nothing from TransCanada until your land’s condemned. As word spreads, landowners feel threatened. They scramble to agree with whatever crumbs they’re offered, before their land just gets taken instead.

Even when eminent domain isn’t directly used, the transaction can hardly be called “voluntary.” Such means become darker still when we consider that they’re being used to override tribal sovereignty and build over Native American burial grounds, like those of the Sac and Fox Nation. Apparently not even death can save the Sac and Fox from colonists intent on destroying their homes.

Using Schools to Reinforce White Male Privilege   stuartbramhall at The Most Revolutionary Act (Friday, February 22)

This is the sixth  of a series of guest posts by Dr Danny Weil from an article (World Class Standards: Whose World, Which Economic Classes and What Standards?) he originally published in Daily Censored.

In this sixth section, Dr Weil argues that conservative ideologues and corporate leaders are concealing their true intent in aggressively imposing educational standards and standardized tests on an unsuspecting American public. Besides hammering home the superiority of European culture, free market values and stereotypically male approaches to knowledge, they reinforce the notion that individual deficiency, rather than pernicious social and political problems, are responsible for human misery.

***

The Standards Debate as Social Prevarication and Myth

By Dr Danny Weil

“Perhaps the greatest tragedy of modern man is his domination by the force of {these} myths and his manipulation by organized advertising, ideological or otherwise.  Gradually, without even realizing the loss he relinquishes his capacity for choice; he is expelled from the orbit of decisions.  Ordinary men do not perceive the task of the time; the latter are interpreted by an “elite” and presented in the form of recipes and prescriptions.  And when men try to save themselves by following the prescriptions, they drown in leveling anonymity, without hope and without faith, domesticated and adjusted.” – Paulo Freire, Education for Critical Consciousness, 1976

Human beings seek to exist in the world, to make sense of their peculiar relationships with external and internal reality.  They seek dialogue and relationships with others in order to claim their humanness and become free from the external and internal bonds that bind them.  Standards, claim progressive post-modernists, are part and parcel of the sickness, the cognitive dis-ease that is rampant in education today precisely because they reinforce the meaningless of education — giving meaning only to what education can do for one materially, not psychologically or subjectively.  They become little more than a prerequisite for accepting and adjusting to a market society.

To begin with, radical pedagogy and progressive post-modern educational theory, hereinafter referred to as post-formalism (Kincheloe, Rethinking Intelligence, 1999), argues that tests and testing do far more than simply seek to measure academic performance or basic skills.  “From a post-formalist point of view, standards and assessment as put forth by both economic and cultural conservatives, give a false illusion—an ideological myth of meritocracy and objectivity that really operates deceitfully as technologies of power and control (Foucault, Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison, 1977).”  Standards operate as part of a modernist project, dissecting thinking into minute fragments and then testing the fragments separate from the whole.  They also are part of a mono-cultural or Eurocentric and androcentric tradition that place value on socio-centric truths and cultural claims to superiority.

Post-formalism would argue conservative standards, hereinafter referred to as universal standards, are culturally biased, gender discriminative, and class based sorting and classifying mechanisms that surreptitiously seek to motivate students by holding out the promise of extrinsic material rewards if the standards are met—i.e., better jobs, college entrance, higher incomes and better employment.  They create a false ideology of “fairness” that proclaims that individual effort is the controlling factor in determining success, regardless of ones’ social class, sex, race, cultural background or particular place in the social system.

Post-formalism argues that the current standards debate actually serves to suffocate a truly genuine dialogue about the purpose of education, of history, of human beings as subjects seeking their freedom in the enterprise of life; instead, the debate demagogues and couches the controversy over schooling as market competitiveness, global production, better goods and services, and strong national identity.

“Unfortunately, and yet understandably, the notion of universal standards resonates with many parents, especially minority parents and the economically and culturally disenfranchised, precisely because they want their children to become successful in a racially and sexually biased, class society where wages, for the majority of people, have scarcely risen in more than twenty five years (Sklar, Shifting Fortunes: The Perils of the Growing American Wealth Gap 1999).”  And as new jobs emerge and old ones die out, education is increasingly looked upon by citizenry as a way to endure rapid changes in economic life—to get ahead —a way out, or at the very least, a way to stay even and survive.  Lower wages, unemployment, and jobs relocated to third world countries have created economic insecurity, misery and uncertainty among American citizens with people scrambling and trying to avoid being the next victim of reorganization, reengineering, downsizing, restructuring or businesses disappearing, merging, and being bought out overnight.  The Right exploits these fears and economic uncertainties with the rhetoric of universal standards, falsely arguing that if we just had higher, normative standards, education would prepare everyone for the “new world order” and assure that security and equality would be re-instituted in mental and material life.  The message is clear:  don’t change life, change standards.

The Illusion of Individualistic Meritocracy

The universal standards debate disguises the way that history constructs meaning and opportunity by eternalizing itself behind false images of meritocracy, scientific rationality, and truth. By giving illusion to the mythology of meritocracy, standards serve to marginalize, discourage and disenfranchise, precisely because they propose that those who fail to live up to the technicistic standards are individual failures, do not belong in education; that they would be better served in vocational programs or, in the alternative, perhaps not be educated at all.  The failure to meet normative standards becomes defined as an individual problem devoid of social context and culpability. The debate refuses to recognize and discuss socio-economic issues such as crumbling school infrastructure, overcrowded schools, inadequate teaching resources, dysfunctional teacher training programs, the clandestine nature of teaching in isolation without mentorship or guidance, the shortage of qualified teachers (especially among minority communities), poverty, dysfunctional families, the lack of early childhood nutrition, health care or preschool, low salaries, the dismal state of parental involvement, poverty, low wages and the economic and political arrangements of post-modern capitalist society that creates, if not allows these conditions to exist.  Nor does the debate recognize intellectual diversity, cultural distinctions, intellectual diversity, epistemological processes and concerns, language disparities and differences, or gender discrimination.

Mental hygiene warrants   Rad Geek at Rad Geek People's Daily (Friday, February 22)

Here is the creepiest bit of dystopian legal language that I have heard in the past month or so:

mental hygiene warrants

and

Real Time Crime Center

Keep in mind that one of the main activities of the Real Time Crime Center right now is to watch, chase down, arrest, imprison and force unwanted psychiatric treatment on people who specifically have not been accused of committing any crimes (The city [sic] is making a major push to sweep the streets of dangerous, mentally ill New Yorkers—and has even compiled a most-wanted list. … Those [mental hygiene] warrants mean that the patients are not wanted for a crime but instead are being sought because they are not getting their court-ordered treatment.)

This bit of overtly totalitarian mental health fascism has been brought to you by the New York Police Department..^[1]

Also.

• GT 2007-10-29: For her own good.
• GT 2008-11-10: On sound and fury.
• GT 2009-12-03: Without remorse.

1. ^[1] Content warning, for slurs from the headline on down, fear-mongering, ignorant scapegoating, and general police-state fascism. I apologize for the really very offensive and generally awful source article; I hate the New York Post in basically every possible way. ↩

February 22.   at Ran Prieur (Friday, February 22)

February 22. Related to the ongoing subject, a good reddit thread: Am I the only one who thinks Brave New World is a paradise rather than a dystopia? Thankfully, the OP does seem to be the only one... so far. A lot of the responses mention "what it means to be human," but as I mentioned the other day, it is possible to use technology to change human nature. I'd like us to change to become more able to handle freedom, power, responsibility, and risk; but we could just as easily change in the other direction, and become more and more tolerant of being infantilized.

February 20.   at Ran Prieur (Wednesday, February 20)

February 20. Last week I argued that it's better for us to have more freedom and power, which means more opportunities to harm other people and ourselves, even if it leads to more people being harmed. Obviously this has to be done in moderation, which is why I support moderate restrictions on guns and drugs and driving. Because if we increase freedom too fast, it can create so much trauma that there's a popular backlash, and a regression toward less personal power and more power monopolized by domination systems.

Latest scribblings   noreply@blogger.com (Sheldon Richman) at Free Association (Friday, February 22)

Unintended Consequence of the Minimum Wage?   noreply@blogger.com (Sheldon Richman) at Free Association (Friday, February 22)

Libertarian Social Morality: Progressive, Conservative or Liberal?   Kevin Vallier at Bleeding Heart Libertarians (Friday, February 22)

Libertarians regularly argue about the relationship between their political commitments and their “moral views.” The disagreement seems to proceed by answers to two questions.

1. Do libertarian political commitments imply moral commitments?

2. If yes, which moral commitments?

Those who answer “No” to the first question are sometimes called “thin” libertarians, whereas those who answer “Yes” are said to affirm some form of “thick” libertarianism (Charles Johnson wrote perhaps the classic piece on the thick-thin distinction). Next libertarians debate about which moral views they should get thick with (pardon the pun).

I. Distinguish Domains of the Moral

I think the debate is obscured by a failure to delineate between different types of moral views. For instance, Steve and Sarah’s recent provocative piece protested both the practice of “slut-shaming” along with the merely moral view that it is wrong for women to have many sexual partners. Consider,

Borowski then slut shames women who engage in casual sex, off-handedly dismisses the possibility that a libertarian could be pro-choice, and spirals off into an unfocused critique of the luxury goods market. Every single one of these things that she criticizes women for doing should be seen not as causes for shame, but as complex choices that smart, thoughtful women can and do make, without destroying their lives in the process.

I’m not out to criticize Steve and Sarah, just to point out that the passage elides the distinction between a moral practice and a moral view. For instance, you might condemn the moral practice of slut-shaming while still holding the moral view that no one should have numerous sexual partners.

To follow P.F. Strawson, we might distinguish between two forms of morality: social morality and individual ideal. Individual ideas are personal views about the best, transcendent, holy, righteous and pure form of life. They can completely captivate an individual but they seldom play the public coordinating function of a social morality. A social morality is a system of rules that ground relations of accountability and moral responsibility. Recognized social-moral rules are the ground for practices of praise and blame that genuinely motivate behavior and is one of the foundations of social order as such. All societies have some form of social morality, even very primitive ones.

Patents kill, part IV   Rad Geek at Rad Geek People's Daily (Thursday, February 21)

Here’s some passages from a great letter to the editor of the Daily Herarld (Sint Maarten, Dutch Caribbean), by my friend and fellow C4SSer Nathan Goodman.

Deadly Contradictions: Patent Privilege vs. Saving Lives

In his 2013 State of the Union address, US President Barack Obama claims that the U.S. will help end extreme poverty by saving the world’s children from preventable deaths, and by realizing the promise of an AIDS-free generation, which is within our reach. Sounds good, right? Unfortunately, the president directly contradicted these goals earlier in his speech by pushing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

The TPP is typically presented as a free trade agreement, but there’s one type of trade barrier it proposes to strengthen: Intellectual property. Patents and other forms of intellectual property restrict trade by granting monopolies on the sharing of an idea or the manufacture of a product. Intellectual property makes it illegal to use your own personal property to manufacture a product and sell it on the market once the state has defined the very idea of that product as someone else’s property.

Intellectual property harms consumers by raising prices. For some goods this is just an economic cost. But when it comes to medicine, the price increases associated with pharmaceutical patents cost lives.

As Judit Rius Sanjuan of Doctors Without Borders says, Policies that restrict competition thwart our ability to improve the lives of millions with affordable, lifesaving treatments. . . . The Trans-Pacific Partnership would expand these already deadly patent monopolies, further restricting access to lifesaving medicines. Tido von Schoen-Angerer of Doctors Without Borders wrote in 2011 that leaked papers reveal a number of U.S. objectives: to make it impossible to challenge a patent before it is granted; to lower the bar required to get a patent (so that even drugs that are merely new forms of existing medicines, and don’t show a therapeutic improvement, can be protected by monopolies); and to push for new forms of intellectual property enforcement that give customs officials excessive powers to impound generic medicines suspected of breaching IP. Each of these provisions would use government force to prevent poor people from accessing medicine.

It’s clear that entrenching patent monopolies contradicts Obama’s stated goals of saving the world’s children from preventable deaths and realizing the promise of an AIDS-free generation. . . . Contradictions like this are nothing new for the state. While politicians repeatedly promise to protect public health, they have long used coercive power to raise medical costs, sacrificing public health for private profits. The state has long justified its power with the language of the public good, all while wielding that power to protect privilege.

If we really care about “saving the world’s children from preventable deaths” and “realizing the promise of an AIDS-free generation,” we must end this murderous collusion between state and corporate power.

We must smash the state and its deadly contradictions.

— Nathan Goodman, Deadly Contradictions: Patent Privilege vs. Saving Lives, in The Daily Herald (February 18, 2013)

Creating Schools that Facilitate Change   stuartbramhall at The Most Revolutionary Act (Thursday, February 21)

Paulo Freire

This is the fifth of a series of guest posts by Dr Danny Weil from an article (World Class Standards: Whose World, Which Economic Classes and What Standards?) he originally published in Daily Censored.

In this fifth section Dr Weil presents the other side of the “standards” debate, by briefly outlining “radical pedagogy,” a freedom-affirming approach to education that facilitates inquiry, discovery and social change.

***

Critical Pedagogy and the Progressive Post-Modernist Position

By Dr Danny Weil

“The problem of education in its relation to the direction of social change is all one with the problem of finding out what democracy means in its total range of concrete applications: domestic, international, religious, cultural economic and political.  …The trouble… is that we have taken democracy for granted; we have thought and acted as if our forefathers had founded it once and for all.”- John Dewey (Democracy and Education, 1997 p 357-358)

Unlike cultural conservative, economic conservative, and neo-liberal notions of education, radical pedagogy and progressive post-modernism, as pronounced and defined by Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire, in his landmark book Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), attaches a completely different and contrary meaning and purpose to education.  For Freire and his progressive post-modern contemporaries, education is not an impartial act, but a conscious political act of freedom and love aimed at subjective exploration, self-reflection and should be grounded in an ethical format that embraces human beings, their historicity and their search for emancipation.  Much like W.E.B. DuBois, who early commented that the role of education “is not to make carpenters out of men, but men out of carpenters (DuBois, The Education of Black People, 1924, p50-54),” Freire envisioned education and its goals as the eradication of human exploitation, the abolition of human manipulation, the elimination of avarice and greed, the rejection of insipid individualism devoid of individuality, and the rejection of racial, class and sexual discrimination and exploitation—not capitalist competitiveness.

Freire himself was very clear in this regard:

“My point of view is that of ‘the wretched of the earth’, of the excluded (Freire, ibid, p22).”

Radical pedagogy believes that teacher preparation must not be married to training, but instead should be attached to a search for personal and social meaning within historical and contemporary understanding.  And, they believe that knowledge can never be conveyed or transmitted as mere facts and information, but must be invented and reinvented through discursive inquiry and a problem-posing curriculum that seeks to help citizens make sense of their cognitive and emotional lives and the world within which they live.

This does not mean that these post-modern theoretical positions do not think that basic skills are important or shouldn’t be taught; post-Formalists argue it is how they are taught, the context within which they are taught, and how they are incorporated in the service of enabling the human being to think and act critically.  Teaching skills in the context of reasoning, where emotional intelligence and rational thinking are reconnected in the pursuit of intelligent activity orchestrated and incorporated in the service of a problem posing curriculum that is based on inquiry and discovery, is much different than teaching skills in rote isolation along with indoctrination in the form of culturally legitimized facts disconnected from meaning.

Where conservatives and neo-liberals attempt to regulate the world of students through standardization, indoctrination and the removal of discourse and autonomy, radical pedagogy and progressive post-modernist educational claims assert that education must be interested in the consciousness of human beings and a determination to help them “read the world” through interaction and dialogue (Freire).  Post-formalism would advocate teaching ethics without indoctrination, where students are encouraged to forge their thinking skills in the fires of controversy and critical scrutiny.  Again, Freire states this position clearly:

“Problem-posing education affirms men and women as beings in the process of becoming—as unfinished, uncompleted human beings in and with a likewise unfinished reality.  The unfinished character of human beings and the transformational character of reality necessitate that education be an ongoing activity (Freire, as above p77).”

Radical Pedagogy, Progressive Post-Modernism and the Education Critique of Standards and Assessments

“Let us view understanding not as a state of possession of knowledge, but one of enablement.  When we understand something we not only possess certain information about it but are enabled to do certain things with that knowledge” –David Perkins  (Smart Schools 1995)

As pointed out earlier, for radical pedagogues and progressive post-modernists who embrace democracy and the need for a democratized self as the focus of education, schooling must be linked to what it means to be human.  Currently, with preparation in school tailored solely for preparation for work; this preparation for work is sold to the public as preparation for life.  Radical pedagogy and progressive post-modernist positions disagree vehemently with this predication and posit the contrary; that preparation in school should be for preparation for life; and preparation for life will, by its very nature, enable students to be prepared for the exigencies of work.  Certainly rational production is a necessity for human endeavors, but a critical and democratically committed citizenry, they argue, is much more capable of rational production than an unconscious manipulated citizenry grafted onto corporate agendas only.  They argue that schools should be centers for utopian thinking, laboratories of wonderment, and environments of inquiry available to all students.  Yet, unfortunately, amidst all the talk of educational reform, progressive post-modernists argue that schools are still seeped in the past and thus can do little to help children create and invent their future or the future of society.  Because of their emphasis on education as liberation, progressive post-modernists have constructed powerful critiques of economic conservative, neo-liberal and cultural conservative arguments for education and educational standards.

 (To be continued.)

Dr Danny Weil is a public interest attorney who has practiced for more than twenty years and has been published in a case of first impression in California. He is no longer active as a lawyer but has written seven books on education, has taught second grade in South Central LA, PS 122, taught K-1 migrant children in Santa Maria, California and Guadalupe, California, taught in the California Youth Authority to first and second degree murderers and taught for seventeen years at Allan Hancock Junior College in Santa Maria, CA. in the philosophy department. Dr. Weil holds a BA in Political Economics and Philosophy, a multi-subject bilingual credential in education (he is fluent in Spanish) and has a PhD in Critical Thinking. He is a writer for the Truthout Intellectual Project.

photo credit: ricardoromanoff via photopin cc

February 20.   at Ran Prieur (Wednesday, February 20)

February 20. Last week I argued that it's better for us to have more freedom and power, which means more opportunities to harm other people and ourselves, even if it leads to more people being harmed. Obviously this has to be done in moderation, which is why I support moderate restrictions on guns and drugs and driving. Because if we increase freedom too fast, it can create so much trauma that there's a popular backlash, and a regression toward less personal power and more power monopolized by domination systems.

Remarks on Jan Narveson’s “Libertarianism: the Thick and the Thin”   Rad Geek at Center for a Stateless Society (Wednesday, February 20)

The following article was written by Charles Johnson and published with the Molinari Institute, December 28th, 2005.

Read as comments in reply to Jan Narveson’s presentation at the second annual meeting of the Molinari Society (28 December 2005), during the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division conference in New York City.

Jan Narveson ably defends a conception of libertarianism as what he describes as a thinly moral doctrine. In order to do so he clears the ground with a hefty bundle of clarificatory remarks about thinness, thickness, morality, politics, culture, and where libertarianism properly locates itself within the conceptual regions marked out by these signposts.

Narveson begins by questioning the formulation of the distinction between thick and thin in terms of an opposition between broader cultural values and a narrowly political doctrine, identifying politics with the business of governments (as when he characterizes an inherently political problem as one whose solution necessarily requires that we erect governments to deal with it). Instead, he suggests that libertarianism is a specifically moral doctrine, concerned with the nature of justice, and that if thin libertarianism means only criticism of force and fraud as practiced by governments, then it needs to be thickened up; but not thickened any, or at least much, further than generalizing it to a moral condemnation of all forms of force and fraud, whatever uniform the jerk doing it is — or isn’t — wearing. Thus far I think the only question that needs to be asked is a definitional question about the use of the word politics. Narveson clearly means it as a synonym for government work; but aren’t there also uses of the word on offer that might pick out some broader range of concerns? For example, the range of claims settled by appeals to individual rights (which would make the domain of politics coextensive with the domain of justice as Narveson defines it), or with some even broader set of questions about the best way for people to go about living together in polities. For the purposes of Narveson’s paper this may be pretty easily consigned to lexicography — we can just distinguish politics-1 from politics-2 and politics-3, make it clear which we refer to in any given case (as Narveson effectively has) and move on from there. But if equivocating between narrow conceptions of politics and broad conceptions has tended, historically, to interfere with libertarians’ ability to appreciate the possible relationships between their own principles and the social and cultural values of other movements — for example, because those other movements described their goals in terms of politics, and libertarians took them to be focused on control over government policy when they meant something broader — and if those misunderstandings have, historically, misled libertarians into thinner versions of libertarianism in order to avoid such political commitments, then it may be worth marking this point for future reference.

Indoctrination: the Real Purpose of Public Schools   stuartbramhall at The Most Revolutionary Act (Wednesday, February 20)

This is the fourth of a series of guest posts by Dr Danny Weil from an article (World Class Standards: Whose World, Which Economic Classes and What Standards?) he originally published in Daily Censored.

In this fourth section, Dr Weil identifies the true mission of public schools, according to cultural conservatives: to indoctrinate and inculcate students in Judeo-Christian values, obedience to authority, conservative morality and patriotism. To ensure, in other words, that they join society with a common individuality and a single American identity.

***

Cultural Conservatives and the Crisis in Education

By Dr Danny Weil

“The national debate on education is now focused on truly important matters: mastering the basics…insisting on high standards and expectations; ensuring discipline in the classroom; conveying a grasp of our moral and political principles; and nurturing the character of our young.” – William Bennett, Our Children and Our Country, 1988, p9”

“Why should we subsidize intellectual curiosity?” – Ronald Reagan

For cultural conservatives, the role of education is far more complex than simply producing workers who can compete in the global economy.  Although they agree with the notion of education for the new workplace of the future, cultural conservatives argue that the real role of schools is to transmit a common individuality, a single American identity.  They understand that education is political and moral activity and look to schooling as a site for the transmission of Judeo-Christian values, conservative morality, a common American heritage and they place great emphasis on manipulating symbols, such as the Bible and the national flag.  Arguing for back-to-basics and privatization in education, these conservatives lament what they characterize as the Balkanization of American identity; and they abhor diversity as a threat to national unity and a common American psyche.  In the minds of cultural conservatives, loyalty, patriotism, and obedience to authority must be rigorously and uncompromisingly taught and can be accomplished by establishing a common curriculum (E.D. Hersch, Cultural literacy: what every American needs to know, 1988).  The cultural conservative movement also argues that schools must teach specific facts and that these facts must never be challenged, but rather accepted as immutable, permanent truth.

For cultural conservatives, the educational crisis is really little more than an indication of a larger crisis—a quandary whereby society has fractured into diverse points of view, where civility has eroded and where standardized interpretations of the world have been forsaken for what they term a moral relativism (Bennett, 1988) or values deficit.  They blame the “excesses” of the 1960’s for what they see as the current crisis in schools and society in general, going so far as to claim:

“For the half decade starting with the late 1960’s, long established academic standards were abolished wholesale in a spasm reminiscent of the Red Guard’s destructive rampage through China’s classical cultural institutions (B. Y. Pines, “Back-to basics” as quoted in I. Shor, Culture wars, 1992, p59 )”.

Despondent over the loss of what they see as the “golden age of pedagogy”, where skills and common, unquestioned values were the object of school curriculums, cultural conservatives embrace back-to-basics as the panacea for what is wrong with America.

One of the best indications of this thrust can be seen in a 1977 article that appeared in Phi Delta Kappan (p87-94). Here, Ben Brodinsky characterized the back-to-basic conservative movement in terms that resonate even more loudly today.  Back-to-basics proposes, according to Brodinsky, among other things, that the school day be devoted solely to reading, writing and arithmetic and that phonics be the method to teach reading.  Textbooks should not display non-traditional values in sex, religion or politics and any criticism of national identity and American values should not be tolerated.  Pedagogy is to be teacher-centered with stern discipline, not child-centered with student autonomy.  Frequent drills and skill-based curriculums should be the norm along with teaching facts to students.  Academic criteria for promotion must be advocated in place of social promotion.  There should be no frills in education, such as sex education or controversial discussions of current affairs.  Fewer electives should comprise the day along with more required courses in the basics. And, the elimination of experimental and innovative courses and methods for value clarification, critical discussion and inquiry should be purged from educational corridors. Finally, back-to-basics, both then and now, advocate the return of patriotism in schools along with religious instruction.

Cultural conservatives call for a curricular restoration of authority in schools whereby teachers are to be colonial administrators of an educational plantation.  And the themes that underlie the cultural conservative calls for curriculum restoration can also be found in the attack on what they term “secular humanism”. U.S. Senator, Jesse Helms, commented not long ago:

“When the U.S. Supreme Court prohibited children from participating in voluntary prayers in public schools, the conclusion is inescapable that the Supreme Court not only violated the right of free exercise of religion for all Americans, it also established a national religion in the United States—the religion of secular humanism (Helms, as quoted in Homer Duncan Secular humanism, the most dangerous religion in America.1979).”

The movement today towards vouchers for religious schools, home schooling and the effort to abolish the teaching of evolution in schools has its roots in the Religious-Right’s efforts to place religion squarely within the sphere of public education. According to cultural conservative, Tim LaHaye:

“Today public education is so humanistic that it is both anti-Catholic and anti-Protestant—because it is anti-God.…The chaos of today’s public education system is in direct proportion to its religious obsession with humanism (LaHaye, The Battle for the Mind,1980)”

By defining education as training, moral indoctrination, authoritarianism, religious instruction and back-to-basics, we can easily see why the national debate over standards, from the cultural conservative point of view, is tied to advocating a calibrating apparatus that measures students’ progress as the ability to memorize and regurgitate pre-ordained and prescribed facts and data, exercise skills in isolation, digest jingoistic curricula without questioning, read phonetically, and obey authority. William Bennett, the arch cultural conservative and former educational “czar”, stated the cultural conservative position clearly:

“We neglected and denied much of the best in American education…. we simply stopped doing the right things and allowed an assault on intellectual and moral standards (Bennett, as above, p9).”

For Bennett and his cultural conservative cohorts, the assault on intellectual and moral standards has led schools away from their mission—indoctrination and inculcation.  These conservatives now rejoice at what they feel is a return to the “real” purpose of education—they see their judgment day as having arrived.

(To be continued.)

Dr Danny Weil is a public interest attorney who has practiced for more than twenty years and has been published in a case of first impression in California. He is no longer active as a lawyer but has written seven books on education, has taught second grade in South Central LA, PS 122, taught K-1 migrant children in Santa Maria, California and Guadalupe, California, taught in the California Youth Authority to first and second degree murderers and taught for seventeen years at Allan Hancock Junior College in Santa Maria, CA. in the philosophy department. Dr. Weil holds a BA in Political Economics and Philosophy, a multi-subject bilingual credential in education (he is fluent in Spanish) and has a PhD in Critical Thinking. He is a writer for the Truthout Intellectual Project.

photo credit: readerwalker via photopin cc

“Intellectual Property”: This Land was Made for You an … er, for Monsanto   Thomas L. Knapp at Center for a Stateless Society (Wednesday, February 20)

In 1860, pro-slavery apologist Edmund Ruffin forcefully argued in support of a proposition: “[T]he greater profits of slaves as property, compared to other investments for industrial operations.”

I’ve no doubt that IG Farben functionaries, touring their shiny new Buna Works complex in 1942 occupied Poland, quelled any twinges of conscience with an identical observation respecting the use of Jewish slave labor from nearby Auschwitz.

Has humanity morally evolved since the US Civil War? Since the Holocaust? If oral argument before the  Supreme Court of the United States in Bowman v. Monsanto is any indicator, well, no.

“Without the ability to limit reproduction of soybeans containing this patented trait [resistance to a particular pesticide],” says IG Farb … er, Monsanto … attorney Seth P. Waxman, “Monsanto could not have commercialized its invention, and never would have produced what is, by now, the most popular agricultural technology in America …”

Chief Justice Edmund Ruf … er, John G. Roberts … seemingly agrees: “Why in the world would anybody spend any money to try to improve the seed if as soon as they sold the first one anybody could grow more and have as many of those seeds as they want?”

Like Ruffin and IG Farben, Roberts and Monsanto argue the issue without reference to its moral dimension.

I willingly stipulate to the truth of Monsanto’s claim that its profits would be greatly enhanced were the state to grant it ownership and control of Vernon Bowman’s farm, of Vernon Bowman’s crops, and of Vernon Bowman himself (and for that matter of every farm and farmer on God’s green earth). That’s exactly what Monsanto is asking the state to do, on the basis of precisely that argument.

Keep one thing firmly in focus here: Vernon Bowman had no contractual obligation whatsoever to Monsanto with respect to the seeds he purchased, planted, and saved the progeny of in this case. He’d previously bought other seeds under contracts forbidding such use, and he’d honored those contracts, but these particular seeds were not so encumbered.

The Business Ethics Journal Review   Matt Zwolinski at Bleeding Heart Libertarians (Wednesday, February 20)

A few academic friends of mine, Chris MacDonald and Alexei Marcoux, have founded a new journal: Business Ethics Journal Review. The idea, which strikes me as a terrific one, is to facilitate a quicker and more robust critical examination of important ideas in business ethics by publishing short, peer-reviewed, open-access commentaries on articles published in business ethics journals.

BEJR went live on February 14th and has already published its first four commentaries. Readers of this blog might be especially interested in Peter Jaworski’s “Moving Beyond Market Failure: When the Failure is Government’s,” and my own “Are Usurious? Another New Argument for the Prohibition of High Interest Loans?”

Anyway, it’s a great new project and I hope you’ll support it by reading their stuff, following them on Facebook, and, if you’re an academic, maybe even submitting a commentary yourself.

Quotebag #91   n8chz at In defense of anagorism (Tuesday, February 19)

“Governments are just window-dressing for the major multinational corporations that actually run the world. They, in turn, are already run by computers.”—whlanteigne

“The sooner we restore a society where work is something we do, and not something we’re ‘given,’ a society where we’re in control of our working lives, the sooner we can do away with fake machismo, commodified rebellion, and going postal.”—Kevin Carson

“The upper class uses its mass media instruments to paint a picture of an aloof, overly idealistic, left.”—The Working Class

“Libertarian pretense that the workplace is voluntary would only make sense if people had an equal alternative to the workplace.”—Critiques of Libertarianism

“So, we do make common cause with liberals on formal equality, but radicals must push further and demand substantive equality against a world system of horrendous inequalities.”—radicalprogress

More for the Revolution   Rad Geek at Rad Geek People's Daily (Tuesday, February 12)

Ron Paul’s supporters have been putting a lot of volunteer work into amateur ads promoting his campaign. With all this activity, I feel like I ought to set aside my carping, and do my part after all. So here you go, Ron Paul Revolutionaries: a couple of contributions of my own, in accordance with the spirit and the general tone of ads like this recent Land of the Free video. Behold:

Vulgar Liberalism: Big Business and Its Useful Idiots   Kevin Carson at Center for a Stateless Society (Tuesday, February 19)

The following article was written by Kevin Carson and published on his blog Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism, October 12th, 2006.

Logan Ferree, in “The Role of the State in the Rise of the Corporation,” links to a debate he’s engaged in on that topic. Markos Moulitsas, in a widely read post proposing a libertarian-Democratic alliance, suggested that the power of large corporations had arisen from the free market, and that the twentieth century regulatory state had been imposed on big business to restrain it against its will.

In his own post at Daily Kos, Ferree linked to this challenge at Catallarchy blog:

Persuade me that corporate (coercive) power, to the extent that it exists, does not rest on governmental power at its foundation.

Ferree comments on liberals’ failure

to offer up a response to [the libertarian] critique of the assumption that government protects us from corporations, instead of enabling them….

…If you can’t defeat libertarianism on this issue, perhaps it’s time to switch sides.

The worst historical idiocy in response, hands down, was this comment by massive not passive:

The only time Government empowers corporations at the expense of the people is when it allows them to avoid compliance of the laws put into place to protect us from the corporations. Also when the governments provide financial favors to certain companies. Only by ignoring the laws do governments aid the corps.

The truth – only under conservative governments are laws created to benefit corps – under an integrty-based progressive administration, laws will help people from the overreach of corporate power. If you want it done right, elect Democrats.

When corporations threatened our safety at work, government stepped in to create worker safety provisions, rights to collectively bargain and the ability to receive overtime pay after 40 hours of labor.

Government knew that the free market would not offer these protections.

When corporations sold unsafe products, such as meat (read Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” for details), government intervened to assure that corporations could not fool the consumer with lies to push unhealthy and possibly toxic consumables.

Once again, the free market was little help here.

When corporations threatened the cleanliness of our air and water, government stepped in to preserve the integrity of our natural resources. Because the free market was not going to do so.

Governments, largely under conservative administrations, have been manipulated into providing favors for certain corporations, via tax abatements, or the “look the other way” approach in regards to disobeying safety/pollution/labor laws. But the reality is a removal of government oversight from corporations would leave this country in far worse shape than the current state.