Quoth: What Education Is

Our early spring bumper crop of wild calla lillies

 “I remember as a boy of not more than nine if that, having to memorize a verse by Ben Jonson of all people.  ‘It is now growing like a tree, in bulk doth make man better be, or standing long at oak, a thousand year.  The lily of the day is fairer far than they,’ and so on.  And what he said was that you can live a good life, even if it’s a short one.  And that was pumped into us, and we were made to memorize it, and that has grown in my mind.  I’ve come from hearing it as a child to realizing, in old age really, what it really means.  The quality of life.  Well, you see, that’s big stuff in education.  You give that to little children, and you have set a time bomb in their minds.  Sometime or another they’re going to wake up and think, that’s what he said.  And that’s what education is.”

Robertson Davies

Updates to Recent Posts

 Nine days after the Climate Distortion post, about 175 million people (or close to the total US population in 1960)  in every region of the United States were under heat advisories with many experiencing high heat indexes. The temperature of the ocean off Florida was 100F.  High ocean temperatures in the Atlantic may fuel storms in the fast-approaching hurricane season.  After forty days of excessive heat, the southwest was anticipating moderating temperatures but higher humidity as monsoon rains were forecast for early August.  There were forest fires in ten European countries, as well as Canada and elsewhere around the world.  Antarctic sea ice is the thinnest on record for this time of the year, beating the all time record in 2017 by a considerable margin. The era of global boiling has arrived, said the UN Secretary-General. 

Apropos of the New College of Gilead/Florida post: for the start of the upcoming 2023-24 academic year, New College of Florida announced that 36 of 100 full time teaching positions were vacant.  Six vacancies were the result of resignations, and a quarter of them followed the extreme right takeover of the board of trustees.  In Florida universities generally, the loss of faculty this year is expected to at least double and perhaps triple the normal turnover.  One senior professor at the University of Florida law school who is Black said simply: "Florida is toxic."  He said there's been no new hires of Black teachers for years.  He has left the school and the state, partly for his own safety.  More at the Guardian.

New College of Gilead (Formerly Known as Florida)

Update 7/30/23:At the start of the 2023-24 academic year, New College of Florida announced that 36 of 100 full time teaching positions were vacant.  Six vacancies were the result of resignations, and a quarter of them followed the extreme right takeover of the board of trustees.  In Florida universities generally, the loss of faculty this year is to at least double and perhaps triple the normal turnover.  One senior professor at the University of Florida law school who is Black said simply: "Florida is toxic."  He said there's been no new hires of Black teachers for years.  He has left the school and the state, partly for his own safety. 

In addition to attacking school libraries and curricula and K-12 schools themselves, the rabid right officials of Florida are completing their takeover of a previously progressive college, known as New College of Florida.

Recent stories about it reminded me of something I’d entirely forgotten: in high school, when I was exploring where I might go to college, I considered applying to what was then called simply New College. 

At that time it really was a New College—in fact, it didn’t have students yet.  I don’t know exactly how or why I was receiving unsolicited information from them, but their letters and brochures were very inviting. 

 It was to be a liberal arts college for academically talented students, who would have a wide latitude in following their own lines and areas of inquiry.  Students would be given written evaluations instead of grades, and each semester they would set goals and sign a contract to fulfill them, which included agreed upon standards of passing or failing.  The student body would be very small but also racially, culturally and economically diverse, and (vital to me) there was financial aid available.

 The brochures as I recall them made much of the most recognizable name on the charter faculty: the eminent historian Arnold Toynbee.  Toynbee made his academic mark in the 1940s and 50s, and was known as well for his international expertise.  Though his academic influence apparently declined by 1960, and he’d retired from teaching before New College persuaded him to join them, he gained new currency with the election of John F. Kennedy to the US presidency.  That’s why I knew his name. 

Toynbee’s major opus was a twelve volume A Study of History which he began publishing in 1934, with the final volume arriving only in 1961.  His major thesis, as JFK described it, was that nations succeed or fail based on how they respond to challenges.  Kennedy used this as an overarching guide to his approach to policymaking.  

 Describing his New Frontier vision in his nomination acceptance speech, Kennedy said: “The New Frontier of which I speak is not a set a promises.  It is a set of challenges.”  “Challenges” was a frequent word in his public vocabulary. Most of what Kennedy tried to accomplish—increasing US prestige and influence in the world, beginning the control of nuclear weapons, and addressing economic, environmental and social issues (such as racial justice and poverty) in the US—were, in his view, the necessary responses to challenges in what he described as the dangerous decade of the 1960s.  Responding to challenges was both defensive and proactive—the challenge to do better.

 In the end, the lure of Toynbee, the utopian sound of the college, and the Sarasota sunshine, were not enough for me to seriously entertain applying.  Maybe I just lacked the courage (and any more information than the brochures offered), but I did not attempt to be one of the first 101 students at New College that entered in 1964.  

Over the years New College seems to have maintained this initial character, and it worked pretty well.  It’s near the top in academic rating, and has had the highest proportion of Fulbright scholars of any college or university in the US.  But seemingly due to its small size (between 600 and 700 students), New College went through several institutional permutations to keep going, most recently becoming the smallest college in the Florida state university system, and also its Honors College. 

 That relationship seemed to work okay until this year, when Governor Ron DeSantis exercised state control to appoint six new members of the governing board of trustees, including four known “conservative” activists (who didn’t live in Florida.)  They quickly fired the college president, denied tenure to all five eligible professors, announced their intention to shut down “ideologically captured departments,” disbanded the diversity and inclusion office, fired the school’s librarian, etc.

 Their intention, said the governor’s chief of staff, is to transform New College into one “more along the lines of a Hillsdale of the South.”  Hillsdale is a small but influential conservative Christian college in Michigan. Not heavy on Fulbright scholars, it nevertheless supplied the Trump administration with its alums.  The majority leader of the Michigan Senate testified to the US House January 5 investigating committee that he was pressured to accept a slate of false electors assembled to overturn the 2020 elections by, among others, the vice-president of Hillsdale.

 Besides its institute for constitutional studies that Mrs. Clarence (“Ginni”) Thomas helped set up in Washington, Hillsdale actively trains teachers in American history and other subjects, and has created the Hillsdale 1776 Curriculum for students from pre-school through high school.  As described in the May 23 issue of the New York Review of Books, it sounds basically like the kind of history commonly taught in the 1950s in grade school and high school.  In place of the Catholic propaganda added to my history courses, there’s conservative propaganda.  But one overall effect is to erase post-1950s scholarship on race, and impose its own revisionist interpretation of the role of slavery.  Scholarship on other groups missing from 1950s history is also ignored. 

Meanwhile, the current faculty and student body of New College has been in a furor all year, under fire from this educational blitzkrieg.  They had their finals interrupted by DeSantis arriving to sign a series of bills restricting gender and race education in Florida colleges and universities.  Graduating seniors refused to recognize their own graduation ceremony (except to heckle the official speakers, including a Trump advisor) and set up their robustly attended alternative commencement, supported by alumni. As for the faculty, they voted to censure their own trustees.   

 But students are a regularly renewable resource. The new New College is already taking steps to get the kind of “mission-aligned” students (in the words of a trustee) they want by becoming the first in Florida to accept the Classic Learning Test as well as the SATs from prospective students.  “Classic” is the new code word for ultra-conservative and (as one of the trustees described it) “Christian tradition.” 

  The total takeover of New College is not the only DeSantis attack on higher education in Florida. His policies and laws affect thousands of students in large public universities as well, and schools across the state have staged walkouts and protests. The speed, intensity and extent of Florida’s transformation into officially a white separatist, anti-choice, anti-gender diversity enclave is shocking, and like Hitler’s blitzkrieg invasions, it is meant to be.  That intensity encourages acts of overt violence, as well as patterns of prejudice.  No wonder the NAACP and other organizations have issued a traveler’s warning for Florida, as if it were a foreign dictatorship.  One of the state's most recent sports heroes, former NBA star Dwayne Wade has already moved his family out of the state, partly in prudent fear for his trans child.

 Even given all that, this latest move has an especially insidious element.  New College of Florida is a public, not a private institution, like Hillsdale in Michigan.  Transforming it into a Christian college is a flagrant violation of the separation of church and state that is at the heart of the imagined American Fascist governments of Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Florida is the Republic of Gilead in the making.

 Arnold Toynbee had some controversial and wrongheaded views, but he had something relevant to say about our times. Maybe he even warned New College students in that class I wasn’t in, that entered in 1964.  He believed that societies rarely fade away to die by natural causes.  They are either murdered, or they commit suicide.  Mostly they commit suicide.

Woof-Woof, Win-Win

Okay, I think we're all ready for a win-win.

Dogs and cats as pets have never been more numerous, but a lot of animals are collateral damage, and have less than happy lives.  Those who aren't abused (or aren't abused anymore) but shy away from humans, still have less chance of survival. In a better world being a people animal wouldn't matter so much.  But that's the way it is now.

 When these animals wind up in shelters, they have less chance of being adopted.  Feral animals who hide or cower don't seem like promising pets.  Their lives may then turn out to be quite short.

On the other hand there are children who have trouble reading, or who can't see the point of reading. (Even before they get to the teen years when smart phones and pheromones dominate, and "books smell like old people.")

Then along came some genius to turn two apparently unrelated problems into one solution: kids reading to shelter animals (this article focuses on dogs, but it's also being done for cats.)

Being read to by a child stirs the animal's curiosity, and a child's voice is less threatening.  To what degree this actually increases the animal's social skills, who knows, but it does familiarize them with humans and human speech, in a safe place.

Meanwhile a kid who likes reading has somebody to read to, and to show the pictures to, just like a parent or teacher.  Or a kid who doesn't read too well is not facing a critic who picks at pronunciation or even aspects of the story that strictly speaking aren't reflected in the text.

It probably doesn't always work--the dog or cat is bored, or the child is--but it seems to work often enough to be a lovely win-win, and maybe the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Christmas in the Land of Guns

On Christmas Day 2015, 27 Americans were shot and killed by other people.  Sixty-three more were shot by others and were wounded but did not immediately die. (The total doesn't include people who shot themselves.)

Two of these bloody Christmas events involved four or more victims--and are therefore classified as mass shootings.  That made Christmas slightly unusual.  On the average, there was roughly one mass shooting a day in 2015.

Exactly none of these incidents was classified as an act of terrorism, perpetrated or inspired by foreigners.

As the Washington Post points out, the number of people killed by guns in the U.S. on Christmas is about equal to the number killed by guns in England, or even in the vastness of Australia, in an entire year.  It is equal to the annual deaths by gun in "Austria, New Zealand, Norway, Slovenia, Estonia, Bermuda, Hong Kong and Iceland, combined."

Some of the victims of Christmas gun violence were children. On Wednesday, Arne Duncan gave a speech marking the end of his seven year tenure as Secretary of Education in the Obama administration.  Though he had accomplishments to describe, his speech was characterized as angry and sorrowful.

Because children of America are at such risk of being killed or wounded by guns. Because Congress refuses to enact the most basic gun safety laws.  Children can't learn if they're dead, or if students live in fear of gun violence, as so many do."A majority of young men of color don’t think they're going to live past 23," he said. "What does that compel us to do?"

Cleaning Up December Bookmarks: Broken Secret Service, New Russian Nuke and Disappearing American Middle Class

Here are some stories I bookmarked/followed this month that I haven't written about yet...

Land of Guns: The Supreme Court made headlines with something it didn't do--it did not take up a case sent to it that concerned local regulations of firearms, leaving in place such a regulation.

That opened a door and Connecticut quickly walked through it.  Near the third year anniversary of the Sandy Hook gun massacre in one of its towns, the state banned gun sales to individuals on terrorist watch lists.  This is after Congress again refused to ban such sales federally to individuals on the no-fly list.  Other states were considering their own bans.

Danger to the President: A story that should have made more headlines was a scathing report on a broken Secret Service.  It notes several examples in which unscreened individuals were permitted near President Obama, including an armed man with an arrest record who shared an elevator ride.

With high attrition and very low morale, the Secret Service is a scandal and a danger, as noted by a Republican Congressman: Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), chairman of the Oversight Committee, said the report should spur further action by the Obama administration. “The situation is getting worse not better,” he said. “The president is in jeopardy, and he better personally get involved in fixing this.”

 Republicans share the blame since their Congress cut Secret Service funding in 2011 more severely than ever before.  But it's more than the GOPers wet dream self-fulfilling prophesy of a federal agency doing badly after they decimated it with budget cuts.  It's a cultural problem that goes back at least to hungover agents guarding President Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963.  And by the way, terrorists read the news.

Native Lives Matter: One of the numerically smaller "minorities" seldom makes headlines, but problems among the First Americans remain.  In Canada, the new Trudeau government has launched an investigation into murders of aboriginal women, revealing horrifying statistics.  In the US, the ability of tribes to police their own lands is under threat, along with their sovereignty.

As for the related issue of sports teams names that insult Native Americans, the relentless move away from them gained a powerful corporate supporter in Addidas, that pledged financial support to schools that dump their offensive names and mascots.

Two Nations: The so-called "income inequality" divide deepened this year, and for the first time in generations, there is no middle class majority in America.  The rich are getting richer, and thanks in part to rising prices that inevitably follow (despite the nonsensical official inflation rate) everyone else is getting poorer.

There is not a one-to-one correspondence with the two nations of rich and the rest to our deep bipolar political divide, but there is clearly a political effect in one group: less educated white working class/ low middle class men, particularly older, particularly in the South and the rustbelt, but also scattered nearly everywhere in the US they can still afford to live.

 As a category (though with exceptions--since in many respects I fit this bill) they form the solid base for Trumpism and the general rabid right fanaticism that is the official GOP stance.

Exploiting insecurity and shrinking opportunities and income by blaming "foreigners" especially of other races is a time-tested tactic of Republican elites, though it appears to have gotten beyond their control.

The plight of this group however was emphasized by new statistics that show it is the only category of Americans to show a decline in life expectancy.  Suicide and drug abuse appear to be chief causes.  One analyst (quoted in this analysis by Paul Krugman) theorized it's because they have lost the narrative of their lives.

Well, that's a simplistic way to put it, but it hints at the situation.  The nature of American divisions in class and geography inspired yet another map with cute names for the divisions--income, racial and therefore cultural and political--that befuddle attempts to figure out just what is happening to this dangerously disunited United States.

The federal government is not blameless in this disenchantment, especially among the white working class, according to this thoughtful article.  Though the situation is also rife with paradox and double binds.

As for the income inequality issue itself, Bernie Sanders continues to talk about it, but thanks to terrorist attacks (even though most terrorist incidents in the US since 2004 have been by right wing zealots) and the general xenophobic tenor fueled by GOPer candidates, it hasn't emerged yet as a big campaign issue.

But when it was a hotter topic, there was this guy who decides to raise the minimum wage in his company to $70 grand a year.  It made a nice Twitter-type splash.  Then somebody did a follow-up.  How's that company doing now, after that rash deed?  Well, pretty damn good actually.

Obesity in America: A stroll through a shopping mall this season should provide graphic support to the reality that, compared to a generation or two ago, there are not only more Americans, they each take up more space.     One new study suggests that increasing obesity in children may be related not only to Big Gulps but too many antibiotics.   There are, at least statistically, other factors besides high calorie food.

Another public health issue continues to be GMO crops.  While often cited as an anti-science stance, the concern is not so much over the crops themselves as the herbicides used to make them viable--a demonstrable health problem.

No Education Left Behind:  Few things have been as damaging to American public schools than the so-called No Child Left Behind mandates.  Here in CA they decimated arts programs among others, so that high school graduates are unprepared for entire areas of college.  They decimated social studies and civics education, which one writer links to the rise in domestic terrorism.  Well, finally it's on the decline with the new federal Education law, easing test mandates and increasing state control.

It's Not Your Grandad's Nuclear War:  New threats like the latest permutations of terrorism get the attention and focus fears, but bad old fashioned nuclear war is still a much bigger threat.

Russia's bombing campaign of Syria is pretty blatantly a low-risk but live testing ground of their latest weapon systems, developed under Putin to replace the Soviet-era arsensal.  Putin has not been shy about both developing new nuclear weapons and threatening to use them.  Under the news radar this month, Russia inadvertently revealed their very powerful new nuclear torpedo, which is remarkably dangerous not only for its yield but its ability to operate independently. They can also detonate offshore and create huge tsunami tidal waves that themselves can destroy coastal cities.

This at the same time as GOPer candidates bluster includes advocating actions which would lead directly to war with Russia.

American Exceptionalism

The United States has arguably been declining and falling for years, but occasionally there are new markers.  Apart from internal measures--decline in relation to principles and ideals, decline in relation to the past--there are comparisons with other countries.  Some of these are discounted, thanks to the collapse of the economic power of Japan, the country that scared America in the 70s and 80s.  But discounting everything is perilous.

We note this week that there is a new robotic rover on the surface of the Moon, and it is from China.  There was an apparently successful orbit of a living being and safe return, conducted by Iran.  At least some of the space activity these days is due in part to the U.S. outsourcing its own technology, and others quickly adapting it.  That technological and intellectual capital is being spent, and may not be renewed.

May not if trends in U.S. education continue.  There have been scary headlines and warnings for years, so what's new about the latest?  For one thing, the U.S. had fallen behind in average math achievement, but our best were still among the best.  No more.  Our best students languish "in the middle of the pack" internationally.  They can't keep up.

Add this to other downward trends, if not spirals: infant mortality, longevity, and above all, the enormous gulf between rich and everybody else--very likely the source of much of the rest, along with the retrenchment of governmental resources.  With even the modest advance in healthcare coverage in the Affordable Care Act under intense political fire, our healthcare system remains near the bottom of the industrialized world.   Instead the U.S. leads the world in gun violence and captial punishment--with no fear of relinquishing that dominance.

Despite this country's residual strengths and the advances in less quantifiable qualities, this all has the distinct aroma of decadence.  America is exceptional in its self-satisfied paralysis, its furious conflicts that stalemate action or even enough of a common diagnosis to proceed.

From the  New York Times editorial on Sunday:

In a post-smokestack age, there is only one way for the United States to avoid a declining standard of living, and that is through innovation. Advancements in science and engineering have extended life, employed millions and accounted for more than half of American economic growth since World War II, but they are slowing. The nation has to enlarge its pool of the best and brightest science and math students and encourage them to pursue careers that will keep the country competitive. 

But that isn’t happening. Not only do average American students perform poorly compared with those in other countries, but so do the best students, languishing in the middle of the pack as measured by the two leading tests used in international comparisons.... 

On the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment test, the most recent, 34 of 65 countries and school systems had a higher percentage of 15-year-olds scoring at the advanced levels in mathematics than the United States did. The Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland all had at least twice the proportion of mathematically advanced students as the United States, and many Asian countries had far more than that.

Other tests have shown that America’s younger students fare better in global comparisons than its older students do, which suggests a disturbing failure of educators to nurture good students as they progress to higher grades. Over all, the United States is largely holding still while foreign competitors are improving rapidly."

Meanwhile, the Chinese are talking softly about their rover on the Moon (the peaceful exploration of space) which they are conducting methodically, with plenty of resources committed to it.  But their longer range plans may be more complex.  This BBC story says they are looking at future potential for the Moon's minerals. This is not really a new or necessarily sinister idea, unless the fact that the Bush administration expressed interest in the same thing tilts the balance for you.  But it shows that while these days the only Americans thinking that far ahead are science fiction writers, the Chinese aren't just wondering, they're exploring.

Blue Monday

The painting is by Kandinsky, who formed or was part of various groups, several of which had "Blue" in the name.

It's Monday morning and difficult to greet with hysterical laughter, but this may help: I remember reading some of this when it first surfaced in the 80s but somehow it's much funnier now.  In fact I had to stop reading it because I was in danger of laughing myself sick.  Really, it's the funniest thing I've read, line for line, in a long time, maybe ever.  It's a compilation from college freshman essays on history.  It reeks with joy.

Happy Ending, Maybe

Catherine Ferguson Academy was a unique school in the Detroit public school system.  It educated 250 high school girls at a time, pregnant or new mothers, offering daycare to more than 100 of their babies.  The girls helped run a small farm, in addition to academic studies that all together provided a plus 90% graduation rate, and a high percentage going on to higher education.

But when Michigan strengthened its laws giving power to single overseers, and the one in charge of Detroit public schools set his sights on Catherine Ferguson, controversy ensued.  Students getting set to begin a sit-down protest strike in the school were hauled out and arrested, while police sirens wailed to block out their cries.  All this got the attention of Rachel Maddow on MSNBC who did several segments on the school and its plight, including on Wednesday, which was the day that Catherine Ferguson was slated to close forever.

The city's newspapers belatedly but strongly decried the decision to close the school.  A protest rally was scheduled for noon Thursday, with Danny Glover among the speakers.  But then the apparent Hollywood ending--at the last minute the announcement came that Catherine Ferguson Academy had been saved--taken over as a charter school, with the promise of more resources.

It was a perfect ending---maybe too perfect.  The company that will run the school (and made a deal the same day for two other public schools that would close but send its students to their charter school) seems to have a record working with disadvantaged kids, and seems initially at least a much better choice than another company rumored to be in the running, which ran a school with a graduation rate closer to 10%.

But the whole thing was suspect from the beginning.  The decision to close Catherine Ferguson was ostensibly to save the city money, but most of its budget was paid for by federal and state grants.  There were other schools closed, but the money saved was far short of expectations. 

Two things are certain: a private company now has what once was a groundbreaking and highly successful public school, and just as pointedly, the teachers at Catherine Ferguson will no longer be union members.

So excuse me for being a little suspicious of all this, the timing in particular, and of what will happen over the next year or two at Catherine Ferguson, once the celebs have left and the cameras have moved on. 

I suspect that thought has also crossed the mind of the school's founding principal,  Asenath Andrews.  Amidst the joy and relief of the school not closing, she mentioned to Rachel Maddow on Thursday (transcript not yet posted) that she hoped she felt the same way the next day, or next year, when she might need to go on Rachel's program again.  Maddow also made a cheery but definite point of saying she will keep in touch, and will visit the school in the future.         

Buying the Future

The graduation season focuses attention on the perils of universities these days.  Some worry that too many students are on drugs.  Now there's reason for everyone to worry that too many universities are on Koch.

Two Florida newspapers charged that the Florida State University economics department  "had accepted a $1.5 million grant from a foundation controlled by petrochemical billionaire Charles Koch on the condition that Koch’s operatives would have a free hand in selecting professors and approving publications."

NPR's All Things Considered picked up the story, and quoted officials as denying that Koch has a role in selecting faculty, but even in a short and shallow report, otherwise shows how the department bends over for the Koch agenda.

Think Progress, however, notes that Koch has been busy buying the educational future:. As reporter Kris Hundley notes, Koch virtually owns much of George Mason University, another public university, through grants and direct control over think tanks within the school. For instance, Koch controls the Mercatus Center of George Mason University, an institute that set much of the Bush administration’s environmental deregulation policy. And similar conditional agreements have been made with schools like Clemson and West Virginia University. ThinkProgress has analyzed data from the Charles Koch Foundation, and found that this trend is actually much larger than previous known. Many of the Koch university grants finance far right, pro-polluter professors, and dictate that students read Charles Koch’s book as part of their academic study."

Think Progress implicates Brown University, West Virginia University, Utah State and Troy University as well.

Starving government so it no longer has the resources to act in the public interest is the not so secret agenda of the GOPer coalition of the predatory capitalist right and the religious right--a coalition that's become so intertwined that a lot of folks personify both and may even believe they are the same thing. We're seeing this in many areas, and now it's becoming noteworthy in higher education--the last area of education in which the U.S. still holds world prominence, though admittedly more for a few elite institutions than the general makeup.  When you starve these institutions, interested above all in self-preservation, then support has to come from somewhere.  Increasingly, it's coming from billionaires with either or both motives for that agenda, which are linked not only by the profit motive but by opportunities to create a political climate favorable to that agenda.

All of this complements other efforts, from state governments and municipalities mandating what can and cannot be taught in schools regarding (for example) evolution and climate change, to the somewhat buffoonish but still troublesome efforts of people like Michelle Bachman and Mike Huckabee to rewrite history so it comports with Rabid Right ideology.

It's not that universities have heretofor been pure.  The Pentagon and military contractors have financed entire schools for years.  This is just more clearly ideological and political, and aimed at controlling what is taught and what is not.  Except for certain schools sponsored by Christian organizations, colleges and universities have officially and for the most part functionally upheld universal standards against impositions and dictates from outside.   

In the years directly after the Nazis and Fascists, and while the Soviet Union was being heavily critiqued, much was made in the U.S. about the difference between education and propaganda.  A lot of it turns out to be self-serving, but we did get a sense of the difference.  The counter-factual was propaganda, and all you had to do was prove it wrong and it could not masquerade as education.  Conversely, if something is called propaganda and it turns out to be true, it's education.  In today's world, it doesn't necessarily work that way anymore.

Subversive!

Here's President Obama poisoning the minds of American youth with the message of "Get serious this year." What? That will cut into Xbox sales--that's not capitalism, it's socialism!

This is a nice last 6 minutes. Some comments from students: "This doomed generation should be proud that they had something to do with electing a President who cares about the quality of schooling and knows how to spell it too...What I would most like to applaud President Obama on is taking the time to look at this new generation from ages 5 to 18 and letting us know that he cares." "Obama made my education feel more important, that I mattered." "His speech talks to the students on a personal basis, and the country should be proud that we have a competent President who can talk to students without making mistakes and sounding like an idiot."

As for me, it made me want to be young again.

California Future's Day of Infamy

Assuming the reported California state budget deal is announced today, July 20 becomes a day that will live in infamy. Robert Cruikshank wrote Sunday at Calitics: "And so the budget drama hurtles toward its inevitable conclusion, perhaps as soon as tomorrow. Democrats have caved and given Arnold Schwarzenegger what he wanted - a cuts-only budget that does massive and lasting damage to the state of California, to the people who live here, and to our collective future. It's taken 31 years, but Howard Jarvis is finally going to get the wholesale destruction of public services he always wanted."

David Dayen followed up at Calitics with a post titled A Complete Blindness to Long-Term Consequences, and I name the class, age and race victims at American Dash.

The irony is that this is happening when we finally have a President who understands the self-destructive stupidity of this course, and is trying to reverse it. Less than ironic is the likelihood that other states will copy this approach in their own budget crises. In the short run, the Terminator's deal may well counteract or at least weaken any economic stimulus in California resulting from federal action. Dayden writes: By siphoning off almost $1 billion in gas tax funds slated for cities and counties, not one pothole in California will get filled this year. With the loss of $1.7 billion in redevlopment funds, not one project like affordable housing will get initiated. And by taking $1.3 billion in local property taxes, lots of city and county employees, particularly in public safety, will end up out of work. It's really robbery on a pretty grand scale, and it will offset any economic recovery through stimulus funding throughout the state. "

It's also going to cause immediate chaos, especially in education. But in the long term, this budget deeply wounds the California future, and thereby the American future.

Update: The deal was announced late in the day, though not in detail. Meanwhile, another piece on how these cuts will end up costing California more later, and these are just the direct financial costs.

California Falling

It's finally happening, California is falling into the sea.

The lifeboats are out. Some have yachts--let's face it, some have battleships--but most are counting their provisions and figuring out how long they can survive, while checking the old rubber boat for leaks. And then there are those who don't have to check---they have nothing that will float.

It's something of a slow motion disaster, especially if you see its origin--as Paul Krugman does, as I do, and as a lot of people did at the time--in the beginning of the moronic inferno with the passage of Prop 13 more than three decades ago. The idea was that California could afford everything, like the best school system in the nation, without paying for it. That brand of magical thinking, which is just barely disguised kill-the-government social Darwinism, let the individual rich enrich themselves even more with no responsibility to the community that supports their ability to get rich, and at the expense of everyone else--has provided, among other things, the now worst school system in the country.

Now the Terminator is living up to his name. Governor S. has interpreted the rejection of phony ballot initiatives as a rejection of any new taxes--although this question was not on any of the ballots, and this is his own fantasy. So he is terminating entire health and education programs and crippling others, and so the political idiocy in Sacramento is going to be paid for by the poor, the sick and the young. And eventually--perhaps a not very distant eventually--everyone in the state, and then in the country.

These cuts will wind up costing the state money--billions of it--in costs they will cause and in lost federal support, and will have a ripple effect that could turn out to be a slow motion tsunami, although these days the slow motion part is questionable. To vary the cliche, California is gripped by the perfect storm--a collapsing economy that's draining the state of revenue, leading to cuts which will inevitably push the economy to collapse faster, as job and pay losses ripple through every sector.

In the area of education, prospective college students will lose grant and loan money while the two state university systems take yet another hit. The non-elite system, which our local Humboldt State belongs to, has forced deeper budget cuts every year, and there's only so much damage in a relatively short time that a system can take. It's not that money is necessarily being spent in the best way, but it's getting to the point that a total reorganization will be needed, and that costs even more money.

That's the other aspect of the perfect storm--local K-12 schools and local governments have all been turning themselves inside out to cut their budgets every year, and now there are these even greater cuts. Teachers in one L.A. school have gone on a hunger strike to protest. And that's likely to be just the beginning.

Huge cuts in health programs are already being forecast to eventually cost more money as well as lives, and that's on top of losing federal money, which is often many times what the state is spending. A sensible reading of the rejection of the propositions is that voters want the legislature and the governor to do their jobs and make law that addresses this crisis. But the Terminator has chosen to interpret it as yet another anti-tax crusade. So some are dubbing him Governor Hoover.

Pillar of the Future: Education

In his Georgetown speech, President Obama's first pillar in the foundation of the future is to reform the outdated rules and regulations that allowed this crisis to happen in the first place. The fifth pillar is long-term deficit reduction, to be done not by wishful thinking or crazy proposals, but by getting together to confront the hard problems and craft solutions. But that is a task that virtually all responsible economists agree needs to wait until the government has dealt with the Great Recession we're in right now. Both of these sober and sensible approaches belie the kind of infantile analysis the Rabid Right is indulging in, as evidenced by the "tea-bag" protests on April 15.

The second pillar of the future is education. Republicans have talked a lot about education while pursuing policies that have driven it to the brink of disaster on all levels. And at all levels, the United States is falling behind.

President Obama recognizes that the American economic future depends on our citizens being smart and skilled enough to compete and innovate in a world where many countries have invested more heavily in education.

It's not only that Europe has done better. It's especially important because the U.S. is not going to out-compete on the basis of raw numbers with countries like India and China. There are more college honor students in India than there are total college students in the U.S.

Here's what President Obama said at Georgetown:

"The second pillar of this new foundation is an education system that finally prepares our workers for a 21st century economy. In the 20th century, the GI Bill sent a generation to college, and for decades, we led the world in education and economic growth. But in this new economy, we trail the world's leaders in graduation rates and achievement. That is why we have set a goal that will greatly enhance our ability to compete for the high-wage, high-tech jobs of the 21st century: by 2020, America will once more have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.

To meet that goal, we have already dramatically expanded early childhood education. We are investing in innovative programs that have proven to help schools meet high standards and close achievement gaps. We are creating new rewards tied to teacher performance and new pathways for advancement. I have asked every American to commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training, and we have provided tax credits to make a college education more affordable for every American."

Foundation of A Sustainable Future

President Obama warned the faculty and students at Georgetown University on Tuesday that he was there to deliver prose, not poetry. But there's more poetry in concise description in a precisely organized structure, easy to understand because it is so clear, direct and grounded in the real world.

Towards the end of the speech, he mentioned the problem of "an attention span that has only grown shorter with the twenty-four hour news cycle, and insists on instant gratification in the form of immediate results or higher poll numbers. When a crisis hits, there's all too often a lurch from shock to trance, with everyone responding to the tempest of the moment until the furor has died away and the media coverage has moved on, instead of confronting the major challenges that will shape our future in a sustained and focused way."

Well, that's another game he's not playing. In this speech he did precisely that: confronted the major challenges that will shape our future in a sustained and focused way. The media mostly ignored it, mentioning at best his assessment that the economy shows "glimmers of hope", but there are still difficult times ahead.

The first half of the speech was a step by step analysis of the current economic crisis, the steps that were taken in the last months of Bush and the steps his administration has taken and why. For anyone who is confused or doubtful about any part of it, this speech makes it pretty clear. You can read the transcript here or in PDF format at C-Span here. The CSpan video is currently here.

The second half of the speech is about the future. President Obama began by referring to a parable. "There is a parable at the end of the Sermon on the Mount that tells the story of two men. The first built his house on a pile of sand, and it was destroyed as soon as the storm hit. But the second is known as the wise man, for when "…the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house…it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock."

We cannot rebuild this economy on the same pile of sand. We must build our house upon a rock. We must lay a new foundation for growth and prosperity – a foundation that will move us from an era of borrow and spend to one where we save and invest; where we consume less at home and send more exports abroad."

President Obama outlined five pillars of a better future.

"It's a foundation built upon five pillars that will grow our economy and make this new century another American century: new rules for Wall Street that will reward drive and innovation; new investments in education that will make our workforce more skilled and competitive; new investments in renewable energy and technology that will create new jobs and industries; new investments in health care that will cut costs for families and businesses; and new savings in our federal budget that will bring down the debt for future generations. That is the new foundation we must build. That must be our future – and my Administration's policies are designed to achieve that future."

In the coming days, I will excerpt President Obama's remarks on several of these pillars, and his vision for a better future.

Change We Voted For

"I know [the special interests, insurance, banks, oil company lobbyists] are gearing up for a fight as we speak. My message to them is this: So am I." President Obama describes his budget, his priorities and the fight ahead, in five minutes.

Starting to Happen

Barack Obama is four days away from becoming President, but his presidency is starting to happen. While his cabinet selections are being considered for confirmation by the Senate, PE Obama has begun to take the reins of economic recovery.

Thanks in large measure to how the Bushites bungled the first montrous half of the $700 billion TARP bailout, there was congressional resistance to approving the second half for Obama. But he and his administration said straight out what they intended to do with it, and how transparent they were going to be with exactly how they would spend that money. Obama also let it be known that if Congress balked, he would use his first veto to free the funds.

And whatever else he said, it worked. Wrote Time's Jay Newton-Small: Yesterday really was something to watch with Senate Dems openly going into the meeting voicing skepticism about supporting the second half of the bank bailout, an issue on par with President Bush in public approval ratings, both are at 27%. “I don't think the climate warrants it,” said Senator Evan Bayh walking into the luncheon with PEOTUS Obama. “The first half has done its work, the banking sector is far more stable than in September.”

Yet somehow, 45 minutes later, nearly everyone emerged in support of the bailout. “It was really something to watch,” marveled Michigan's Debbie Stabenow. “He convinced a lot of people to come to his side. It was just amazing to see what kind of president he'll make."

So on Thursday, a key Senate vote assured that Obama would get the remaining $350 billion as soon as he takes office.

Meanwhile, his own economic recovery plan has changed some, partly in response to criticisms and ideas, and it has also become more specific. Ambinder lays it out this way:

Moolah -- a large expansion of unemplyoment benefits, increasing the duration and amount of the money; also: a big expansion of the (highly stimulative) foos stamp program.
Education: $41 billion for school repair; nearly $80 billion to states and local governments to prevent criticial services from being cut; $15.6 billion for Pell grant expansion; $6 billion to colleges and universities.

A passel of other items, like a few billion for home heating subsidies.
COBRA -- $39 billion worth of new spending to allow folks who've lost their job to keep their employer's insurance even longer.
Highway/Road/Rail: $30 billion for projects; also, billions for light rail, upgrades and repairs and Amtrak.
Energy: $11 billion for the electricity grid, $8 billion in loan gaurantees for new power station / transmission projects, $6.7 billion to make government buildings more energy efficient, $6.2 billion to help poor families make their homes more energy efficient; $600 million for new, energy efficient cars for the federal fleet; $2.4 billion for carbon capture research;

Businesses: $430 million for small business loans; $100 million for rural business grants; several hundred million to help foster job growth in the manufacturing sector and in localities hit hard by the recession.
Science -- $3 billion for the National Science Foundation, $2 billion more for the NIH, hundreds of millions for high energy physics, satellite development, construction grants, the U.S. geological survey, NASA climate change programs and more.

Tax Cuts -- Obama's downpayment on payroll tax relief -- $500 per person, $1000 per couple. The Earned Income Tax Credit will be expanded.
Digital conversion -- $650 million in new coupons for the digital television transition.

The recovery plan also comes with blueprints for oversight, both institutional (Overseeing the economic recovery spending, House Appropriations Committee chairman David Obey (D-WI) said today, will be a seven-person board composed of assistant secretaries and inspectors general of various agencies. Obey described the board's mission as "early warning of funding management problems" as the bill is implemented in states and towns across the country) and by providing information to--well, everybody: Contracts and data on where the stimulus money is heading will be posted online... But the best part of all: Any member of the public who has concerns with a particular element of the spending disbursement can post their questions for the oversight board to investigate.

Soon-to-be President Obama remains the most popular incoming president in generations (71%), and his economic recovery program is especially popular--but here's the really fantastic news, so note it well ye conventional wisdom nonthinkers: "the idea of creating jobs through increasing production of renewable energy and making public buildings more energy efficient" gets the approval of 89% of the public.

School Daze

In the thick heat of August, thoughts don't automatically return to a new school year, particularly college. Some colleges, like my alma mater, don't begin until the third week of September, but many are starting today, including the one across the street (just about), Humboldt State University.

So here are a few college facts from a New Yorker essay last spring (probably part of a commencement address in progress) by one of the best writers writing, Louis Menand. There are some 4,000 institutions of higher learning in the U.S. A far greater percentage of the population goes to college now than when I did (about half) , and a lower percentage graduates (also about half.) Harvard used to accept about 30% of its applicants; today it accepts 9%.

About a million and a half students graduated last spring. 22% of them majored in business, far more than any other field. Some 4% majored in English, as I did. Menand writes: "There are more bachelor degrees awarded every year in Parks, Recreation, Leisure, and Fitness Studies, than in all foreign languages and literatures combined."

So college and its apparent purpose for many students is very different now, although my contact with students is generally in the arts, so I know they still exist! College is far more of an employment prerequisite, and so surly students must go into debt for this credential. There was a certain scam quality to the enterprise in the past as well, but today it's a dim student who doesn't sense that possibility. Some college teachers and administrators may also suspect it, though they must wonder who is really getting the financial benefit.

I just heard a Virginia Tech professor on TV mentioning that far more students now are "on medication," meaning for psychological problems. This is a new item that transcends the dubious and the gloomy into the territory of danger. Teachers are not trained to handle aggressively disturbed students (in fact, in a generally unappreciated irony, most college teachers haven't actually trained to teach.) The movement (it's hard to say how big it is, since TV news picks up on the novel and strange whenever possible) for students to tote guns, is hardly a practical alternative, unless more routine bloodshed is the goal.

The idea that colleges have shifted to cynical credential mills and one dimensional job training facilities with poor security screening is pretty disheartening. All the more heroic then are the students who pursue real education and the teachers who help them. Such students are a minority but we always were. But today they must be even more focused on their ideals.

Menand had another message for American students as well, as good in August as it was in May. In facing the great questions of the day and of all time, in learning the many approaches and points of view, and in experiencing the great diversity that is another newer feature of the U.S. campus, they may learn humility. "We want to give graduates confidence to face the world, but we also want to protect the world a little from their confidence," he wrote.

It's the statement that reflects a nation no longer changed only by 9-11 but by the arrogance of the war in Iraq. But it's universal enough for a university in any time.

As for my own college daze, there's not a week that I don't connect to something that began or that I learned there. Right now on my desk is a book--the actual, physical book--that I bought for a literature class some 40 years ago. I went to a liberal arts college, which according to Menand is a classification no longer used. I may not have done all that well at business, but I'm proud to be in the four percent.

Corporate Science and School Censorship

In a Washington Post oped Sunday, Laurie David (National Resources Defense Council trustee and founder of Stopglobalwarming.org) wrote that as co-producer of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth movie, she'd heard lots of requests from parents that the film be made available to schools. So she offered to donate 50,000 DVDs to the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) for distribution across the country. They said no.

Is it because they perceive the content--approved as accurate by every climate scientist asked so far--as political, as taking "sides," and therefore as not something they should distribute? It has always been absurd that the Climate Crisis was a political issue. But largely because of a few giant global corporations and their political minions, it was. So if NSTA's position was that it had to remain neutral, or especially if it refused on principle to accept materials that could be in any way construed as propaganda from a source that might have a political or ideological agenda, I could respect that completely.

But that's not really why they turned down 50,000 DVDs, even though it was one of the reasons they offered. Another was much more telling: "Accepting the DVDs, they wrote, would place "unnecessary risk upon the [NSTA] capital campaign, especially certain targeted supporters." One of those supporters, it turns out, is the Exxon Mobil Corp." Exxon contributed some $6 million in a recent campaign; and an Exxonista sits on NSTA's board.

The National Science Teachers Association not only gets bucks from Exxon and other oil companies, they distribute their "educational materials"--that is, their corporate propaganda. As for a political agenda, theirs has been clear. An internal American Petroleum Association memo leaked in 1998 said it all: Informing teachers/students about uncertainties in climate science will begin to erect barriers against further efforts to impose Kyoto-like measures in the future."

Let me quote again from Saturday's Washington Post: 'We have to deal with greenhouse gases," John Hofmeister, president of Shell Oil Co., said in a recent speech at the National Press Club. "From Shell's point of view, the debate is over. When 98 percent of scientists agree, who is Shell to say, 'Let's debate the science'?"

Either NSTA hasn't gotten the memo from their corporate overlords (Shell is another big contributor) or it's all just part of a Shell game, but two things are clear: there is no debate over the science, and corporations with a massive self-interest will continue to work the issue to whatever advantage they can get. Corporations have also partnered with so-called conservatives who cut funding to schools and school programs, so they would be more dependent on the "private sector," i.e. corporate propaganda and control.

Some corporations, especially companies needing to build new power plants, need regulation, so the future is predictable and the playing field is leveled. But corporations are also still trying to manipulate public perception, to get the best possible deals for themselves. Apparently it's not enough to go after voters. They're going after children.

Laurie David makes the analogy to Big Tobacco's promotion of cigarettes to teens and children, symbolized by Joe Camel. Once again, the corporations are going right to the kids. The analogy is more than an analogy. As George Monbiot discovered, the leading Climate Crisis denying lobbying organization was begun by Philip Morris as a tool to deny the hazards of smoking, and especially of second-hand smoke. Many of the same people, using the same techniques and websites, have gotten big money from Exxon to engineer the so-called controversy over the Climate Crisis, where in reality none has ever existed. (Although until recent years, some scientists in the relevant fields wanted more data before they committed, there was never opposition, and today there is virtual unanimity.)

What isn't clear is what America's science teachers are going to do about this. Is teaching Climate Crisis denial any less anti-scientific than teaching Biblical creationism as science? Is it really worth the free glossy propaganda? No doubt science teachiers need more disinterested state funding for their science teaching. But maybe they should show some character first.

UPDATE: On his Countdown program, Keith Olbermann named the president of the
National Science Teachers Association as today's Worst Person in the World.

Farrr out! Kickin out the jams and contemplating the
twelve tone scale in Koslce-Sacra hospital experiment
in music therapy for newborns. AP photo.