Shut Up and Think for Yourself

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m good with that.

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

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

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

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

Root and STEM

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The TED Commandments

 

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

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

Thou Shalt Not Simply Trot Out thy Usual Shtick

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

Thou Shalt Reveal thy Curiosity and Thy Passion

Thou Shalt Tell a Story

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

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

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

Thou Shalt Remember all the while: Laughter is Good.

Thou Shalt Not Read thy Speech.

Thou Shalt Not Steal the Time of Them that Follow Thee

Their Truth

 

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

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

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

Judgement is what we are here for.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical Theory in Fairyland

The Wicked Queen and her magic mirror.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And before long she opened her eyes, lifted up the lid of the coffin, sat up, and was once more alive. 

“Oh, heavens, where am I?” she cried. 

The King’s son, full of joy, said, “You are with me,” and told her what had happened, and said, “I love you more than everything in the world; come with me to my father’s palace, you shall be my wife.”

And Snow White was willing, and went with him, and their wedding was held with great show and splendour.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Word Art

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