View 659 January 24 - 30, 2011 (original) (raw)
Thursday, January 27, 2011
The State of the Union
We have had a day for the pundits to consider the State of the Union speech. There are nine and sixty ways to consider the speech, and I don't supposed that every single one of them is right, but of those I have seen, Daniel Henninger in today's Wall Street Journal sums it up best in "A Presidency to Nowhere," (link) and I recommend that you take the time to read it. Henninger says:
If Barack Obama had come even close to matching policies with the sentiments he spun across the House chamber in the first sections of that speech, the Republicans would have been dealing with a formidable new centrist president.
The speech's prelude could have been delivered by Ronald Reagan or written by the conservative entrepreneurial Utopian George Gilder.
In a single generation, "the rules have changed," he said, propelled by technology. "The naysayers predicting our decline" are wrong. When moments later Mr. Obama said, "We are the first nation to be founded for the sake of an idea," one felt the ghost of the Gipper hovering nearby. The president called forth more of those spirits, praising "the idea that each of us deserves the chance to shape our own destiny. That's why centuries of pioneers and immigrants have risked everything to come here."
And: "We need to out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world." Yes!
And: "Our free enterprise system is what drives innovation." Oh, yes!
Even an Obama naysayer was thinking, Go for it, Mr. President.
That echoes my feelings as I watched the speech. Of course it didn't last. When he got to the high speed rail and solar panels it was clear that it was speech, not a change of heart, and when he got to education it was even clearer that either we live in Lake Wobegon or Obama let the education establishment unions write that part of this speech. I am all for American exceptionalism, and I thoroughly believe that school systems which understand the differences between education and training, and apportion their resources accordingly can make help make America great again; but there was none of that in the speech.
Trying to give everyone a world class university prep education is equivalent to giving no one a world class university prep education while simultaneously denying those who need skills training don't get that either; it merely assures employment to education bureaucrats while burdening teachers with needless and boring "workshops" and silly "education" classes. As Jacques Barzun long ago observed, university departments of education "take a grain of truth, grind it exceeding fine, and puff each mote up into a course" which they then make compulsory. Barzun wrote that in the 1940's when there was still some debate over traditional vs. progressive education. Today it's different: they no longer start with the grain of truth. It's all dust and air, but the teachers are forced to sit through class after class of boring vapidity.
The President projected the image that the Independents who voted for him wanted to see but didn't get in his first two years. The speech may have won some of them back -- polls indicate so. But as time goes on and we understand that getting out of the hole we are in will be a great deal rougher than we imagine, one hopes that the Independents will recover from the dazzle and come back to reality.
Henninger concludes:
After ObamaCare and financial re-regulation, the remaining Obama years are looking like a presidency to nowhere. Even if you believe in green jobs, that's an industry off in the future. Beyond the Keynesian liniment oil of public spending, he's offering almost nothing for the here-and-now economy.
Rep. Paul Ryan, in his response, was right that "our nation is approaching a tipping point." Either the government leads the economy, as proposed in the last two-thirds of Mr. Obama's State of the Union, or it will be driven into the 21st century by the nation's pioneer legacy of individual innovation, as he seemed to say in the first third of the speech.
If you belief it's the latter, six more years of chasing Mr. Obama's idea of investments will be a waste of precious time. The Super Bowl of global competition is well into the first quarter. The future is now.
Read it all. It's worth the effort.
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I note that Government Motors is to be sold off. Of course fairness would indicate that the despoiled bond holders whose blue chip investments were confiscated so that Obama could reward the unions that forced the American auto industry into bankruptcy in the first place were not given any favorable seat at the sell-off table. This was a naked act of confiscation to reward political allies, and I am astonished that there is not more outrage. At the same time, the SEC regulators have made it impossible to have an American IPO, so that initial issue profits will go to foreign firms. Of course the American investment bankers will get their cut. Goldman Sachs will not suffer even though the rest of us will. So it goes.
(Note I am talking about bond holders. The stock holders got what was coming to them; but the bonds were supposed to be nearly as safe as Treasuries.
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Education and Skill
It has long been known that there is virtually no correlation between the effectiveness of schools and the amounts spent on them. Of course there is a minimum below which it is unwise to go, but that's rather low.******For the most part, spending more on schools, whether it's on teacher salaries (based on seniority and "credentials" provided by colleges of education) or on reducing class sizes, spending more money on schools does not get a proportionate rise in education results, and can often obtain an actual reduction.
Recent studies have shown that the single most effective move a school district can make would be to fire the 10% worst teachers. Simply get rid of them and disperse their students among the other teachers, (which of course increases class size while reducing the school's budget) will get surprising results, in some cases up to a 50% increase in efficiency as measured by reduction in dropout rate and performance of those graduating.
A second highly effective means for increasing education efficiency is simple enforcement of discipline. Get rid of the obstreperous students: reassign them to Siberian Salt Mine classes, send them to holding pens, expell them -- the point being that those who will not refrain from disrupting classes ought not be allowed to impose a lifelong tax on those who control themselves and try to learn. This is one of the secrets of private and religious school effectiveness: it's not that the teaching is better, it's that the environment is more tranquil since the distractive elements can be eliminated at will.
Finally, a public education system has to realize that this is not Lake Wobegon. Half the children are below average. Below average doesn't mean useless; but it does mean that half the children are not going to be college professors or even grade school teachers. Half are going to be waiters, masons, carpenters, lathe operators, mechanics, yes, and even burger flippers. I will leave it to the readers to sort out what jobs require above average "intelligence" (mostly meaning ability to manipulate abstract symbols) and which require "skills" meaning the ability to learn to do, and do, more repetitive tasks with efficiency and continue to do that long after the "intelligent" fail from lack of motivation. The point is that while everyone requires some education -- learning how to learn -- and everyone requires some ability to form efficient habits to get them through the routines of the day, there is a pretty sharp break between the productive life of intellectuals and the productive lives of everyone else.
Until that is widely admitted -- it's pretty obvious, but it's not politically correct -- the school systems are a hamper, not an advantage in the worldwide competition we now face. Even if the Green Jobs myth were true, those who get those Green Jobs will not all be intellectuals. An "educated" work force is not necessarily a highly skilled work force. So it goes.
Cheap energy and freedom create an economic environment in which all can thrive. A good education system can enable a high proportion of the population to do well indeed. What we have is an education system generated by the Iron Law of Bureaucracy. Until it is dismantled, it will have high negative consequences. Those who can escape it can thrive. The rest will just have to endure.
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** Note: I don't know the bare minimum facility and teacher requirements for a adequate grade school education, but from personal experience in both Catholic and a rural public grade school in Tennessee I can say that it can certainly get down to 2 grades to the room, and 20 and more pupils to the grade, with teachers who held 2-year associate of arts degrees from Normal schools, for grades 1 - 8. That was my elementary school education, and I do not feel deprived. I don't know the background of the nuns at St. Anne's, but at Capleville (grades 4 - 8) the teachers were all farmers' wives or unmarried middle age women. Some were more intellectually inclined than others, but I wouldn't call them intellectuals; I didn't meet real intellectuals until I got to Christian Brothers, which was a junior college with a high school attached, and was the university prep Catholic high school in Memphis. (There were others, including Catholic High which was run by Jesuits and was where you got sent if you didn't make it at CBC.) When I was at the University of Iowa I had friends who had attended a one-room consolidated (grades 4 - 8) and one of my friends was on a year's leave from being the teacher at a 1-8 one-room consolidated. He worked damned hard. I think he had 15 students overall, so the teacher student ratio was a lot better than mine had been with two grades to the room. After his young wife's untimely death, Art Robinson home schooled his kids with this curriculum http://www.robinsoncurriculum.com/ and claims that he spent very little time with the kids; they pretty well taught themselves from carefully chosen materials. Since they all seem to have done well -- his oldest son has a Ph.D. from Cal Tech -- that may be the minimum indeed, but of course that wasn't Lake Wobegon either.
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The horror!
I was looking up Art Robinson's obviously successful home schooling curriculum (obviously successful at least with his own children, given the results) when I saw that this gets a very high place in the Google search:
| Oregon GOP Congressional Candidate Sells Racist Book Suggesting ...
Digging a bit further I find that this is because one of the hundreds of items in the Robinson home schooling package is an eBook copy of G. E. Henty's By Sheer Pluck, a novel written in the 19th Century. In that book are the lines
"They [negroes] are just like children," Mr. Goodenough said. "They are always either laughing or quarrelling. They are good-natured and passionate, indolent, but will work hard for a time; clever up to a certain point, densely stupid beyond. The intelligence of an average negro is about equal to that of a European child of ten years old. ... They are fluent talkers, but their ideas are borrowed. They are absolutely without originality, absolutely without inventive power. Living among white men, their imitative faculties enable them to attain a considerable amount of civilization. Left alone to their own devices they retrograde into a state little above their native savagery"
The character is not an obvious monster. The horror! Including a book that has those lines is enough of course to label Art Robinson, a scientist of some reputation, as a racist and his home schooling program worthless. You need look no further.
Now this nonsense was part of a whole slurry of smears because Art was brave -- or foolish? -- enough to run for Congress against a liberal Democrat, so the attack machine turned out with full force. Spend a lot and call names; it's easier than rational discussion.
There only one reply, of course. Larry Niven made it best: a reader wrote to complain of the beliefs and actions of one of Niven's characters. Larry replied
"We in the writing profession have a technical term for people who believe that a writer necessarily holds the opinions of his characters. We call them idiots. None of my best friends are idiots. Merry Christmas."
I dealt with this smear last October. As I said then, I found in the 1940's that the Henty books had the approval of Jacques Barzun, and on his recommendation I went to the library to find them, and I enjoyed many of them.
Now, I am told, Art's education program is no longer politically correct because it continues to include this book along with many others. Perhaps we need a new National Education Program to determine which books ought forever to be banned. I suspect there would be little problem finding people who think they are wise enough to be part of that panel. The Catholic Church used to maintain an index of forbidden books, and we were taught that it was sinful to read books on the list; but I never thought the Brothers were very serious about it. Those books often were dreadful, as I found when I sought them out. Of course the juicy parts of Kraft-Ebbing were in Latin, but I took Latin in high school. And I note that most young Catholics don't even know there ever was an Index. So it goes.
Sources of the Henty books -- there are many of them -- arehere, and here.
In a perfect world, of course, no one would ever read a work of fiction in which a sympathetic character holds a politically incorrect opinion, and anyone who recommends such a book would be sent to reeducation camp. Welcome to the liberal ideal world, where everyone will be liberated from being exposed to the temptation to believe false opinions. March forward on the flywheel of history! Learn your Marxist theories, which are scientific and cannot be wrong, and -- oops. Sorry. Got carried away.
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