The famous although largely academically ignored Montessori method and the increasingly relevant philosophy of Objectivism have many things in common. The Montessori method provides the foundation for the formation of an integrated and individual intelligence, and Objectivism provides the philosophical explanatory framework and the model for its extrapolation into the adult formation of ethics, work, and personal life. While roaming the internet I happened to find this particularly insightful article which discusses the relationship of the two in detail. I highly recommend it. Enjoy!
http://www.expert-tennis-tips.com/maria-montessori.html
Translator
Showing posts with label teachers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label teachers. Show all posts
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Going Galt on Easter? or Trying to Have One's Cake and Eat it Too...
There is a reason that the Tea Parties will not amount to much. There is a reason why the Libertarian Party will continue to receive only minimal support. There is a reason and it's been staring us in the face for over fifty years. The reason is that we are facing a philosophical crisis, and only a coherent philosophical response will negate our opponents.
Why is the notion of laissez-faire capitalism viewed as a fringe crackpot obsession? It's because the so-called defenders of capitalism are logically incoherent. Greenspan preached free markets while going at them with a pair of pliers and a scalpel. Then, when the patient's dying on the table, he declares that the patient was to blame for being butchered. John McCain, like "W" before him, preached free markets out of one side of his mouth, while running around trying to curry favor with every right-wing Christian messianic institution who could offer to grease his shiny white noggin with. Freedom and theocracy don't mix. Period.
The people who are going to the Tea Parties and bearing signs accusing Obama of being a Muslim are also missing the point entirely. It doesn't matter what religion Obama holds in the confines of his own head. Hell, he could even be an atheist for all we know. The problem with what he is doing is that it is predicated on the assumption that political and economic power should be conjoined. The truth is that combining the two is the fast track to fascism. Perhaps he isn't even fully aware of that. Maybe he is. But it is certainly not an idea started or even driven by Obama. On the contrary, it is an idea that has been espoused by many people both Democrat and Republican and for a very long time. Ultimately, Obama couldn't be able to do what he has been doing unless the people of the country put him there to do it. Bush couldn't have started what Obama is finishing if the people of this country hadn't put him there to do it. So why? Why don't people turn to the Libertarian Party, the only one supposedly advocating freedom? The fundamental reason, as Ayn Rand pointed out a long time ago, was and is that it is philosophically incoherent.
The Libertarian Party stands against government, but what does it stand for? Is a vote for the libertarians a vote for anarchy? Or is it a vote for Objectivism? Is it a vote for an economic policy? But economics is just one province of politics. What can the Libertarian Party be expected to advocate? How can those who advocate armed revolution for the sake of abolishing government entirely stand side by side with those who want to secure the framework of a capitalist society and thus preserve the structure of what civilization has accomplished? The Libertarian Party needs to establish a philosophically coherent alternative to the Democrats and Republicans. There can be no allowance for god in government, just as there can be no allowance for politics in economics. The Republicans fail on the first count. The Democrats fail on the second. But the reason why the Democrats have such power right now is because theirs is the essentially more consistent philosophical stance, whereas the opposition is fractured and inconsistent. Neither is fully coherent, but in this age of "have-it-your-way" ideology, consistency is enough to make a philosophy seem coherent. But a fully coherent, internally consistent political platform would blow away even Obama's cocky smile.
The Democrats fully accept the altruistic doctrine that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. They fully accept that the state, i.e. the body politic, has the full right to dictate the lives of its individual constituents, because they fully accept that people do not have individual rights. They view rights as a social privilege to be removed or altered at whim. So, they offer a fully consistent front when attacked on those issues.
The Republicans have presented only the most convoluted and tired excuses for capitalism. The reason is because they, too, want to cling to the old moral premises of altruism. However the Democratic ideology is more consistent with altruistic premises then capitalism. Capitalism is fundamentally opposite to altruism in every conceivable way. Therefore, to try and justify capitalism on altruistic grounds is destined only to make advocates of capitalism look foolish, irrational, and illogical.
The Libertarians present a good economic argument for capitalism based largely on the work of Mises and some libertarians even credit Rand. However, the Libertarian Party still does not have a lucid image of what government should be. They only have an image, albeit an accurate one, of what it should not be. And while their arguments against intrusive government are convincing, arguments for total anarchy are fundamentally flawed. As long as there is a significant anarchistic/nihilistic influence in the Libertarian Party it cannot present a coherent alternative to either of the others.
It is time for the champions of liberty to recognize that Objectivism is the only philosophical system which both secures human rights, provides a rationale for freedom and capitalism, and delineates the proper constraints of government influence in a coherent, fully consistent model. Stop apologizing for Rand, we need to embrace her ideas. We need to embrace her arguments. We need to embrace her morality, the only morality which declares that "your life belongs to you and that the good is to live it." You cannot have capitalism and Pat Robertson. You cannot have McVeigh and freedom. You cannot have anarchy and prosperity. Until we have accepted and embraced a unifying, cohesive, and fully functional philosophical moral standard behind which to campaign we will not be able to stand up to a unified front of gentle, smiling socialists. We will continue to be internally divided and discredited by our own hypocrisy.
However Objectivism is not a philosophy that can be taken piecemeal. The whole point is that for political actions to be morally validated that they must be integrated into the whole of our objective knowledge of the universe. Of what it means to live, and to die. Of what truly is the nature of human beings. How do they come to know things? And what does such knowledge mean for their survival. A contradiction cannot be allowed, it is sufficient to invalidate any moral claim, or political initiative. Under Objectivist thought, unless a law can be demonstrated to be coherently integrated with human knowledge and the morality that knowledge entails, then that law should not be adopted. Conversely, if a law can be shown to be inconsistent with our knowledge of the human condition, or immoral in light of what we know, then that law should be removed. Taxation, global policing, government involvement in private lives...these are all things which are inconsistent with what we already know about the nature of human freedom and which systems optimize human happiness. This is why the enemies of freedom wish to pervert the meaning of the words freedom, human rights, and liberty. They want to coopt freedom to mean freedom to claim the property of others to establish equality. They want to distort human rights to mean an unqualififed claim to a doctor's or a teacher's labor. They want to claim that liberty means mob rule.
These stances are rife with contradictions, but until and unless we call their bluff and declare that the emperor has no clothes, until we do this, they will maintain the appearance of holding the high ground. Especially to the college professors responsible for training our teachers who are responsible for educating our children. Along this chain it ultimately starts in the colleges. And unilateral cries for freedom for freedom's sake will be powerless to stand against a consistent logical set of views. The highly educated demand that there be at least a seemingly logically consistent philosophy behind their political agendas, and they devote a great deal of time and effort in picking holes in rival theories. Unfortunately the libertarian movement is so varied that it is relatively easy to demonstrate the lack of cohesive thought. And as long as we try to attack them for acting on principles explicitly which we continue to hold implicitly, we are bound to make them look like they are on the firmer ideological ground. If we want to be free, we must be prepared to demonstrate how and why freedom is superior. We cannot state that it just is.
The notion of going Galt, as an intentional withdrawal of sanction from the current social system, in our present age is premature and a practical impossibility. There are several reasons for this. One is that the government claims the legal right to tax almost everything, property, interest, etc. This means that to go off the grid, so to speak would be impossible. One could withdraw all their assets, buy gold and go live somewhere. But unless they continued to pay taxes on the capital gains of those assetts, taxes on the very land they live, and sales taxes for what they purchase the government would eventually come to collect. And as long as they have to pay those taxes to keep the guns off their porch, then they're supporting the current government. This is the fundamental immorality of any involuntary tax system. Namely, that it forces us to support those we oppose. Of course, cooperation under coercion cannot be said to mean sanction. We can be confident that we are morally pure in this, because the government has left us no alternative. Pay or die. Sacrifice your whole life, or pay a percentage. A choice made at the end of a gun is not a free choice. But regardless of guilt, the end result is the same...the government is still supported by our labor.
The other alternative would be to simply stop doing anything, dismantle and dispose of all one's assets and go on the social dole. However this would have a psychological consequence on those who would attempt this. Not to mention, I think it wouldn't take the governement long to notice if people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet were all applying for welfare. No, that won't work either. There's a reason why in Atlas Shrugged, there had to be a place for people to go to where government couldn't find them. It's because without such a place, they couldn't effectively withdraw. We can't withdraw if we have no place to go. As long as we are forced to be active participants in the system, the only tangible net effect of our withdrawing from social life, is to remove what little resistance we offered to begin with.
No, the only alternative is to increase our activity. To target it. To forge our resistance into a blade of reason--honed with our arguments and tempered by our convictions. We must take the leadership roles in the industries in which we work. Or we must support the most capable and efficient in those roles. We must become skilled debaters. We must actively seek out discussions where our views are freely under attack and we must defeat our opponents using polished rational arguments that leave them no where to stand but to resort to petty insults. We must drive the statists out of the public discourse, not by force, but with the inherent superiority of our policies. But just as impurities in the metal will cause a sword to break, so will inconsistencies and contradictions in the philosophical basis of our resitance cause us to falter when our mettle is tested.
Yes, we must organize. Yes, we must demonstrate our unified resolve. But until our resolve is in fact unified, all we demonstrate by organizing is how much lack of unity there really is. The unifying philosophical element is Objectivism. It is the only philosophy to organize the current social crisis into a coherent and comprehensible framework of ideas while still advocating the very things we claim to be pursuing. What we need to stand up to the politics of Obama and the politics of McCain is not a party against government in general, but a party for an Objectivist government, organized under objective priniciples, and motivated by the Objectivist ethics.
Why is the notion of laissez-faire capitalism viewed as a fringe crackpot obsession? It's because the so-called defenders of capitalism are logically incoherent. Greenspan preached free markets while going at them with a pair of pliers and a scalpel. Then, when the patient's dying on the table, he declares that the patient was to blame for being butchered. John McCain, like "W" before him, preached free markets out of one side of his mouth, while running around trying to curry favor with every right-wing Christian messianic institution who could offer to grease his shiny white noggin with. Freedom and theocracy don't mix. Period.
The people who are going to the Tea Parties and bearing signs accusing Obama of being a Muslim are also missing the point entirely. It doesn't matter what religion Obama holds in the confines of his own head. Hell, he could even be an atheist for all we know. The problem with what he is doing is that it is predicated on the assumption that political and economic power should be conjoined. The truth is that combining the two is the fast track to fascism. Perhaps he isn't even fully aware of that. Maybe he is. But it is certainly not an idea started or even driven by Obama. On the contrary, it is an idea that has been espoused by many people both Democrat and Republican and for a very long time. Ultimately, Obama couldn't be able to do what he has been doing unless the people of the country put him there to do it. Bush couldn't have started what Obama is finishing if the people of this country hadn't put him there to do it. So why? Why don't people turn to the Libertarian Party, the only one supposedly advocating freedom? The fundamental reason, as Ayn Rand pointed out a long time ago, was and is that it is philosophically incoherent.
The Libertarian Party stands against government, but what does it stand for? Is a vote for the libertarians a vote for anarchy? Or is it a vote for Objectivism? Is it a vote for an economic policy? But economics is just one province of politics. What can the Libertarian Party be expected to advocate? How can those who advocate armed revolution for the sake of abolishing government entirely stand side by side with those who want to secure the framework of a capitalist society and thus preserve the structure of what civilization has accomplished? The Libertarian Party needs to establish a philosophically coherent alternative to the Democrats and Republicans. There can be no allowance for god in government, just as there can be no allowance for politics in economics. The Republicans fail on the first count. The Democrats fail on the second. But the reason why the Democrats have such power right now is because theirs is the essentially more consistent philosophical stance, whereas the opposition is fractured and inconsistent. Neither is fully coherent, but in this age of "have-it-your-way" ideology, consistency is enough to make a philosophy seem coherent. But a fully coherent, internally consistent political platform would blow away even Obama's cocky smile.
The Democrats fully accept the altruistic doctrine that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. They fully accept that the state, i.e. the body politic, has the full right to dictate the lives of its individual constituents, because they fully accept that people do not have individual rights. They view rights as a social privilege to be removed or altered at whim. So, they offer a fully consistent front when attacked on those issues.
The Republicans have presented only the most convoluted and tired excuses for capitalism. The reason is because they, too, want to cling to the old moral premises of altruism. However the Democratic ideology is more consistent with altruistic premises then capitalism. Capitalism is fundamentally opposite to altruism in every conceivable way. Therefore, to try and justify capitalism on altruistic grounds is destined only to make advocates of capitalism look foolish, irrational, and illogical.
The Libertarians present a good economic argument for capitalism based largely on the work of Mises and some libertarians even credit Rand. However, the Libertarian Party still does not have a lucid image of what government should be. They only have an image, albeit an accurate one, of what it should not be. And while their arguments against intrusive government are convincing, arguments for total anarchy are fundamentally flawed. As long as there is a significant anarchistic/nihilistic influence in the Libertarian Party it cannot present a coherent alternative to either of the others.
It is time for the champions of liberty to recognize that Objectivism is the only philosophical system which both secures human rights, provides a rationale for freedom and capitalism, and delineates the proper constraints of government influence in a coherent, fully consistent model. Stop apologizing for Rand, we need to embrace her ideas. We need to embrace her arguments. We need to embrace her morality, the only morality which declares that "your life belongs to you and that the good is to live it." You cannot have capitalism and Pat Robertson. You cannot have McVeigh and freedom. You cannot have anarchy and prosperity. Until we have accepted and embraced a unifying, cohesive, and fully functional philosophical moral standard behind which to campaign we will not be able to stand up to a unified front of gentle, smiling socialists. We will continue to be internally divided and discredited by our own hypocrisy.
However Objectivism is not a philosophy that can be taken piecemeal. The whole point is that for political actions to be morally validated that they must be integrated into the whole of our objective knowledge of the universe. Of what it means to live, and to die. Of what truly is the nature of human beings. How do they come to know things? And what does such knowledge mean for their survival. A contradiction cannot be allowed, it is sufficient to invalidate any moral claim, or political initiative. Under Objectivist thought, unless a law can be demonstrated to be coherently integrated with human knowledge and the morality that knowledge entails, then that law should not be adopted. Conversely, if a law can be shown to be inconsistent with our knowledge of the human condition, or immoral in light of what we know, then that law should be removed. Taxation, global policing, government involvement in private lives...these are all things which are inconsistent with what we already know about the nature of human freedom and which systems optimize human happiness. This is why the enemies of freedom wish to pervert the meaning of the words freedom, human rights, and liberty. They want to coopt freedom to mean freedom to claim the property of others to establish equality. They want to distort human rights to mean an unqualififed claim to a doctor's or a teacher's labor. They want to claim that liberty means mob rule.
These stances are rife with contradictions, but until and unless we call their bluff and declare that the emperor has no clothes, until we do this, they will maintain the appearance of holding the high ground. Especially to the college professors responsible for training our teachers who are responsible for educating our children. Along this chain it ultimately starts in the colleges. And unilateral cries for freedom for freedom's sake will be powerless to stand against a consistent logical set of views. The highly educated demand that there be at least a seemingly logically consistent philosophy behind their political agendas, and they devote a great deal of time and effort in picking holes in rival theories. Unfortunately the libertarian movement is so varied that it is relatively easy to demonstrate the lack of cohesive thought. And as long as we try to attack them for acting on principles explicitly which we continue to hold implicitly, we are bound to make them look like they are on the firmer ideological ground. If we want to be free, we must be prepared to demonstrate how and why freedom is superior. We cannot state that it just is.
The notion of going Galt, as an intentional withdrawal of sanction from the current social system, in our present age is premature and a practical impossibility. There are several reasons for this. One is that the government claims the legal right to tax almost everything, property, interest, etc. This means that to go off the grid, so to speak would be impossible. One could withdraw all their assets, buy gold and go live somewhere. But unless they continued to pay taxes on the capital gains of those assetts, taxes on the very land they live, and sales taxes for what they purchase the government would eventually come to collect. And as long as they have to pay those taxes to keep the guns off their porch, then they're supporting the current government. This is the fundamental immorality of any involuntary tax system. Namely, that it forces us to support those we oppose. Of course, cooperation under coercion cannot be said to mean sanction. We can be confident that we are morally pure in this, because the government has left us no alternative. Pay or die. Sacrifice your whole life, or pay a percentage. A choice made at the end of a gun is not a free choice. But regardless of guilt, the end result is the same...the government is still supported by our labor.
The other alternative would be to simply stop doing anything, dismantle and dispose of all one's assets and go on the social dole. However this would have a psychological consequence on those who would attempt this. Not to mention, I think it wouldn't take the governement long to notice if people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet were all applying for welfare. No, that won't work either. There's a reason why in Atlas Shrugged, there had to be a place for people to go to where government couldn't find them. It's because without such a place, they couldn't effectively withdraw. We can't withdraw if we have no place to go. As long as we are forced to be active participants in the system, the only tangible net effect of our withdrawing from social life, is to remove what little resistance we offered to begin with.
No, the only alternative is to increase our activity. To target it. To forge our resistance into a blade of reason--honed with our arguments and tempered by our convictions. We must take the leadership roles in the industries in which we work. Or we must support the most capable and efficient in those roles. We must become skilled debaters. We must actively seek out discussions where our views are freely under attack and we must defeat our opponents using polished rational arguments that leave them no where to stand but to resort to petty insults. We must drive the statists out of the public discourse, not by force, but with the inherent superiority of our policies. But just as impurities in the metal will cause a sword to break, so will inconsistencies and contradictions in the philosophical basis of our resitance cause us to falter when our mettle is tested.
Yes, we must organize. Yes, we must demonstrate our unified resolve. But until our resolve is in fact unified, all we demonstrate by organizing is how much lack of unity there really is. The unifying philosophical element is Objectivism. It is the only philosophy to organize the current social crisis into a coherent and comprehensible framework of ideas while still advocating the very things we claim to be pursuing. What we need to stand up to the politics of Obama and the politics of McCain is not a party against government in general, but a party for an Objectivist government, organized under objective priniciples, and motivated by the Objectivist ethics.
Sunday, March 8, 2009
The End of Public Education
I've chosen the title of this article as I have, because I intend to address several points relating to the "end" of public education. First, what is the "end", or goal, of public education? Second, I intend to address the failure of public education as it nears it's practical end, or finality. Finally, I want to address the benefits of fully-privatized education and why we should advocate it's adoption as well as what we will need to consider in the conversion period. For the most part I don't think these arguments are new, and I don't believe they were originated by me. But I do believe in their validity, their urgency, and their relevance. I will do the best I am able to do justice to these arguments, but like always, I urge people to go back to the original sources and check the arguments for themselves. I am not an expert in most of the fields concerned, although I do have credentials and experience in education and finance, and have personally studied philosophy for most of my life. So, I am not an expert, these are simply the views of one man trying to express them in as clearly and concisely a manner as possible. I will be the first to admit that there is still a lot I don't know. But based on what I do know, I have confidence in the validity of my stances on these issues. I welcome any critiques, and I will respond to any valid criticisms with as reasoned a response as I am able. If I am wrong, please try to prove me so. Perhaps we can learn something together.
In that interest I would first like to clear up a concern that Keahou has brought to my attention in a comment here.
First of all, the advice that Pinochet decided to follow resulted in the "Miracle of Chile". That is, that a military junta adopted free-market reforms which drove Chile's economic growth and laid the foundations for a strong democratized society that eventually ousted Pinochet. Pinochet was a murderer and a despot. But he happened to have some good economic sense, which put his nation into a leading role in South America. Now, it can't be said to have been a free government at the time, because free governments don't allow the government to go around murdering people. But comparatively, in that Chile was more laissez-faire than other South American countries, it proved that the freer the market, the stronger economic growth. But as China has also proved, economic growth is not necessarily specific to democratic systems. The long-term democratizing effects of free-market reforms on the social status of China will, however, be interesting to observe. I don't think they will be able to oppress human rights with impunity forever. I would bet that, like Chile, the source of their prosperity will ultimately lead to the dissolution of their centrist government. Either that, or they will choose to crush the source of that prosperity and fade into the background like we are doing in America. The miracle of Chile is that the military junta opted for it's own obsolescence to preserve the country's economic prosperity, something which would seem to defy expectations.
Now that has been cleared up, we can get on with the privatization of education. What is the goal of public education? Simply put, it is to ensure a uniform standard of education to all students from elementary to post-secondary education. Now this hinges on two critical points. What do we mean by education? Also, has public education been effective in meeting that stated goal?
Education has several meanings depending on its context. The dictionary doesn't provide much more than a circular definition, although this is largely due to what Rand pointed out was the epistemological errors of lexicologists who try to define a word independently of its referents. Practically speaking, there are two basic interpretations of what is meant by education. One has as its goal the accumulation of a certain list of facts and formulae. The other has as its goal the acquisition of skills and processes. The former measures its success by the ability of students to answer questions correctly. The latter measures its success by the ability of its students to actually do things with their knowledge. The former is relatively simple to test quantitatively. The latter can only be assessed qualitatively by analyzing the child's productions. For ease of reference, then, let's define the former interpretation of education as the Textbook & Testing Approach (TNT) and the latter as the Cognitive Development Approach (CD).
Now regardless of whether a school system is public or private, teachers can tend to be attracted to either of these approaches. However, in a public, standardized system, the emphasis is systematically placed on the standardized testing, which means that the emphasis is consequently placed on the list of facts presented in the test. Now, the criteria that the test-makers use to select those facts is largely irrelevant. If the standard of measurement is simply a list of facts and formulae, then the success of teachers, schools, and methods are based on a measure of the ability of children to have memorized those facts. Whether or not they can actually use that information is not as clearly testable in a quantitative format. If school funding is based on quantitative performance measures, then schools which are the best at TNT will be the most funded schools. While it can be successfully argued, I think, that CD approaches would result in ultimately higher attainment on TNT measures, the practical upshot is that unless a school has at the very least a mixed system of CD and TNT, students still won't do very well on the quantitative tests. (They will still have to remember the specific facts and formulae on the given test.)
The problem with qualitative tests is that they don't produce results which can be easily assessed by non-specialists in education. A public system is ultimately responsible to the least specialized authority, the elected government official. Their interpretation of test results is bound to be based on the number crunching of quantitative assessments. Especially, the less autonomy schools and teachers have in making relevant educational decisions, and the more dependent they are on government for support, the less they can afford to concentrate on their students' cognitive development, if it will risk even a marginal decrease in their performance on TNT testing. If you doubt this, please come to Japan and visit a junior high school English class.
Japan is the model of top-down education. All the things I've just proposed are, in Japan, a stark reality. Despite the awareness of teachers that the methods they are constrained to use are widely accepted as being ineffective, the pressure to conform to and produce quantitative standardized results in the testing system, prohibit them from initiating the very innovations that would serve their students best. Japanese students are very good at memorizing a certain list of terms, short-term, for the purpose of passing a test, without understanding the rhyme or reason very well. But, even after 6+ years of English study under this methodology, most Japanese adults can't speak more than a few words that have been incorporated into Japanese as loan words or some memorized set phrases. If anything, it teaches students that they can't ever understand the subject, that it is hopeless, and that the best they can do is to try to stuff as many of the facts and formulae into their heads as possible so that they can pass the entrance exams into high school and college, facts which are promptly forgotten. Everyone involved understands this, and yet nobody can or will change it, because the people in charge of those decisions are the ones most removed from the process, the politicians. The people sacrificed? The children.
But of course, it's only appropriate to view the children as being sacrificed, if the standard of success of education is functional ability. If the standard of success is simply obedience and rote memorization, then these public schools would seem to be a great success. Or are they?
Even in a system of largely TNT dependent teaching and increasing standardization, the measure by those testing standards indicate that public schooling costs more per student and produce a lower quality of education. Just look at what's happening in Washington, D.C. since they instituted the voucher system. Of course, since the democrats are on the rise, that'll soon be eliminated. After all, who wants the ugly evidence of the comparative ineffectiveness of socialist educational practices to hang around under the advent of a socialist regime?
I don't think the failings of our current educational system are debatable. Pretty much everyone understands that private schools offer better education (even Obama's children aren't going public) and that maintaining teacher quality standards is well nigh impossible in a system that doesn't adequately reward competent teachers (watch the second part). The main objection to privatization, I think, is the potential cost.
So, what, really, would be the cost to parents of phasing out public education into privately run schools? As it is, parents are all taxed to pay for education. For example, in Washington D.C. the cost per student for education was about $12,979 a year making it #3 out of the top 100 largest school districts in the nation. Despite this fact, they ranked pathetically low compared to the national averages. 33% is the national average for 4th graders who lack basic skills in math, in DC, the percentage was 62%. 49% is the average nationally for 8th graders who lack those same basic skills, in DC it was more like 74%. That's why they instituted a voucher system to try and get these kids into higher quality educational programs. Those vouchers are good for $7,500. The average cost of going to a private school in the DC area is currently $4,500. Only 39% of private schools in the DC area are more expensive than $10,000. That means that, if the tax burden for parents was reduced by the amount the government would no longer need if the system was privatized, parents could easily afford the price of private education.
Students would receive better quality education. Teachers would also have to be more accountable, because private enterprise will be less tolerant of teacher incompetence then socialized unions. Standards will have to produce children who are capable of using their knowledge to further their goals, because that will be the product that parents and children will notice the most. Parents will be more involved in school, because they will want to make sure they're getting their money's worth. If anything, parents would be saving money, getting more for it, and everyone would be happier.
Vouchers are not an end in themselves. They are a means of privitizing the educational system without causing a massive system shock. As public schools become progressively outmoded in pace with the development of a private infrastructure, the schools could be absorbed into private organizations. Once the public funding and relevant taxes have been replaced by a privitized system, then there will be no more need for vouchers and no more need to make it a political issue.
Inner city schools are suffering as it is, and a critical problem is the lack of incentive for talented teachers to go to those schools, or for people to send their children there. People who can afford to move to a more affluent region, already do, taking their tax money with them. If the government's coercive monopoly on education was relaxed so as to stimulate private investment in education and the efficiency of free markets, then private schools could be instituted to compete with the faltering inner city schools for those temporary vouchers and thus raise the standard of education for all who live in those areas. It would effectively remove one of the constricting influences which drives money out of those areas. As education improves, the social climate will improve, and those abandoned areas will become revitalized.
As Keahou says, there are indeed "so many practical issues to be considered".
So, to sum up, privatized education should be cheaper, more efficient, allow teachers to develop innovative techniques in an environment that will offer incentives for efficiency, effectiveness, and innovation, will encourage the revitalization of impoverished areas and increase the competitiveness of our children in the global market place by effectively raising their comprehensive abilities in reasoning skills (the foundation of math and the sciences.) Either that, or we can continue to squander money on the floundering system that we have now, where everybody recognizes that the emperor has no clothes, but love Obama too much to tell him. I wonder what practical considerations I'm leaving out? Well, I hope somebody will let me know so we can continue this discussion.
In that interest I would first like to clear up a concern that Keahou has brought to my attention in a comment here.
First of all, the advice that Pinochet decided to follow resulted in the "Miracle of Chile". That is, that a military junta adopted free-market reforms which drove Chile's economic growth and laid the foundations for a strong democratized society that eventually ousted Pinochet. Pinochet was a murderer and a despot. But he happened to have some good economic sense, which put his nation into a leading role in South America. Now, it can't be said to have been a free government at the time, because free governments don't allow the government to go around murdering people. But comparatively, in that Chile was more laissez-faire than other South American countries, it proved that the freer the market, the stronger economic growth. But as China has also proved, economic growth is not necessarily specific to democratic systems. The long-term democratizing effects of free-market reforms on the social status of China will, however, be interesting to observe. I don't think they will be able to oppress human rights with impunity forever. I would bet that, like Chile, the source of their prosperity will ultimately lead to the dissolution of their centrist government. Either that, or they will choose to crush the source of that prosperity and fade into the background like we are doing in America. The miracle of Chile is that the military junta opted for it's own obsolescence to preserve the country's economic prosperity, something which would seem to defy expectations.
Now that has been cleared up, we can get on with the privatization of education. What is the goal of public education? Simply put, it is to ensure a uniform standard of education to all students from elementary to post-secondary education. Now this hinges on two critical points. What do we mean by education? Also, has public education been effective in meeting that stated goal?
Education has several meanings depending on its context. The dictionary doesn't provide much more than a circular definition, although this is largely due to what Rand pointed out was the epistemological errors of lexicologists who try to define a word independently of its referents. Practically speaking, there are two basic interpretations of what is meant by education. One has as its goal the accumulation of a certain list of facts and formulae. The other has as its goal the acquisition of skills and processes. The former measures its success by the ability of students to answer questions correctly. The latter measures its success by the ability of its students to actually do things with their knowledge. The former is relatively simple to test quantitatively. The latter can only be assessed qualitatively by analyzing the child's productions. For ease of reference, then, let's define the former interpretation of education as the Textbook & Testing Approach (TNT) and the latter as the Cognitive Development Approach (CD).
Now regardless of whether a school system is public or private, teachers can tend to be attracted to either of these approaches. However, in a public, standardized system, the emphasis is systematically placed on the standardized testing, which means that the emphasis is consequently placed on the list of facts presented in the test. Now, the criteria that the test-makers use to select those facts is largely irrelevant. If the standard of measurement is simply a list of facts and formulae, then the success of teachers, schools, and methods are based on a measure of the ability of children to have memorized those facts. Whether or not they can actually use that information is not as clearly testable in a quantitative format. If school funding is based on quantitative performance measures, then schools which are the best at TNT will be the most funded schools. While it can be successfully argued, I think, that CD approaches would result in ultimately higher attainment on TNT measures, the practical upshot is that unless a school has at the very least a mixed system of CD and TNT, students still won't do very well on the quantitative tests. (They will still have to remember the specific facts and formulae on the given test.)
The problem with qualitative tests is that they don't produce results which can be easily assessed by non-specialists in education. A public system is ultimately responsible to the least specialized authority, the elected government official. Their interpretation of test results is bound to be based on the number crunching of quantitative assessments. Especially, the less autonomy schools and teachers have in making relevant educational decisions, and the more dependent they are on government for support, the less they can afford to concentrate on their students' cognitive development, if it will risk even a marginal decrease in their performance on TNT testing. If you doubt this, please come to Japan and visit a junior high school English class.
Japan is the model of top-down education. All the things I've just proposed are, in Japan, a stark reality. Despite the awareness of teachers that the methods they are constrained to use are widely accepted as being ineffective, the pressure to conform to and produce quantitative standardized results in the testing system, prohibit them from initiating the very innovations that would serve their students best. Japanese students are very good at memorizing a certain list of terms, short-term, for the purpose of passing a test, without understanding the rhyme or reason very well. But, even after 6+ years of English study under this methodology, most Japanese adults can't speak more than a few words that have been incorporated into Japanese as loan words or some memorized set phrases. If anything, it teaches students that they can't ever understand the subject, that it is hopeless, and that the best they can do is to try to stuff as many of the facts and formulae into their heads as possible so that they can pass the entrance exams into high school and college, facts which are promptly forgotten. Everyone involved understands this, and yet nobody can or will change it, because the people in charge of those decisions are the ones most removed from the process, the politicians. The people sacrificed? The children.
But of course, it's only appropriate to view the children as being sacrificed, if the standard of success of education is functional ability. If the standard of success is simply obedience and rote memorization, then these public schools would seem to be a great success. Or are they?
Even in a system of largely TNT dependent teaching and increasing standardization, the measure by those testing standards indicate that public schooling costs more per student and produce a lower quality of education. Just look at what's happening in Washington, D.C. since they instituted the voucher system. Of course, since the democrats are on the rise, that'll soon be eliminated. After all, who wants the ugly evidence of the comparative ineffectiveness of socialist educational practices to hang around under the advent of a socialist regime?
I don't think the failings of our current educational system are debatable. Pretty much everyone understands that private schools offer better education (even Obama's children aren't going public) and that maintaining teacher quality standards is well nigh impossible in a system that doesn't adequately reward competent teachers (watch the second part). The main objection to privatization, I think, is the potential cost.
So, what, really, would be the cost to parents of phasing out public education into privately run schools? As it is, parents are all taxed to pay for education. For example, in Washington D.C. the cost per student for education was about $12,979 a year making it #3 out of the top 100 largest school districts in the nation. Despite this fact, they ranked pathetically low compared to the national averages. 33% is the national average for 4th graders who lack basic skills in math, in DC, the percentage was 62%. 49% is the average nationally for 8th graders who lack those same basic skills, in DC it was more like 74%. That's why they instituted a voucher system to try and get these kids into higher quality educational programs. Those vouchers are good for $7,500. The average cost of going to a private school in the DC area is currently $4,500. Only 39% of private schools in the DC area are more expensive than $10,000. That means that, if the tax burden for parents was reduced by the amount the government would no longer need if the system was privatized, parents could easily afford the price of private education.
Students would receive better quality education. Teachers would also have to be more accountable, because private enterprise will be less tolerant of teacher incompetence then socialized unions. Standards will have to produce children who are capable of using their knowledge to further their goals, because that will be the product that parents and children will notice the most. Parents will be more involved in school, because they will want to make sure they're getting their money's worth. If anything, parents would be saving money, getting more for it, and everyone would be happier.
Vouchers are not an end in themselves. They are a means of privitizing the educational system without causing a massive system shock. As public schools become progressively outmoded in pace with the development of a private infrastructure, the schools could be absorbed into private organizations. Once the public funding and relevant taxes have been replaced by a privitized system, then there will be no more need for vouchers and no more need to make it a political issue.
Inner city schools are suffering as it is, and a critical problem is the lack of incentive for talented teachers to go to those schools, or for people to send their children there. People who can afford to move to a more affluent region, already do, taking their tax money with them. If the government's coercive monopoly on education was relaxed so as to stimulate private investment in education and the efficiency of free markets, then private schools could be instituted to compete with the faltering inner city schools for those temporary vouchers and thus raise the standard of education for all who live in those areas. It would effectively remove one of the constricting influences which drives money out of those areas. As education improves, the social climate will improve, and those abandoned areas will become revitalized.
As Keahou says, there are indeed "so many practical issues to be considered".
So, to sum up, privatized education should be cheaper, more efficient, allow teachers to develop innovative techniques in an environment that will offer incentives for efficiency, effectiveness, and innovation, will encourage the revitalization of impoverished areas and increase the competitiveness of our children in the global market place by effectively raising their comprehensive abilities in reasoning skills (the foundation of math and the sciences.) Either that, or we can continue to squander money on the floundering system that we have now, where everybody recognizes that the emperor has no clothes, but love Obama too much to tell him. I wonder what practical considerations I'm leaving out? Well, I hope somebody will let me know so we can continue this discussion.
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Apples, No Apples, Apples: The Sleight of Hand of Obama Inc.'s Elite Economic Corps of Dunderheads
OK. Now I had to read this a couple of times to make sure I got it straight. Now, I thought that I wasn't reading it correctly. I mean, circular logic has some famous adherents. Just look at Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy...or Sam Harris' justification for torture. But this circle is the most striking for how clearly circular it is. You don't have to dig too deep to see the sleight of hand going on in this one. For the whole article, you'll have to check out this link here.
But the part that floored me was this quote:
""I do think the American people in the past have shown an excellent ability to respond to adversity," Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke told members of the Senate Budget Committee. "And I believe it's going to happen this time and that we're going to see a much stronger economy, not that far in the future."
To hasten that day, the Fed and the Treasury launched their long-awaited program to jump-start the market for consumer loans, including financing for small businesses, students and car buyers.
Under the program, known by the acronym TALF, the Fed will provide loans to investors who buy securities backed by newly issued consumer loans. The idea is to revive the market for asset-backed securities, which provides funding for a large portion of consumer lending.
"In our system, banks are important, but typically 40% of lending comes through the securitization markets. And those markets are not functioning well," Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner told the House Ways and Means Committee.
"So we're going around banks . . . by doing something only the government can do, which, on appropriate terms to protect the taxpayer, is to try to get those credit markets opening up again," he said." "
OK. TALF. This is the system as it appears to be presented here. The government will now encourage more lending to groups which are high risk in a recession and which the markets recognize as such: students, small businesses, and car buyers. (It may be for that reason that the banks aren't loaning as much to these groups right now..duh....)
But of course, Obama Inc. and his party of looting neanderthals, think that the answer is to give more money to people who probably won't be able to pay it back. (AIG, GM...etc, etc, etc...)
In this case, they will subsidize the extension of credit to high risk groups by sponsoring securities based on packages of volatile debt. They will use the security of the United States Treasury to guarantee that debt and sell shares in it to investors. Not only that, but it will loan money to investors so that they can buy those securities. So, technically, the government will be making it look like it's selling financial instruments when really it's just handing out taxpayer money again.
If the initial loans go into default, the securities become worthless. That means the government can't collect the money from these loans, which means that the investors also don't get anything from the securities either, except that they have to pay back the loans to the government that they used to buy the now worthless securities. Which means that the government will in effect be paying for it's handouts to high-risk lenders by convincing credit-worthy investors to commit to paying for them over the long-term.
Housing fiasco redux.
What Obama and his geniuses are assuming is that the people who will receive these loans will actually pay them back. Now here's the catch. If any financial institution was reasonably confident that the people who are the potential beneficiaries of these loans could actually pay them back, then the financial institutions would loan them the money in the first place.
Why? Because that's how financial institutions make money. By lending to people who pay them back plus interest. Nobody makes money by lending to people who don't pay back. As the housing fiasco and its consequences have effectively demonstrated.
So what will happen to investors who buy large amounts of these securities, if the securities go into default (as they probably will)? Well, their balance sheets will have a sudden gaping hole where their assets used to be, and an equal amount of now unsupported debt. In short, I think that any investor who takes a heavy interest in these derivatives will be staking a lot on the dependability of the federal government to lend responsibly. And if the federal government doesn't, then we will see even more investors taken down in this thing. That will further damage the economy, destroy even more wealth (or "redistribute it" as Obama likes to say), and almost certainly cripple our nation for decades. (That is, decades more than these kind of policies have already crippled us...)
Now, now, I'll be fair. The current crisis isn't Obama's doing. It was caused by Bernanke, Greenspan, and the hypocrites at the Fed and in Congress on both sides of the aisle who have been supporting centrist government-controlled markets. That was the problem with the Republicans. They talked free markets, but they were busy getting their hands deep into the guts of it, so they could grease their own pockets, and the pockets of their buddies. That and they were spending so much time preaching about God that the secular conservatives out there didn't feel very comfortable supporting them either.
The Democrats are idealogues. I seriously believe that they think that they are helping people by sacrificing us all to the hunger of the disenfranchised mob that has been created by generations of irresponsible governance. (Although I think it's telling, how many of Obama's picks have a problem paying their taxes...)
The answer is to stop this madness, not to keep trying more of the same thing.
Cut spending, cut taxes, cut social programs and privatize them.
Privatize education.
Dissolve the Fed.
Introduce a staged retreat from social security so that we can support those who have already paid their way in, but so that we can phase it out as soon as possible. Phase out medicare and government intervention in insurance premiums.
Stop the senseless bailouts of companies that shovel out lifetime-guaranteed retirement policies to workers who retire at 48?! (Like GM....)
Stop the war on poverty. The supposed enemy in that war is the only group that can even remotely provide what is needed to alleviate the problem, by pursuing that war we intensify the poverty.
Stop the war on drugs. 1 in 32 Americans are in jail. 25% of them are there for drugs. Only 5% of homicides were narcotics related. Educate your children to keep them off drugs. I agree, they suck. They are NOT good things to have around children. But neither is tobacco or alcohol, and we have managed to keep them in control without making them into the dangerously uncontrolled illicit multi-billion dollar global industries that illicit drugs are today. In a way, the war on drugs is paying for the war on terror....paying our enemy's wages. Not unlike Prohibition and the mafia...Remove the profit, make them legal and regulate them like any other drug or intoxicant.
And, no, we don't need the self-inflated pompous rhetoric of Rush Limbaugh to rally around. What we need is a return to fundamental principles, like those advocated by Ron Paul and Barry Goldwater and the generation of conservatives who really lived up to that name. The crisis we are experiencing day by day in our sweat, our fear, our blood, and our lives...this crisis is a moral crisis. The moral superiority of laissez-faire capitalism, the objective moral reality of rational self-interest as a life-generating force, the moral supremacy of reason as opposed to the bulwarks of religion or the frantic paranoia of the social relativist---the denial of these truths is what we are experiencing tangibly, and visibly and undeniably this very moment.
This country is headed in the wrong direction, and we're speeding it up! You can't defend freedom by destroying it. You can't defend liberty by enslaving yourselves. You can't increase prosperity by punishing it. You can't inspire innovation by stifling it in bureaucratic red tape. You can't broaden minds through education by stifling teacher creativity. You can't heal bad debt by creating more of it. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
"Yes, this is an age of moral crisis. Yes, you are bearing punishment for your evil. But it is not man who is now on trial and it is not human nature that will take the blame. It is your moral code that's through, this time. Your moral code has reached its climax, the blind alley at the end of its course. And if you wish to go on living, what you now need is not to return to morality -- you who have never known any -- but to discover it." --Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)
But the part that floored me was this quote:
""I do think the American people in the past have shown an excellent ability to respond to adversity," Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke told members of the Senate Budget Committee. "And I believe it's going to happen this time and that we're going to see a much stronger economy, not that far in the future."
To hasten that day, the Fed and the Treasury launched their long-awaited program to jump-start the market for consumer loans, including financing for small businesses, students and car buyers.
Under the program, known by the acronym TALF, the Fed will provide loans to investors who buy securities backed by newly issued consumer loans. The idea is to revive the market for asset-backed securities, which provides funding for a large portion of consumer lending.
"In our system, banks are important, but typically 40% of lending comes through the securitization markets. And those markets are not functioning well," Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner told the House Ways and Means Committee.
"So we're going around banks . . . by doing something only the government can do, which, on appropriate terms to protect the taxpayer, is to try to get those credit markets opening up again," he said." "
OK. TALF. This is the system as it appears to be presented here. The government will now encourage more lending to groups which are high risk in a recession and which the markets recognize as such: students, small businesses, and car buyers. (It may be for that reason that the banks aren't loaning as much to these groups right now..duh....)
But of course, Obama Inc. and his party of looting neanderthals, think that the answer is to give more money to people who probably won't be able to pay it back. (AIG, GM...etc, etc, etc...)
In this case, they will subsidize the extension of credit to high risk groups by sponsoring securities based on packages of volatile debt. They will use the security of the United States Treasury to guarantee that debt and sell shares in it to investors. Not only that, but it will loan money to investors so that they can buy those securities. So, technically, the government will be making it look like it's selling financial instruments when really it's just handing out taxpayer money again.
If the initial loans go into default, the securities become worthless. That means the government can't collect the money from these loans, which means that the investors also don't get anything from the securities either, except that they have to pay back the loans to the government that they used to buy the now worthless securities. Which means that the government will in effect be paying for it's handouts to high-risk lenders by convincing credit-worthy investors to commit to paying for them over the long-term.
Housing fiasco redux.
What Obama and his geniuses are assuming is that the people who will receive these loans will actually pay them back. Now here's the catch. If any financial institution was reasonably confident that the people who are the potential beneficiaries of these loans could actually pay them back, then the financial institutions would loan them the money in the first place.
Why? Because that's how financial institutions make money. By lending to people who pay them back plus interest. Nobody makes money by lending to people who don't pay back. As the housing fiasco and its consequences have effectively demonstrated.
So what will happen to investors who buy large amounts of these securities, if the securities go into default (as they probably will)? Well, their balance sheets will have a sudden gaping hole where their assets used to be, and an equal amount of now unsupported debt. In short, I think that any investor who takes a heavy interest in these derivatives will be staking a lot on the dependability of the federal government to lend responsibly. And if the federal government doesn't, then we will see even more investors taken down in this thing. That will further damage the economy, destroy even more wealth (or "redistribute it" as Obama likes to say), and almost certainly cripple our nation for decades. (That is, decades more than these kind of policies have already crippled us...)
Now, now, I'll be fair. The current crisis isn't Obama's doing. It was caused by Bernanke, Greenspan, and the hypocrites at the Fed and in Congress on both sides of the aisle who have been supporting centrist government-controlled markets. That was the problem with the Republicans. They talked free markets, but they were busy getting their hands deep into the guts of it, so they could grease their own pockets, and the pockets of their buddies. That and they were spending so much time preaching about God that the secular conservatives out there didn't feel very comfortable supporting them either.
The Democrats are idealogues. I seriously believe that they think that they are helping people by sacrificing us all to the hunger of the disenfranchised mob that has been created by generations of irresponsible governance. (Although I think it's telling, how many of Obama's picks have a problem paying their taxes...)
The answer is to stop this madness, not to keep trying more of the same thing.
Cut spending, cut taxes, cut social programs and privatize them.
Privatize education.
Dissolve the Fed.
Introduce a staged retreat from social security so that we can support those who have already paid their way in, but so that we can phase it out as soon as possible. Phase out medicare and government intervention in insurance premiums.
Stop the senseless bailouts of companies that shovel out lifetime-guaranteed retirement policies to workers who retire at 48?! (Like GM....)
Stop the war on poverty. The supposed enemy in that war is the only group that can even remotely provide what is needed to alleviate the problem, by pursuing that war we intensify the poverty.
Stop the war on drugs. 1 in 32 Americans are in jail. 25% of them are there for drugs. Only 5% of homicides were narcotics related. Educate your children to keep them off drugs. I agree, they suck. They are NOT good things to have around children. But neither is tobacco or alcohol, and we have managed to keep them in control without making them into the dangerously uncontrolled illicit multi-billion dollar global industries that illicit drugs are today. In a way, the war on drugs is paying for the war on terror....paying our enemy's wages. Not unlike Prohibition and the mafia...Remove the profit, make them legal and regulate them like any other drug or intoxicant.
And, no, we don't need the self-inflated pompous rhetoric of Rush Limbaugh to rally around. What we need is a return to fundamental principles, like those advocated by Ron Paul and Barry Goldwater and the generation of conservatives who really lived up to that name. The crisis we are experiencing day by day in our sweat, our fear, our blood, and our lives...this crisis is a moral crisis. The moral superiority of laissez-faire capitalism, the objective moral reality of rational self-interest as a life-generating force, the moral supremacy of reason as opposed to the bulwarks of religion or the frantic paranoia of the social relativist---the denial of these truths is what we are experiencing tangibly, and visibly and undeniably this very moment.
This country is headed in the wrong direction, and we're speeding it up! You can't defend freedom by destroying it. You can't defend liberty by enslaving yourselves. You can't increase prosperity by punishing it. You can't inspire innovation by stifling it in bureaucratic red tape. You can't broaden minds through education by stifling teacher creativity. You can't heal bad debt by creating more of it. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
"Yes, this is an age of moral crisis. Yes, you are bearing punishment for your evil. But it is not man who is now on trial and it is not human nature that will take the blame. It is your moral code that's through, this time. Your moral code has reached its climax, the blind alley at the end of its course. And if you wish to go on living, what you now need is not to return to morality -- you who have never known any -- but to discover it." --Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Who Will Care for your Children?
In case you didn't catch my earlier post on the subject:
http://anamericananti-theistabroad.blogspot.com/2008/07/not-enough-teachers-not-enough-nurses.html
But here again we have another symptom of the ongoing problem:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25692127/
See the problems when lumbering bureaucratic institutions make arbitrary decisions without any awareness of what is needed to actually realize the demands they place on the system?
Let me put it another way. What good does it do to demand that all students have access to a nurse when the number of nurses, how much they are paid, etc. is decided by a public board which has to vote on any related executive decision from tax allocation to job allocation?
What good does it do to demand teachers in a system which makes it impossible to satisfy its own demands?
The only solution is to privatize education, expose the schools to market forces and force the bureaucrats to produce results. Allow parents 100% freedom in where they send their children and remove education from the tax burden so that they can afford to send them. The alternative is to simply place more demands on the nurses (which we already know are in short supply). Should they do even more work for less pay?
If you set those terms, where are you going to find people wiling to work at the schools? Or do you really want the lowest bidder responsible for your child's health?
The choice is yours.
http://anamericananti-theistabroad.blogspot.com/2008/07/not-enough-teachers-not-enough-nurses.html
But here again we have another symptom of the ongoing problem:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25692127/
See the problems when lumbering bureaucratic institutions make arbitrary decisions without any awareness of what is needed to actually realize the demands they place on the system?
Let me put it another way. What good does it do to demand that all students have access to a nurse when the number of nurses, how much they are paid, etc. is decided by a public board which has to vote on any related executive decision from tax allocation to job allocation?
What good does it do to demand teachers in a system which makes it impossible to satisfy its own demands?
The only solution is to privatize education, expose the schools to market forces and force the bureaucrats to produce results. Allow parents 100% freedom in where they send their children and remove education from the tax burden so that they can afford to send them. The alternative is to simply place more demands on the nurses (which we already know are in short supply). Should they do even more work for less pay?
If you set those terms, where are you going to find people wiling to work at the schools? Or do you really want the lowest bidder responsible for your child's health?
The choice is yours.
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