Bit dribble

The melody of Pi

2011-08-29T19:19:00.000-07:00

Who's got the copyright for the melody of Pi? Here is a hilarious and at the same time profound clip on the subject of Pi Politics by Vihart.

Architecture in Pyongyang

2011-08-28T20:33:00.000-07:00

If you've watched The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaușescu, you have observed the extent to which North Korea has served as a model to the Romanian dictator. Watch particularly the following scene, with a Korean singer playing a Romanian country piece dear to the Romanian leader:

This is the only time on record when the dictator is seen genuinely happy, dropping his guard and letting a smile. Ceaușescu visited the East Asian country in 1971, and was so impressed with the popular manifestations organized for him by Korean communist leader Kim Ir Sen that he decided to emulate what he had observed back in Romania. As soon as he returned from his trip, he tightened his grip on power, issuing what are called the Theses of July, a mini-Cultural revolution mandating a return to Socialist Realism in Romanian written and visual arts.

A few years later, in 1977, the March 4 earthquake devastates the city of Bucharest.

(photo collage credit: Alex Galmeanu)

Not inclined to let a good crisis go to waste, Ceaușescu decides to rebuild the city on the model of Pyongyang. One quarter of the old city is leveled, and replaced with concrete apartment buildings, to the horror of the lovers of historic Bucharest. The vast majority of the capital's citizens think the dictator has gone mad, yet nobody protests the demolition in the city.

Few understood then, and few understand now why North Korean architecture exercised such a pull on the Romanian dictator. But as any of his other mad decisions, at its core it had a kernel of logic. Here is a clip by Berlin architect Philipp Meuser, who was recently allowed to shoot a few Pyongyang architectural scenes. Despite the totalitarian outlook of the city, it is an architectural jewel, and when one day North Korea will be a free country Pyongyang will be one of the most highly sought tourist attractions especially for its mesmerizing sky-risers and apartment buildings. As Meuser says, modern architecture has always been ideological, and on this Pyongyang offers no exception.

Learn German with Loriot

2011-08-28T19:40:00.000-07:00

The unobjectionable Mark Twain

2011-01-08T08:56:00.000-08:00

Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, in a NewSouth Books edition is intended for classroom use, and plans to do away with any reference to the euphemism 'nigger', replacing it with 'slave'. For good balance, the term 'Injun' will be also replaced with 'Indian'. According to the Publishers Weekly, Twain scholar and editor Alan Gribben says: "This is not an effort to render Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn colorblind... Race matters in these books. It's a matter of how you express that in the 21st century."

Some readers have protested. Diana Senechal, commenting at the Core Knowledge blog, observes that "Changing the “n” word to “slave” distorts the meaning and language. Huck frequently refers to Jim as a “n” but does not regard him as a “slave.” What happens to the sentence at the end of chapter 14?

'I see it warn’t no use wasting words–you can’t learn a slave to argue. So I quit.'

"That’s absurd", writes Senechal. "Huck isn’t commenting on Jim’s slave status; he’s commenting on his race. It’s a racist comment, yes, but it’s blatantly ironic; the reader sees that Huck’s reasoning is no better than Jim’s, and that Jim has done better than Huck in this discussion. And it is in the very next chapter that Huck is humbled–when he plays a trick on Jim and realizes how mean it was."

Ironically, the novel Huckleberry Finn was controversial from the beginning, but not for its typecasting of Jim 'the nigger ... that used to belong to old Miss Watson' and of Injun Joe, the terrible, vengeful Indian - but rather for the reprehensible acts of its young characters. Twain writes:

"When Huck appeared, the public library of Concord flung him out indignantly, partly because he was a liar, and partly because after deep meditation and careful deliberation he decided that if he'd got to betray Jim or go to hell, he would rather go to hell - which was profanity, and those Concord purists couldn't stand it."

Then there's an episode in 1905 when the Brooklyn Public Library officials sought to dispose of the book at the request of a 'young woman, superintendent of children's department, [who] insisted that Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer be removed from the children's room because of their "coarseness, deceitfulness and mischievous practices."'

http://www.twainquotes.com/19351102.html

When asked by the Brooklyn head librarian to defend his two books, the author responded with the following letter:

"Dear Sir:

I am greatly troubled by what you say. I wrote Tom Sawyer & Huck Finn for adults exclusively, & it always distressed me when I find that boys and girls have been allowed access to them. The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean. I know this by my own experience, & to this day I cherish an unappeased bitterness against the unfaithful guardians of my young life, who not only permitted but compelled me to read an unexpurgated Bible through before I was 15 years old. None can do that and ever draw a clean sweet breath again on this side of the grave. Ask that young lady - she will tell you so.

"Most honestly do I wish I could say a softening word or two in defence of Huck's character, since you wish it, but really in my opinion it is no better than God's (in the Ahab & 97 others), & the rest of the sacred brotherhood.

"If there is one Unexpurgated in the Children's Department, won't you please help that young woman remove Tom & Huck from that questionable companionship?

Sincerely yours,
S. L. Clemens"

In time, we have become less offended by the mischievous boys in Twain's books - but that is only because their world is now distanced in time and space, and their misdemeanors now look patriarchal and stylized. We would still balk today at a children book with the subject of contemporaneous students stealing and getting away with it, running away from public school taking months long idyllic trolls through the wilderness, drinking water from rivers and eating tree bark. Or maybe we'd accept it as an eccentricity, but Twain seriously believed in the educational benefits of this free roaming life style. For him, the school of life was preferable to the one with classrooms.

While some people say that an education is what remains after everything learned has been forgotten, Twain had a simpler version: "Education consists mainly in what we have unlearned". And he had something to say about the entire organization: "In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then He made school boards."

In what regards Mark Twain's views on the depiction of Indians in literature, he wrote an 1870 essay with his usual verve, 'The Noble Red Man', where he's taking a strong view on novels like those of Fenimore Cooper that present the Indian as a Noble Savage.

"In books he is tall and tawny, muscular, straight and of kingly presence; he has a beaked nose and an eagle eye. " [...]

"He is noble. He is true and loyal; not even imminent death can shake his peerless faithfulness. His heart is a well-spring of truth, and of generous impulses, and of knightly magnanimity. With him, gratitude is religion; do him a kindness, and at the end of a lifetime he has not forgotten it. Eat of his bread, or offer him yours, and the bond of hospitality is sealed--a bond which is forever inviolable with him.

"He loves the dark-eyed daughter of the forest, the dusky maiden of faultless form and rich attire, the pride of the tribe, the all-beautiful. He talks to her in a low voice, at twilight of his deeds on the war-path and in the chase, and of the grand achievements of his ancestors; and she listens with downcast eyes, "while a richer hue mantles her dusky cheek."

"Such is the Noble Red Man in print. But out on the plains and in the mountains, not being on dress parade, not being gotten up to see company, he is under no obligation to be other than his natural self, and therefore:

"He is little, and scrawny, and black, and dirty; and, judged by even the most charitable of our canons of human excellence, is thoroughly pitiful and contemptible. There is nothing in his eye or his nose that is attractive, and if there is anything in his hair that--however, that is a feature which will not bear too close examination... He wears no bracelets on his arms or ankles; his hunting suit is gallantly fringed, but not intentionally; when he does not wear his disgusting rabbit-skin robe, his hunting suit consists wholly of the half of a horse blanket brought over in the Pinta or the Mayflower, and frayed out and fringed by inveterate use. He is not rich enough to possess a belt; he never owned a moccasin or wore a shoe in his life; and truly he is nothing but a poor, filthy, naked scurvy vagabond, whom to exterminate were a charity to the Creator's worthier insects and reptiles which he oppresses. Still, when contact with the white man has given to the Noble Son of the Forest certain cloudy impressions of civilization, and aspirations after a nobler life, he presently appears in public with one boot on and one shoe--shirtless, and wearing ripped and patched and buttonless pants which he holds up with his left hand--his execrable rabbit-skin robe flowing from his shoulder--an old hoop-skirt on, outside of it--a necklace of battered sardine-boxes and oyster-cans reposing on his bare breast--a venerable flint-lock musket in his right hand--a weather-beaten stove-pipe hat on, canted "gallusly" to starboard, and the lid off and hanging by a thread or two; and when he thus appears, and waits patiently around a saloon till he gets a chance to strike a "swell" attitude before a looking-glass, he is a good, fair, desirable subject for extermination if ever there was one. [...]"

At that time, literature depiction of natives had no third alternative between the idealized one of Fenimore Cooper and the gaunt one of Mark Twain. The entire Noble Man can be found at http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/hns/indians/redman.html - it is a well written diatribe, and one of the most offensively contemptuous pieces ever composed. I'd like to believe that his extermination is one of behavior and of pants kept up with the left hand, and not of actual breathing persons, but I am not too sure.

Twain is as controversial now as he was in his time, and we can enjoy some of his writings while being careful with others, but the last thing we should do is to falsify him especially for young readers. So let Injun Joe be Injun - the word is so rarely used that it's long lost its pejorative bite. I doubt that this word is read in many other places today than in Tom Sawyer. As for the n. word, it can be read like that in class, if 'nigger' is too much, but the text itself should be left as it is. His contemporaries have managed not to edit his more blasphemous passages, and neither should we.

(Parts of this text have been originally posted as a comment on the Core Knowledge blog.)

A few maxims of François, duc de La Rochefoucauld

2010-09-24T20:02:00.000-07:00

"In the Age of Louis XIV Voltaire describes the Maximes of La Rochefoucauld" as one of the works which contributed the most towards forming the taste of the French nation and giving its feeling for aptness and precision", writes Leonard Tancock in the 1979 Introduction to the Penguin Classic edition of the Maxims.

Here are some of my favorites. I've done my best to remain true to some of the double meanings in the original...

19 - Nous avons tous assez de force pour supporter les maux d'autrui.

We all have sufficient strength to endure the trouble of others.

22 - La philosophie triomphe aisément des maux passés et des maux à venir. Mais les maux présents triomphent d'elle.

Philosophy easily triumphs over past and future evils. But present evils triumph over philosophy.

64 - La vérité ne fait pas tant de bien dans le monde que ses apparences y font de mal.

Truth doesn't do as much good in the world as its appearance does evil.

89 - Tout le monde se plaint de sa mémoire, et personne ne se plaint de son jugement.

Everybody complains about their memory, and nobody complains about their judgment.

110 - On ne donne rien si libéralement que ses conseils.

Nothing we give away as liberally as our advice.

129 - Il suffit quelquefois d'être grossier pour n'être pas trompé par un habile homme.

To be slow-witted is at times sufficient for saving oneself from a smart trickster.

231 - C'est une grande folie de vouloir être sage tout seul.

It's very foolish to want to be wise all alone.

238 - Il n'est pas si dangereux de faire du mal à la plupart des hommes que de leur faire trop de bien.

It's not as dangerous to harm the majority of the people as it is to do them too much good.

375 - Les esprits médiocres condamnent d'ordinaire tout ce qui passe leur portée.

Average minds duly condemn whatever goes past their reach.

421 - La confiance fournit plus à la conversation que l'esprit.

Confidence gives more to conversation than wit.

447 - La bienséance est la moindre de toutes les lois, et la plus suivie.

Propriety is the least of all laws, and the most followed.

458 - Nos ennemis approchent plus de la vérité dans les jugements qu'ils font de nous que nous n'en approchons nous-mêmes.

Our enemies are closer to the truth in their judgment of our character than we are ourselves.

496 - Les querelles ne dureraient pas longtemps, si le tort n'était que d'un côté.

Quarrels would not last long, were the fault on one side only.

Adam Smith on education

2010-02-16T20:18:00.000-08:00

The Wealth of Nations, V.1.181

"...It is otherwise with the common people. They have little time to spare for education. Their parents can scarce afford to maintain them even in infancy. As soon as they are able to work they must apply to some trade by which they can earn their subsistence. That trade, too, is generally so simple and uniform as to give little exercise to the understanding, while, at the same time, their labour is both so constant and so severe, that it leaves them little leisure and less inclination to apply to, or even to think of, anything else.

"But though the common people cannot, in any civilized society, be so well instructed as people of some rank and fortune, the most essential parts of education, however, to read, write, and account, can be acquired at so early a period of life that the greater part even of those who are to be bred to the lowest occupations have time to acquire them before they can be employed in those occupations. For a very small expence the public can facilitate, can encourage, and can even impose upon almost the whole body of the people the necessity of acquiring those most essential parts of education.

"The public can facilitate this acquisition by establishing in every parish or district a little school, where children may be taught for a reward so moderate that even a common labourer may afford it; the master being partly, but not wholly, paid by the public, because, if he was wholly, or even principally, paid by it, he would soon learn to neglect his business. In Scotland the establishment of such parish schools has taught almost the whole common people to read, and a very great proportion of them to write and account. In England the establishment of charity schools has had an effect of the same kind, though not so universally, because the establishment is not so universal. If in those little schools the books, by which the children are taught to read, were a little more instructive than they commonly are, and if, instead of a little smattering of Latin, which the children of the common people are sometimes taught there, and which can scarce ever be of any use to them, they were instructed in the elementary parts of geometry and mechanics, the literary education of this rank of people would perhaps be as complete as it can be. There is scarce a common trade which does not afford some opportunities of applying to it the principles of geometry and mechanics, and which would not therefore gradually exercise and improve the common people in those principles, the necessary introduction to the most sublime as well as to the most useful sciences."

Of the two systems of morality

2010-02-16T19:47:00.000-08:00

"In every civilized society, in every society where the distinction of ranks has once been completely established, there have been always two different schemes or systems of morality current at the same time; of which the one may be called the strict or austere; the other the liberal, or, if you will, the loose system. The former is generally admired and revered by the common people: the latter is commonly more esteemed and adopted by what are called people of fashion."

This was written by Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, V.1.199, published in 1776.

"The former is generally admired and revered by the common people: the latter is commonly more esteemed and adopted by what are called people of fashion. The degree of disapprobation with which we ought to mark the vices of levity, the vices which are apt to arise from great prosperity, and from the excess of gaiety and good humour, seems to constitute the principal distinction between those two opposite schemes or systems. In the liberal or loose system, luxury, wanton and even disorderly mirth, the pursuit of pleasure to some degree of intemperance, the breach of chastity, at least in one of the two sexes, &c. provided they are not accompanied with gross indecency, and do not lead to falsehood or injustice, are generally treated with a good deal of indulgence, and are easily either excused or pardoned altogether. In the austere system, on the contrary, those excesses are regarded with the utmost abhorrence and detestation. The vices of levity are always ruinous to the common people, and a single week's thoughtlessness and dissipation is often sufficient to undo a poor workman for ever, and to drive him through despair upon committing the most enormous crimes. The wiser and better sort of the common people, therefore, have always the utmost abhorrence and detestation of such excesses, which their experience tells them are so immediately fatal to people of their condition. The disorder and extravagance of several years, on the contrary, will not always ruin a man of fashion, and people of that rank are very apt to consider the power of indulging in some degree of excess as one of the advantages of their fortune, and the liberty of doing so without censure or reproach as one of the privileges which belong to their station. In people of their own station, therefore, they regard such excesses with but a small degree of disapprobation, and censure them either very slightly or not at all."

The Sokal affair

2010-02-09T09:32:00.000-08:00

Physicist Alan D. Sokal's Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity, published in 1996 in the Social Text, an academic journal dedicated to cultural studies. Sokal is a leftist that has taught mathematics at the National University of Nicaragua during the Sandinista government.

"...the content of any science is profoundly constrained by the language within which its discourses are formulated; and mainstream Western physical science has, since Galileo, been formulated in the language of mathematics.100 101 But whose mathematics? The question is a fundamental one, for, as Aronowitz has observed, ``neither logic nor mathematics escapes the `contamination' of the social.'' And as feminist thinkers have repeatedly pointed out, in the present culture this contamination is overwhelmingly capitalist, patriarchal and militaristic: ``mathematics is portrayed as a woman whose nature desires to be the conquered Other.'' Thus, a liberatory science cannot be complete without a profound revision of the canon of mathematics. As yet no such emancipatory mathematics exists, and we can only speculate upon its eventual content.

We can see hints of it in the multidimensional and nonlinear logic of fuzzy systems theory; but this approach is still heavily marked by its origins in the crisis of late-capitalist production relations. Catastrophe theory, with its dialectical emphases on smoothness/discontinuity and metamorphosis/unfolding, will indubitably play a major role in the future mathematics; but much theoretical work remains to be done before this approach can become a concrete tool of progressive political praxis. Finally, chaos theory -- which provides our deepest insights into the ubiquitous yet mysterious phenomenon of nonlinearity -- will be central to all future mathematics. And yet, these images of the future mathematics must remain but the haziest glimmer: for, alongside these three young branches in the tree of science, there will arise new trunks and branches -- entire new theoretical frameworks -- of which we, with our present ideological blinders, cannot yet even conceive. "

Truth or dare? Sokal's book on the subject, Impostures intellectuelles, coauthored with Jean Bricmont, has apparently been making quite a stir in France. For an entry point to the debate pro and contra Sokal and Bricmont, replete with links to the writings of the actual protagonists, see here.

What is the difference between the AFT and the NEA?

2010-02-05T13:57:00.001-08:00

The AFT (the American Federation of Teachers) and the NEA (the National Education Association) are the two largest nationa teacher unions.

"I suppose this is something I should know, but I don't, so does anyone out there know what the difference between the NEA and the AFT are?" That is the question asked by Matt Iglesias in his blog, and a number of well-informed readers of his blog obliged with a well clarifying picture of the two unions.

One of the readers of the Iglesias blog notes very informatively:

Historically the NEA viewed teaching as a profession and itself as a professional organization, similar to the AMA. It would help teachers take their place in society and from time to time assist in the peer-to-peer discussions that would occur when wages and working conditions needed to be adjusted.

The AFT viewed teaching, in its political and contractual interactions at least, as a form of hourly labor best thought of in the framework of an industrial trade union (and it is a member of the AFL-CIO).

From the 1940s through the 1960s most teachers thought along the lines of the NEA, and where teachers were organized they tended to join the NEA.

When the 1970s rolled around, stagflation hit, budgets started getting cut, and teachers bearing the brunt of the problems with city school systems, it became apparent that those in power considered teachers to be akin to janitors rather than doctors, and treated them accordingly. At that point the AFT started to grow and take membership away from the NEA. In reaction the NEA became more politically involved and active, but never as much so as the AFT.

Teachers are still highly educated, politically aware and active, and have some free time in the afternoons - so they have always been a good source of foot labor for the Dems. To the extent that the AFT is still more militant and more active, they are the ones that have the most influence on the Dems, but the NEA was still larger numerically last time I checked.

...

One difference is that the AFT, brought to national prominence by Albert Shanker, tends to act more like a regular union, going on strikes, etc., and the NEA more like a professional organization, less militant in its tactics. On the other hand, the AFT has been more willing to consider various accountability/curriculum reforms than the NEA. Certainly true under Shanker, who b/c almost a kind of neocon,this may have changed more recently. AFT tends to be more urban, NEA suburban.

Here's a link to a argument that they should merge that runs down some differences:
http://www.educationpolicy.org/files/neaftbk/book0000.htm#I6

I'd say the Dems are in hock to both. AFT at the local level on issues of pay/work rules. NEA at the national level on the need to water down accountability reforms.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau - the contrarian genius

2010-02-05T12:23:00.000-08:00

"It would have been better for the peace of France if this man had never existed", said Napoleon of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Or here is what Voltaire wrote to Rousseau about "The Social Contract":

"I have received your new book against the human race, and thank you for it. Never was such a cleverness used in the design of making us all stupid. One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours. But as I have lost that habit for more than sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it. Nor can I embark in search of the savages of Canada, because the maladies to which I am condemned render a European surgeon necessary to me; because war is going on in those regions; and because the example of our actions has made the savages nearly as bad as ourselves."

A recent biography of Rousseau's life, by Leo Damrosch, apparently hits all bases. Damrosh himself summarizes it very nicely:

Rousseau was "...describing a state of nature that never existed, a political system that never could exist and an educational scheme that never should exist."

The first chapter can be read here. For a summary of the biography, please see Stacy Schiff's 'Jean-Jacques Rousseau' - an unruly mind in the NY Times.

Theodore Darlimple on the intimidating revival of the economist John Kenneth Galbraith

2010-02-02T10:39:00.000-08:00

Theodore Darlimple is, if you do not know him, one of the most outspoken critics of the Liberal left. Here is a fragment from The Galbraith Revival, published in the City Journal.

...Here we reach the heart of the matter. Galbraith’s thinking about social and economic matters was always de haut en bas; his solutions emerged from the Olympian heights of his own ratiocination, to be applied to the clueless multitudes below. (No doubt his own great height, over 6 foot 8, accustomed him to looking down on people.) His literary style is symptomatic of his attitude, a true case of the style being the man himself. Hundreds of times, he uses question-begging locutions that intimidate with their orotund grandeur. I open a book of his at random and find the following: “The controlling fact is”; “This trade-off is present in all accepted thought”; “Nor should one wish otherwise”; “It has now been adequately urged”; “This is not a matter of choice; it is the modern imperative”; “It would, of course, be a serious error”; “This has long been recognized”; “All of this is to be welcomed”; “The lesson is clear”; “The solution is not difficult; it has the advantage of inevitability.”

The cumulative effect is to intimidate those who believe themselves not well enough informed to contradict so high an authority. We are far from the realm of Jane Austen’s light and ironic “It is a truth universally acknowledged.” When J. K. Galbraith enunciates a truth universally acknowledged, he does not want us to smile inwardly; he wants us to fear not being included in le tout Paris of correct, generous, and humane thought. What fool does not wish to be on the side of the inevitable?

I find Darlimple's observation pretty deft, de bas en haute, so to say. Darlimple's writing is brilliant, but at times, however, disappointingly uneven. The piece on the architecture of Le Courbusier - The Architect as Totalitarian, also published in the City Journal, I found to be too broad-stroked:

There is to be no escape from Le Corbusier’s prescriptions. “The only possible road is that of enthusiasm . . . the mobilization of enthusiasm, that electric power source of the human factory.” In his book The Radiant City, there is a picture of a vast crowd in Venice’s Piazza San Marco, with the legend, “Little by little, the world is moving to its destined goal. In Moscow, in Rome, in Berlin, in the USA, vast crowds are collecting round a strong idea”—the idea being, apparently, the absolute leader or state. These words were written in 1935, not a happy period for political thought in Moscow, Rome, or Berlin, and one might have hoped that he would have later recanted them.

For such insinuations, I would say, the evidence introduced is pretty flimsy. Or look at this paragraph:

When one recalls Le Corbusier’s remark about reinforced concrete—“my reliable, friendly concrete”—one wonders if he might have been suffering from a degree of Asperger’s syndrome: that he knew that people talked, walked, slept, and ate, but had no idea that anything went on in their heads, or what it might be, and consequently treated them as if they were mere things. Also, people with Asperger’s syndrome often have an obsession with some ordinary object or substance: reinforced concrete, say.

I don't know, Doctor Darlimple, that does not look to me like the right diagnosis. Pity - for Darlimple is an otherwise sparkling and outspoken intellectual critic.

Gideon Rachman, purveyor of doom at the Financial Times

2010-02-02T09:26:00.000-08:00

How the bottom fell out of ‘old’ Davos - on the waning influence of the US and 'Old' Europe in a world of high rising East Asian countries.

When nations turn into hoarders - how much the world population growth depends on food supplies, and how much the latter depend on fossil oil energy

Why America and China will clash - about what's behind Google's recent decision to stand up to the Chinese government's tendency to suppress Internet access

America is losing the free world - how Barack Obama was turned down by high officials of brasil, India, South Africa and Turkey at the Copenhagen Climate summit. He writes: "...Revealingly, both Brazilian and Chinese leaders have made the same pointed joke – likening the US to a rich man who, after gorging himself at a banquet, then invites the neighbours in for coffee and asks them to split the bill."

More of his Financial Times columns here. Rachman also has an excellent blog.

Andrew Sullivan's ghost bloggers

2010-01-20T09:54:00.000-08:00

Sullivan Ends Vacation Early To Respond To Ghostblogger Criticism - writes Michael Triplett.

"Any editorial views published as such on this blog are therefore mine and mine alone. But the content and counter-argument are generated by the collective mind of the readers, under-bloggers and the rest of the blogosphere. I think it’s cleaner and simpler not to clutter the blog up with bylines, and to retain its identity as one single narrative conversation. As long as you’re transparent about that, and we have been, I see no problem", writes Andrew Sullivan.

Not so, says lawprof blogger Ann Althouse, about ghost contributions by Sullivan staffers Patrick Appel and Chris Bodenner:

"I seriously believed I was interacting with Sullivan, a writer I have respected for maybe 20 years. I wouldn’t have bothered with Patrick (or Chris). I really don’t care what they think. If they insult me, they are to me like any number of bloggers who insult me and whose bait I don’t take. I would always take Sullivan’s bait, because Sullivan is important. Not to know whether it’s Sullivan or one of them makes a mush out of the whole blog. I’m not wading through all of this ghost-generated verbiage and guessing about what might be the real thing."

Scott Brown wins the Massachusetts election for the open senate seat

2010-01-20T08:59:00.000-08:00

Journalist David Gergen had asked in the election debate if Scott Brown would be willing to "...sit in Teddy Kennedy's seat and [say] I'm going to be the person who's going to block [health care reform] for another 15 years." Scott Brown's memorable response might have won him the election right there: "With all due respect, it’s not the Kennedy seat, and it’s not the Democrats’ seat. It’s the people’s seat."

Shortly thereafter, we hear from Scott Brown supporters like Fred Barnes, who wrote that The Health Care Bill Is Dead:

"The impact of Republican Scott Brown’s capture of the Massachusetts Senate seat held for decades by Teddy Kennedy will be both immediate and powerful. "

And we hear from Kyle Trygstad

"Just two people -- John F. Kennedy and Edward M. Kennedy -- had been elected in the last 58 years to the Massachusetts Senate seat Republican Scott Brown won yesterday. The seat's legacy and Democrats' dominance in the state were no match, however, for the lethal mix of Brown's message and a poorly run campaign by Democrat Martha Coakley, as well as a shifting public mood..."

And from Rich Lowry:

"Scott Brown did the mind-blowing last night. He won the Senate seat formerly held by Teddy Kennedy, in the state that's the cradle of contemporary liberalism, after trailing by 30 points."

Also from progressive leaning Thomas Edsall, in his Ghost Story:

"The victory of Scott Brown in the fight for Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat shines a light on a trend in American politics that ought to deeply trouble progressives..."

So what was it in the end - did Scott Brown win Ted Kennedy's seat or did he win the people's seat?

Richard E. Nisbett on Educational Research

2010-01-18T19:03:00.000-08:00

Intelligence and how to get it, W. W. Norton & Company, 2009.

From p. 67, Nisbett's thoughts of the state of affairs in education research:

"Despite the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on innovative educational programs, and the hundreds upon hundreds of studies evaluating them, the situation in educational research is scandalous. Research is mostly anecdotal, and most self-styled evaluators of educational programs are actually opposed to the experimental method, that is, providing one educational technique to children randomly selected from some population and providing a comparison technique to other randomly selected children. Very little research rises to the level of being scientifically acceptable.

"The situation is as shocking as it would be if pharmaceutical companies were to routinely peddle their medicines without having them backed by evaluation research that went beyond haphazardly giving the medicine to some individuals with a given illness and reporting the percentage of patients who got better (without knowledge of the percentage of patients who would have gotten better without any treatment at all). Only drug trials that identify a patient population and then randomly assign some patients to the treatment condition and some to the non-treatment condition or alternative-treatment condition count as adequate research. Yet this standard is almost never met in research on educational interventions.

...

''Recent research on schools has employed at least some form of control. In some studies, investigators get schools to agree to accept an intervention, for example, a new type of computer instruction for math, and then compare performance at those schools with that at schools that are similar on a predetermined set of criteria, such as social class and race of students, but that were not offered an intervention. This type of research is better than nothing, but not by much. It is susceptible to the self-selection problem: the schools that are offered the intervention may be systematically different in some unknown ways from those not offered the intervention. The problem is particularly acute when there is literal self-selection, that is, when only some of the schools offered the intervention accept it. The schools that accept the intervention may rate better on some of the relevant dimensions than those that do not accept it.

"Also inadequate are studies that simply report scores at schools before the intervention began and compare them with scores after the intervention began. These studies generally yield effect sizes that are substantially greater than those found by studies comparing the schools that had the intervention with presumably comparable schools that did not. An exception to this rule exists when gains after an intervention are extremely large - and discontinuous with what would have been expected if there had been no intervention. Under such circumstances a claim of effectiveness can sometimes be persuasive."

'World misled over Himalayan glacier meltdown'

2010-01-18T08:05:00.000-08:00

Read the Sunday Times article on the latest screw-up at the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), who had claimed that the Himalayan glaciers were melting so fast that they could disappear by 2035.

"Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate.", had said the IPCC benchmark report of two years ago. The Sunday Times article tracks down how the claim ended up in the IPCC report.

But wait, it is actually worse: some of the glaciers are melting down, just at a much slower rate than advertised. By its incompetent overshoot, the IPCC has done a huge disservice to understanding Global Warming. It is unclear how the IPCC can recover its scientific reputation after this.

For more on Himalaya glaciers and their rate of meltdown - read about the observations made by satellites from space Himalayan Glacier Melting Observed From Space, a March 2007 story in Science Daily.

Mozart, Die Zauberflöte, Il Seraglio, and the sources of European Orientalism

2010-01-18T05:52:00.000-08:00

Ibn Warraq writes about the venturing of European Enlightenment era art in to the spiritual territory of Orientalism, as reflected in Mozart's Magic Flute and The Abduction from the Seraglio.

"The [Enlightenment] Orientalists and their indefatigable intellectual curiosity, scholarship, and translations had incalculable consequences for the development of art, philosophy and politics in Europe, an influence passionately chronicled by Raymond Schwab in The Oriental Renaissance. Orientalists changed forever the intellectual and spiritual landscape of Europe, and allowed artists, writers, and composers to enter imaginatively and sympathetically into civilizations hitherto unfamiliar to Westerners, to accord the Orient dignity and respect, and to people European works with Orientals, seen as equals. It was in this intellectual and spiritual milieu that Mozart created some of his most sublime music. Perhaps Die Zauberflöte, Il Seraglio, and cantata K.619 can be seen as reflections in art of Orientalist research."

More of Ibn Warraq's writings can be found here.

Broken embraces

2010-01-17T18:41:00.000-08:00

Alex O. Scott gives a pitch perfect review to the latest Almodovar movie, "Broken Embraces":

"...the most direct and striking dialogue the movie conducts with a filmmaker from the past is with Pedro Almodóvar himself. Aficionados will recognize “Girls and Suitcases,” bits of which turn up in “Broken Embraces,” most powerfully at the end, as a replica of “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” Mr. Almodóvar’s marvelous madcap comedy from 1988. Its appearance is not vanity or clever self-quotation. Rather, the director’s pastiche of his early, funny work becomes, in the context of this somber new film, a poignant reflection on aging and loss. To catch a glimpse of “Women” in the mirror of “Embraces” is to see how cinematic images can be both tangible and ghostly.

And also — literally in the case of Harry Caine and “Girls and Suitcases” — invisible to their maker, who is no longer the man he was. He has lost so much over the years. Every one of us has, and if Mr. Almodóvar has grown wise enough to understand that art is a dreadfully inadequate compensation, he is still generous enough to offer it to us anyway. "

Islam and the Decline of Greek Culture

2010-01-16T20:15:00.000-08:00

A good review of the literature on the subject of Islam, Greek culture and European Renaissance:

Islam and the Decline of Greek Culture: A Critical Look at John Freely's Book “Aladdin’s Lamp”

To be read carefully though - the review does sound a bit incensed about Islam.

Laplace, Napoleon and the hypothesis of the prime mover

2010-01-15T19:47:00.000-08:00

This is a story nicely told by Augustus DeMorgan, the XVIIth Century mathematician famous for the DeMorgan Laws,

not (a or b) = (not a) and (not b)
not (a and b) = (not a) or (not b)

DeMorgan wrote this fragment in A budget of paradoxes:

"With the general run of the philosophical atheists of the last century the notion of a God was an hypothesis. There was left an admitted possibility that the vague somewhat which went by more names than one, might be personal, intelligent, and superintendent. In the works of Laplace, who is sometimes called an atheist from his writings, there is nothing from which such an inference can be drawn: unless indeed a Reverend Fellow of the Royal Society may be held to be the fool who said in his heart, etc., etc., if his contributions to the Philosophical Transactions go no higher than nature. The following anecdote is well known in Paris, but has never been printed entire. Laplace once went in form to present some edition of his "Systeme du Monde" to the First Consul, or Emperor. Napoleon, whom some wags had told that this book contained no mention of the name of God, and who was fond of putting embarrassing questions, received it with—"M. Laplace, they tell me you have written this large book on the system of the universe, and have never even mentioned its Creator." Laplace, who, though the most supple of politicians, was as stiff as a martyr on every point of his philosophy or religion (e. g., even under Charles X he never concealed his dislike of the priests), drew himself up and answered bluntly, "Je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothese-la." Napoleon, greatly amused, told this reply to Lagrange, who exclaimed, "Ah! c'est une belle hypothese; ca explique beaucoup de choses."

It is commonly said that the last words of Laplace were, "Ce que nous connaissons est peu de chose; ce que nous ignorons est immense." This looks like a parody on Newton's pebbles: the following is the true account; it comes to me through one remove from Poisson. After the publication (in 1825) of the fifth volume of the Mecanique Celeste, Laplace became gradually weaker, and with it musing and abstracted. He thought much on the great problems of existence, and often muttered to himself, Quest ce que c'est que tout cela! After many alternations, he appeared at last so permanently prostrated that his family applied to his favorite pupil, M. Poisson, to try to get a word from him. Poisson paid a visit, and after a few words of salutation, said, "J'ai une bonne nouvelle a vous annoncer: on a recu au Bureau des Longitudes une lettre d'Allemagne annoncant que M. Bessel a verifie par l'observation vos decouvertes theoriques sur les satellites de Jupiter." Laplace opened his eyes and answered with deep gravity, "L'homme ne poursuit que des chimeres." He never spoke again. His death took place March 5, 1827.

"The language used by the two great geometers illustrates what I have said: a supreme and guiding intelligence —apart from a blind rule called nature of things—was an hypothesis. The absolute denial of such a ruling power was not in the plan of the higher philosophers: it was left for the smaller fry. A round assertion of the non-existence of anything which stands in the way is the refuge of a certain class of minds: but it succeeds only with things subjective; the objective offers resistance. A philosopher of the appropriative class tried it upon the constable who appropriated him: I deny your existence, said he; Come along all the same, said the unpsychological policeman."

Laplace's retort on the existence of God, "I did not have a need for this hypothesis", still resonates with me as the best answer to the question. But that is not the entire story that DeMorgan had intended to say... Here is DeMorgan's continuation:

"Euler was a believer in God, downright and straightforward. The following story is told by Thiebault, in his Souvenirs de vingt ans de sejour a Berlin, published in his old age, about 1804.

[...]

"Diderot paid a visit to the Russian Court at the invitation of the Empress. He conversed very freely, and gave the younger members of the Court circle a good deal of lively atheism. The Empress was much amused, but some of her councilors suggested that it might be desirable to check these expositions of doctrine. The Empress did not like to put a direct muzzle on her guest's tongue, so the following plot was contrived. Diderot was informed that a learned mathematician was in possession of an algebraical demonstration of the existence of God, and would give it him before all the Court, if he desired to hear it. Diderot gladly consented: though the name of the mathematician is not given, it was Euler. He advanced towards Diderot, and said gravely, and in a tone of perfect conviction: "Monsieur, (a + bn)/n = x, done Dieu existe; repondes!" Diderot, to whom algebra was Hebrew, was embarrassed and disconcerted; while peals of laughter rose on all sides. He asked permission to return to France at once, which was granted."

David Brooks, Avatar and The Messiah Complex

2010-01-13T07:13:00.000-08:00

Read David Brooks' cronic of Avatar, the James Cameron 3D fantasy.

"Every age produces its own sort of fables, and our age seems to have produced The White Messiah fable.

"This is the oft-repeated story about a manly young adventurer who goes into the wilderness in search of thrills and profit. But, once there, he meets the native people and finds that they are noble and spiritual and pure. And so he emerges as their Messiah, leading them on a righteous crusade against his own rotten civilization."

...

"Still, would it be totally annoying to point out that the whole White Messiah fable, especially as Cameron applies it, is kind of offensive?

"It rests on the stereotype that white people are rationalist and technocratic while colonial victims are spiritual and athletic. It rests on the assumption that nonwhites need the White Messiah to lead their crusades. It rests on the assumption that illiteracy is the path to grace. It also creates a sort of two-edged cultural imperialism. Natives can either have their history shaped by cruel imperialists or benevolent ones, but either way, they are going to be supporting actors in our journey to self-admiration.

"It’s just escapism, obviously, but benevolent romanticism can be just as condescending as the malevolent kind — even when you surround it with pop-up ferns and floating mountains."

Oliver Stone's new Showtime documentary "Secret history of America" stirs trouble

2010-01-12T07:33:00.000-08:00

Hitler? A scapegoat. Stalin? I can empathise. Oliver Stone stirs up history

Oliver Stone: "Hitler was a scapegoat"

"Stalin has a complete other story," Stone said. "Not to paint him as a hero, but to tell a more factual representation. He fought the German war machine more than any single person. We can't judge people as only 'bad' or 'good.' Hitler is an easy scapegoat throughout history and its been used cheaply. He's the product of a series of actions. It's cause and effect ... People in America don't know the connection between WWI and WWII ... I've been able to walk in Stalin's shoes and Hitler's shoes to understand their point of view. We're going to educate our minds and liberalize them and broaden them. We want to move beyond opinions ... Go into the funding of the Nazi party. How many American corporations were involved, from GM through IBM. Hitler is just a man who could have easily been assassinated."

Suffice it to say, he's playing with some powerful perceptions here.

Greg Gutfeld writes: "'Stalin, Hitler, Mao, McCarthy — these people have been vilified pretty thoroughly by history,' [Stone] told reporters, managing to slip non-killer Joe McCarthy into the mix, without causing a murmur.

"But hey, he's right about Mao, Hitler and Stalin — it's just so unfair the way things work when you kill millions of innocent people. But true to his blind allegiance to relativism, Stone claims that "we can't judge people as only 'bad' or 'good.' Hitler was an easy scapegoat."

"He's right: Finger-pointing is so judgmental. Case in point: Stone claims that conservative pundits will hate the show, maybe because conservative pundits hate excuses masquerading as empathy. Me? I don't care if Adolf's mommy never loved him or the maid made fun of his willy. I had similar problems and I didn't kill six million Jews — I think.

"But saying only conservatives will be upset by this, is really a slap in the face to progressives. For Stone assumes that — unlike right-wingers — the left will willingly accept his revisionist look at history's greatest killers.

"He's right: As embracers of all things relative, they are crackers to his cheese."

Jeff Foust asks: Are astronauts close to extinction?

2010-01-07T18:22:00.000-08:00

Read The Future of Human Spaceflight in the MIT Technology Review. It talks about the Augustine Committee, a panel chartered by the White House, which issued in Oct 2009 its report on the future of space travel. And the news is bleak: while the Chinese are preparing for manned missions to Mars,

"The [US] human space flight program... is at a tipping point where either additional funds must be provided or the [human] exploration program first instituted by President Kennedy must be abandoned, at least for the time being."

The current plan is to retire the space shuttle by late 2010, and use Russian Soyuz spacecraft to reach the International Space Station (ISS) until the Ares I rocket (see picture) and Orion capsule are ready. The estimated ready date for Ares I /Orion is 2017. The ISS takes $2-3 billion to maintain yearly, and funding for that is projected at this point until 2015 - when another $1 billion would be the cost of safely dumping it out of orbit.

Foust also writes that

"...Satellites launched on expendable boosters allowed the United States to achieve strategic dominance in space. And Cold War motives disappeared with the collapse of the Soviet Union."

I'm not so much concerned that another country might soon achieve dominance in space - but that a foe might be capable to bring down our satellite infrastructure, thus eliminating our advantage. Here is an analysis by Geoffrey Forden:

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2008/01/inside-the-chin/

Forden writes: "...if the short term military consequences to the United States [of a theoretic sneak attack by China on US military satellites] are not that bad, the long term consequences to all space-faring nations would be devastating. The destruction of the nine satellites hit during the first hour of the attack considered here could put over 18,900 new pieces of debris over four inches in diameter into the most populated belt of satellites in low Earth orbit. Even more debris would be put into geostationary orbit if China launched an attack against communications satellites. In the immediate aftermath of the attack, the debris from each satellite would continue to “clump” together, much as the debris from last year’s test. However, over the next year or so—well after the terrestrial war with China had been resolved—the debris fields would fan out and eventually strike another satellite.

"These debris fields could easily cause a run-away chain of collisions that renders space unusable — for thousands of years, and for everyone."

The Life and Times of Mexico, by Earl Shorris

2010-01-06T19:17:00.000-08:00

A very nice humanistic perspective on the Mexican society - today and in its history. Excellent travel companion if you plan to go South of the border! (Or if you would like to begin to understand our Spanish American co citizens.)

Kudos to Earl Shorris for an excellent work. I'm not even sure which part of the book I liked most - the one about Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata posing together famously in the Mexican Revolution, the part about the Lazaro Cardenias reforms in the 1940's, the part about the conundrum of Mexican education - or the part about Spanish conquest and subservience of the Mezzo America.
Or about the nascent feminism of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (1648-1695), who famously signed in blood her letter of submission to the Catholic Inquisition. Or, still more recent, the intellectual debates between Octavio Paz, Enrique Krauze on one side and Carlos Fuentes on the other.

Atul Gawande on the connection between farming and medical care

2010-01-06T18:28:00.000-08:00

Atul Gawande is a Cancer surgeon at Brigham And Womens Hospital, a journalist for the New Yorker, a Harvard Associate Prof and a book author. Recently he published The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right. If you'd like to understand the US health care conundrum, and what's at stake in the new health care legislation pending in Congress then Gawande's writings would be a good place to start.

Check out his New Yorker article titled Testing, Testing. It playfully makes a few cross references between the agricultural revolution started by the USAID in the 1900s, and - startlingly enough - the role of government in health care today.

"At the start of the twentieth century, another indispensable but unmanageably costly sector was strangling the country: agriculture. In 1900, more than forty per cent of a family’s income went to paying for food. At the same time, farming was hugely labor-intensive, tying up almost half the American workforce. We were, partly as a result, still a poor nation. Only by improving the productivity of farming could we raise our standard of living and emerge as an industrial power. We had to reduce food costs, so that families could spend money on other goods, and resources could flow to other economic sectors. And we had to make farming less labor-dependent, so that more of the population could enter non-farming occupations and support economic growth and development.

"America’s agricultural crisis gave rise to deep national frustration. The inefficiency of farms meant low crop yields, high prices, limited choice, and uneven quality. The agricultural system was fragmented and disorganized, and ignored evidence showing how things could be done better. Shallow plowing, no crop rotation, inadequate seedbeds, and other habits sustained by lore and tradition resulted in poor production and soil exhaustion. And lack of coördination led to local shortages of many crops and overproduction of others.

"You might think that the invisible hand of market competition would have solved these problems, that the prospect of higher income from improved practices would have encouraged change. But laissez-faire had not worked. Farmers relied so much on human muscle because it was cheap and didn’t require the long-term investment that animal power and machinery did. The fact that land, too, was cheap encouraged extensive, almost careless cultivation. When the soil became exhausted, farmers simply moved; most tracts of farmland were occupied for five years or less. Those who didn’t move tended to be tenant farmers, who paid rent to their landlords in either cash or crops, which also discouraged long-term investment. And there was a deep-seated fear of risk and the uncertainties of change; many farmers dismissed new ideas as “book farming.”

"Things were no better elsewhere in the world. For industrializing nations in the first half of the twentieth century, food was the fundamental problem. The desire for a once-and-for-all fix led Communist governments to take over and run vast “scientific” farms and collectives. We know what that led to: widespread famines and tens of millions of deaths.

"The United States did not seek a grand solution. Private farms remained, along with the considerable advantages of individual initiative. Still, government was enlisted to help millions of farmers change the way they worked. The approach succeeded almost shockingly well. The resulting abundance of goods in our grocery stores and the leaps in our standard of living became the greatest argument for America around the world. And, as the agricultural historian Roy V. Scott recounted, four decades ago, in his remarkable study “The Reluctant Farmer,” it all started with a pilot program."

For the rest of the story, read here.

I am particularly interested in Gawande's take on how government fixed farm agriculture while maintaining it private - because elementary education finds itself in the same conundrum: a mass of schools and teachers that need guidance on which education techniques work and which don't. Gawande comes at this from the angle of the health care indiustry - but his analogies and conclusions may apply to precollege education as well.

Gawande was recently interviewed by Charlie Rose on Jan 5, 2010 the subject of health care. Watch it! It will be a good 1/2 hour well spent! You'll learn about Boeing's four-engine Flying Fortress planes and how they got their pilots not to forget to unlock the ailerons after take-off. You'll also see the connection with today's lengthy, convoluted medical procedures that lead to human and heart wrenching treatment mistakes made by doctors.

As a bonus, Gawande talks at length in the Charlie Rose interview about what worked and what didn't in the Universal Healthcare reform in Massachusetts initiated two years ago, and what the implications are for the upcoming US health care bill.

The missing evidence on Learning Styles

2010-01-05T21:12:00.000-08:00

Harold Pashler, Mark McDaniel, Doug Rohrer, and Robert Bjork have written a survey on Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence

The conclusions are summarized by Daniel Willingham in a Washington Post education blog post.

"... Another article was published reviewing the scientific literature on learning styles. It appeared in a journal called Psychological Science in the Public Interest, published by the Association for Psychological Science.

"This journal has an interesting premise. The editor recruits three or four top researchers to review the scientific literature on a complex topic of public import. The researchers must be knowledgeable, but not directly involved in prior research on the topic, so that they will be impartial.

"The straightforward conclusion matched the one that I have drawn in the past—there is not evidence supporting any of the many learning style theories that have been proposed.

"... The idea that we have in hand a learning styles theory that can be used to improve instruction is remarkably well ingrained. This should raise serious questions about teacher training."

A reader of Willingham's post retorts:

"If the research shows that learning styles is a load of crock, then I will accept that. However, my classroom is a lot more fun for all involved when I present material in a variety of ways. I teach elementary general music, and for any given concept I have a range of activities that include singing, dancing, moving, games, listening, playing instruments, and writing. My students are more engaged, and they have plenty of different chances to master the same concept. So while there might not be different learning styles, I see no reason to stop teaching as if there were. For my students and me, it works."

Does the lack of evidence on Learning Styles mean that teachers should stop presenting material in a variety of ways? Not at all. That practice should continue, because it ensures redundancy and cross-enforcement of the class material presented.

But the crux is that Learning Styles can not be used to excuse students from learning, let's say, more abstract math reasoning because they are not innately 'capable' to learn abstract math.

Daniel Willingham asks: Why does school reading not make better readers?

2010-01-05T15:28:00.000-08:00

Willingham's blog post on the Washington Post is a good load of common sense.

"We have supposedly been in the midst of an educational back-to-basics movement since the 1983 release of "A Nation at Risk," a report by a national commission that said American society was in danger of deteriorating because of an eroding public education system.

"Why, then, have reading scores (as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a test often called the nation's report card), been flat since 1971?

"One obvious answer is that even if we’re getting back to basics in school, kids read less and less outside of school. Think of all of the new technologies that compete for their time: they have ipods, video games, text messaging, instant messaging, cell phones.

"Who has time to read?

"Surprise! Americans read more now than they did in 1980. A lot more, according to an exhaustive study done at the University of California, San Diego.

"Why? More than ever, we are surrounded by printed words. We read text messages. We read web pages. We read instructions and information on computer games.

"But if we’re reading more, why is literacy dropping?

"If you think that reading is a skill, then practice should improve the skill. We’re reading more than ever, so why aren’t we better than ever at reading? The problem is that, as I’ve noted before, reading comprehension is not a skill.

"Decoding (that is, translating the letters on the page into sounds) is a skill. Practice is necessary for decoding to become fluent ( that is, fast and effortless). Once you’re fluent, the most important factor contributing to comprehension is background knowledge. If you know a bit about the topic, it’s much easier to understand...."

Yet what David Willingham writes is received with sneers:

"I'm sorry", writes reader heatherdc1980, "I can't take your comments about reading comprehension not being a skill seriously. [...] I'm not sure of your pedagogical training, but you will not find a single K-12 reading teacher or reading specialist who agrees with your view."

Which prompts Robert Pondiscio's retort - "Aye, there's the rub..."

On the contrary, while reading volume matters to a certain extent, and can be taught as a skill up to the 2nd or pushing it to 3rd grade - after which progress slows if less attention is paid to the actual reading material content and quality.

Too bad Willingham's and E. D. Hirsch's ideas are completely shunned by current State English language school standards, who make no attempt to specify any content to be included as reading material in K-12 curriculum.

Same observation is made by Sheila Byrd Carmichael et al. regarding the coming National Common Core Reading/Writing/Speaking/Listening Standards, in the Thomas B. Fordham foundation report Stars by which to navigate:

"...The [Common Core] drafters have done a praiseworthy job of defining essential competencies in reading, writing, and speaking and listening for success in both college and the workplace. They are also to be commended for not falling prey to spurious postmodern theories that disavow close reading and encourage interpretations of a text based solely on how it makes the reader feel. Further, the [Common Core] document properly acknowledges that essential communication skills must be embraced and addressed beyond the English classroom, which could lead to valuable collaboration among teachers and more consistent expectations across subjects.

"These skill-centric standards do not, however, suffice to frame a complete English or language arts curriculum. Proper standards for English must also provide enough content guidance to help teachers instill not just useful skills, but also imagination, wonder, and a deep appreciation for our literary heritage. Despite their many virtues, these skills-based competencies cannot serve as a strong framework for the robust liberal arts curricula that will prepare young Americans to thrive as citizens in a free society..."

"The Suicide of the East?", by Philip D. Zelikov

2010-01-04T21:56:00.000-08:00

Philip D. Zelikov has a perceptive review of the Cold War events of the XXth century, and the dismembering of the USSR. The Suicide of the East? was published in the Dec 2009 Foreign Affairs. Here is an excerpt:

"...Archie Brown, one of the greatest living Kremlinologists and the author of The Rise and Fall of Communism, was paying attention to Gorbachev long before ordinary people had heard of him. Gorbachev was a model young Communist, carefully prepared for high office. He had been handpicked for the leadership by Yuri Andropov, then the head of the KGB. Andropov liked creative moves such as those by Kádár in Hungary, but he was also, as Brown writes, "an implacable opponent of overt dissent and of any development in the direction of political pluralism." Andropov had led the way in the choice to invade Afghanistan. Looking to Gorbachev, he wanted a first-rate modernizing Marxist to sustain the momentum against Politburo colleagues so senescent that, nostalgic for Stalin, they were still complaining about Nikita Khruschev even in the 1980s.

"Some historians are brilliant interpreters who offer provocative new syntheses of the record. Others, perhaps not so flashy, build up the bedrock of knowledge with thorough, careful scholarship. ... (Fortunately, the profession has room for both.) Brown has carefully assembled his facts when he importantly observes, of the 1985 selection of Gorbachev to lead the Soviet Union:

'The views of every member of the Politburo at the time of [Konstantin] Chernenko's death are known. It is, accordingly, safe to say that if anyone from their ranks other than Gorbachev had been chosen as general secretary, the Soviet Union would have neither liberalized nor democratized. . . . If Andropov had enjoyed better health, minor reform, stopping far short of what occurred under Gorbachev, might well have proceeded. If Chernenko had lived longer, nothing much would have changed while he was general secretary.'

"The Soviet empire did not end up crumbling from the outside in. It changed from the inside out, starting at the top. Gorbachev's initial reforms failed and even made matters worse, exposing problems and causing panicked hoarding as goods disappeared from shelves. Especially in 1987 and 1988, Gorbachev redoubled reform instead of backing away. What is more, instead of following the Chinese and Hungarian model of trying economic reform without democratization, he went for some political reform, too. The decision to seek legitimizing elections came simultaneously in the Soviet Union and in Poland. It was a deeply un-Marxist initiative. Marx and Engels had never had much use for democratic processes. Historical materialism was a doctrine of science, not political marketing."

Police, Adj.

2010-01-04T12:38:00.000-08:00

The new film by Corneliu Porumboiu is warmly received by the American film critics. For a list of reviews, see here. The film was awarded the Un Certain Regard jury prize at Cannes earlier in May 2009.

I'll have to put it on my list of things to see this year, when and if it hits the cinemas. The film has stormed an entire critical debate about the true merits of Cinema Verite.

Alexander Zalben of filmcritic.com writes:
"...You can take solace in the first ninety minutes, which puts [the protagonist] right in the middle of a police procedural, investigating a possible drug ring. I should maybe clarify, though. When I say police procedural, I don't mean the flashy lights, quick zooms, and punny quips of CSI and its ilk. I mean a quite literal procedural: lots of filing, filling out papers and reports, walking between offices, and lots and lots of waiting around, staking out suspects. Oh god, so much waiting around. And drinking tea. And just standing there. For minutes at a time.

This is, without a doubt, the most purposefully boring movie I've ever seen.

Then there's the second thing Porumboiu is interested in, language (the "adjective" half of the title)..."

The movie protagonist, Police Detective Cristi played by actor Dragos Bucur, is led to debate his boss Anghelache, dictionary in hand, about the merits of throwing the book at the suspect under investigation and about the meanings of words like Law and Police - as in Film Politist (Crime Thriller) and Stat Politist (Police State).

"Meticulously constructed, Police, Adjective foreshadows Cristi and Anghelache's showdown with several seemingly casual exchanges. In one, the young cop tells an older one that guys who are inept at one sport will also be bad at another. It's a "law," he says" (writes Mark Jenkins of NPR.)

And Alex O. Scott of the NY Times:

"[Cristi] deals with pushy or recalcitrant co-workers, trudges through days of surveillance work without changing his sweater and returns home for desultory conversations with his wife, Anca (Irina Saulescu), who matter-of-factly tells him that things are not working out between them and then continues as if nothing of consequence had been said.

At another point, as Anca, a teacher and something of a linguistic pedant, listens to a romantic pop song over and over on her computer, she and Cristi have a debate about images and symbols in literature. Why, he wonders, don’t people just stick with the literal meanings of words, and forget about all the fancy stuff. His position is a hyperbolically blunt statement of an impulse that drives much recent Romanian cinema, away from metaphor and toward a concrete, illusion-free reckoning with things as they are.

This can be called realism, but that sturdy old word is not quite sufficient to describe “Police, Adjective,” which is at once utterly plain, even affectless, and marvelously rich. Mr. Porumboiu’s style might be called proceduralist. Like Cristi writing his reports, Mr. Porumboiu scrupulously records details in a manner that only seems literal-minded because his technique is invisible, and his intelligence resolutely unshowy.

“Police, Adjective” tells a small story well. At the level of plot, it is consistently engaging, and the psychology of the ambivalent detective, a staple of film noir, is given a new twist in the character of Cristi. But the more closely you look, the more you see: a movie about a marriage, about a career in crisis, about a society riven by unstated class antagonisms and hobbled by ancient authoritarian habits. So much in this meticulous and moving film is between the lines, and almost nothing is by the book."

PS. The film can apparently be seen here. For a Google English translation of that page, see here.

The Nevada gambler, al-Qaida, the CIA and the mother of all cons

2009-12-26T09:44:00.000-08:00

See here courtesy of The Guardian.

What sinked the Copenhagen Climate summit

2009-12-23T16:53:00.000-08:00

According to Mark Lynas, the Chinese delegation torpedoed a better climate deal.

"...The truth is this: a better deal was blocked by powerful nations in the developing world, in particular China. Several of those present in the room as heads of state from more than 20 countries battled it out late into the final night confirm this essential truth, and that Chinese attitudes and behaviour were at times deeply shocking.

"Consider that the Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao, did not deign to attend the heads of state meeting, instead sending a middle-ranking official to sit at the table with Obama, Merkel, Sarkozy, Australia's Kevin Rudd and leaders from Grenada, Ethiopia, Maldives, Brazil, Mexico and others.

"The Chinese have a reputation for being highly status-conscious. There is little doubt that this was a calculated diplomatic slight, aimed, perhaps, at the American president. Instead, all these world leaders, Obama included, were forced to wait as the Chinese delegate went to consult his superiors, or alternatively to attend separate bilaterals with the Chinese premier as he held court in a nearby luxury hotel.

"I was attached to one of the delegations whose head of government attended nearly all the top-level negotiations among leaders and, as senior adviser, I had the opportunity to be present in the room where the intense top-level negotiations took place. Moreover, what took place in the heads of state meeting room and other parallel negotiations is confirmed by multiple high-level sources."

A few things to note. A Senior Adviser would keep such negotiations confidential, unless asked not to by his advisees. We're led to understand that the US Executive Branch wanted stricter emissions limits, and did not get that. That tidbit should make it easier for Congress to ratify this and future other climate deals.

It is also apparent that Obama's advisers are not too bent on shrouding him in the mystic halo of Power that past Presidents have craved. It's as if they see out times as the renewed Age of Reason, past the Shock and Awe Heroic Age of George Bush. Once the image of the Mortal President takes hold, however, we might live to regret this.

*
The meaning of Copenhagen in terms of the new global balance of power did not escape to Tom Brookes and Tim Nuthall of The European Climate Foundation: "Will a new world order result from the chaos in Copenhagen? The jury is out".

The 'Meat' on Pakistan

2009-12-23T16:52:00.000-08:00

"Why does Pakistan hate us" - another Slate story with Chris Hitches at his best:

"Give credit to the vice president: He really does enjoy politics and "can't see a room without working it," as a colleague of mine half-admiringly remarked last Wednesday morning. We were waiting to enter the studio and comment after Biden had finished his interview with the Scarborough/Brzezinski team, in which the main topic was Afghanistan. Exiting, he chose to stop and talk to each of us. Not wanting to waste a chance to be a bore on the subject, I asked him why he had mentioned India only once in the course of his remarks. Right away Biden managed the trick—several good politicians have mastered this—of reacting as if the question had been his own idea. Of course, he said, it was vexing that Pakistan preferred to keep its best troops on the border with India (our friend) rather than redeploying them to FATA—the so-called Federally Administered Tribal Areas—where they could be fighting the Taliban and al-Qaida (our enemy). My flesh was pressed, and it was on to the next...."

The actual meat of the story is to be found further down:

"This, then, is why the Pakistani elite hates the United States. It hates it because it is dependent on it and is still being bought by it. It is a dislike that is also a form of self-hatred of the sort that often develops between client states and their paymasters. (You can often sense the same resentment in the Egyptian establishment, and sometimes among Israeli right-wingers, as well.) By way of overcompensation for their abject status as recipients of the American dole, such groups often make a big deal of flourishing their few remaining rags of pride. The safest outlet for this in the Pakistani case is an official culture that makes pious noises about Islamic solidarity while keeping the other hand extended for the next subsidy. Pakistani military officers now strike attitudes in public as if they were defending their national independence rather than trying to prolong their rule as a caste and to extend it across the border of their luckless Afghan neighbor.

"This is, and always was, a sick relationship, and it is now becoming dangerously diseased..."

The Gentleman from New York

2009-12-23T16:51:00.000-08:00

The Gentleman from New York
Daniel Patrick Moyniham - a biography
Geoffrey Hobson
Houghton Mifflin, 2000

I'd like to signal you a good biography of Daniel Patrick Moyniham that describes the fervor of the 1970s which turned a number of liberals into neocons - Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Richard Perle. Who thought the most ardent critics of liberalism were fallen angels. (Or were they the real liberals?)

Moynihan had his own ideological tribulations, as a Johnson democrat working for Nixon, then as a conservative Democrat Senator upset with Carter, then as the main Senate foe of Reagan, then as the main Democrat bent on sinking Hillary Care.

Incidentally, Moynihan was immersed in problems of education, and while at Harvard he ran with Thomas Pettigrew a seminar on the celebrated Coleman report. That must have been quite a seminar... I've found a good cursory description of it here (p. 352) by Geoffrey Hobson, same as the author of the Moynihan biography.

Freedom’s Mr. Moneybags

2009-12-23T16:49:00.000-08:00

A Gift of Freedom - How the John M. Olin Foundation Changed America
By John J. Miller

From a 2005 National Review interview with John J. Miller, author of "Gift of Freedom", some interesting tidbits about John M. Olin, the famed conservative Mecena. The interview is titled Freedom’s Mr. Moneybags.

"... I’ll suggest that without the John M. Olin Foundation, Allan Bloom might not have written The Closing of the American Mind, the best-selling book that deeply influenced the way people think about the entrenchment of cultural relativism in the modern academy. As it happened, the foundation gave Bloom a small grant that allowed him to write an article for National Review, which was published in 1982. Bloom’s friend Saul Bellow encouraged him to turn the article into a book, which became this amazing runaway success, both critically and commercially. Throughout it all, the John M. Olin Foundation provided Bloom with steady financial support.

"Another example might be Francis Fukuyama, best known for his “End of History” thesis. It was first delivered as a lecture at the Olin Center at the University of Chicago, and then it was published as an article in The National Interest, a foreign-policy journal that was created with Olin dollars. Frank is one of the smartest guys around, and he’d probably be successful no matter what, but the John M. Olin Foundation certainly played a key role in creating the conditions for this particular success. Incidentally, one of Fukuyama’s most prominent critics, Samuel Huntington, ran his own John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard. It’s interesting to observe that the most provocative and fascinating debate on foreign policy after the Cold War — Fukuyama vs. Huntington — didn’t occur between Left and Right, but between two men who may reasonably be described as conservatives, and both of them beneficiaries of the John M. Olin Foundation."

From the same interview, a nicely fitting quote from Oscar Wilde: "Philanthropy seems to have become simply the refuge of people who wish to annoy their fellow creatures."

Niebuhr's paraphrasing of the Royal Road...

2009-12-22T19:42:00.000-08:00

'... A crown without a cross, a triumph without a battle'
(The Constant Dialogue, p. 94)

American and Eurpean Protestants in 1948

2009-12-22T19:13:00.000-08:00

A Time article on Reinhold Niebuhr from 1948 suggests, not less, "that Americans often see European Protestants as spending 'too much time thinking about God and Scripture [and] not enough helping their neighbor', while Europeans see American Protestants as 'simple minded do-gooders with a busy-bee, "social worker" concept of religion".

(Martil Halliwell, Reinhold Niebuhr, The Constant Dialogue, p.93)

Debating the Advanced Placement high school program

2009-12-21T14:39:00.000-08:00

The New York Times ran a public debate on the Advanced Placement (AP) high school class program. Six specialists were invited to comment on last April's Thomas B. Fordham foundation survey of AP teachers, authored by Ann Duffett and Steve Farkas, which had found that AP class attendance has spiked up in the past years while managing to keep a high academic level. The report indicated that the number of high school students who took one or more AP class had increased from 2002 to 2007 by a remarkable 45%, from 1.1 to 1.6 million.

As usual, the reader's comments are more interesting than the expert opinions. But look at the blackboard picture, pasted from the NYT debate lead page. Quiz: what math detail is wrong?

Can you teach Social Justice...

2009-12-20T19:15:00.000-08:00

... if you shun subject matter content? This is what Joanne Jacobs and also Robert Pondiscio are asking, regarding the recent controversy at University of Minnesota’s Education school which pits the American Dream against Social Justice as the 'right' reductionist propositions. The U of M's Teacher Education Redesign Initiative's Race, Culture, Class, and Gender Task Group had submitted its report, where we read:

"The story of the United States is often told in terms of the American Dream. Historian James Truslow Adams is thought to have coined the phrase 'American Dream' in 1931, in his book, The Epic of America. Adams wrote that the American Dream is:

'...That dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability and achievement ...It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.'

The Education Redesign report continues:

"Future teachers will understand that despite an ideal about what is considered common culture in the United States, that many groups are typically not included within this celebrated cultural identity and more often than not, many students with multi-generational histories in the United States are routinely perceived to be new immigrants or foreign. That such exclusion is frequently a result of dissimilarities in power and influence."

I can't help but notice that the group titulature, Teacher Education Redesign, sounds awfully close to Teacher Reeducation. If the U of M Education School would be open for some mid XXth Century Eastern European History, with its Reeducation Brigades imposed at the point of bayonets, they would understand why this might be a problem.

Get your history on, or we're condemned to repeat it, right? King Philip's War, the Native American genocide, the French and Indian War, the plight of Blacks and Native Americans in the Revolutionary War, 1812, the conquest of Mexico, the Civil War, the Progressive Era post Reconstruction. All good places to visit. All good excuses to put restless teacher minds to use, especially since these subjects are cursively dismissed in grade and middle schools around the country. Right?

But that would have broken a tenet of school education - that history and content matter are imposing and oppressive. Why bother understanding things of old. Instead, the Education Redesign group will spoon feed future teachers to "make use" in their analysis of the "myth of meritocracy in the United States", the history of white racism "with special focus on current colorblind ideology", and the "history of demands for assimilation to white, middle-class, Christian meanings and values".

Curious Social Justice, this one, pitted against meritocracy. Forget that cultural identity and individual differences are hollow if still rested on the old creed of innate limitations. And forget the deeply religious XXth Century American who said:

Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends.

And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream...

Reinhold Niebuhr, John Dewey and the constant dialogue

2009-12-20T09:31:00.000-08:00

The Constant Dialogue. Reinhold Niebuhr & the American Intellectual Culture.
By Martin Halliwell. Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2005.

I admit to come to this with a certain interest in mind, to understand how John Dewey was seen in his time. John Dewey's most basic idea is that education is the key to understanding and the most important outlet of Philosophy. How did the pragmatism of a most careful intellectual, John Dewey, end up being used as an excuse for remaking elementary education in a child-centric, child-initiated image, to the result that intellectualism was thoroughly purged out of the class rooms. For the painful saga of John Dewey and child centered education, see Diane Ravitch's brilliant history of American schools - Left Back.

Dewey is a generation older than Niebuhr, and both can be described at the time of the events surrounding 1929 as Socialists. Both are upset with Roosevelt's New Deal policies, judging them ad hoc and unprincipled (The Constant Dialogue, p. 72). Niebuhr attacks John Dewey for his atheism; from Niebuhr's perspective, Dewey's pragmatism is at odds with the need of individuals for a bit of transcendence. It could also be argued, says Halliwell (p. 57), that Dewey did not pay attention to the nuances of religious thought and that Niebuhr's awareness of science lacked any depth.

And here is a nice quote from Dewey (p. 65). I seem to be unstable, chameleon-like, yielding one after another to many diverse and even incompatible influences; struggling to assimilate something from each yet striving to carry it forward in a way that is logically consistent with what has been learned from its predecessors.

From Halliwell's perspective, Niebuhr does not manage to dent Dewey's surface. I was hoping I would get a Niebuhr reaction to Dewey's support of Lenin's revolution, and Dewey's excitement with progressive education in the USSR up until its reversal in Stalin's time at the beginning the 1930's. To his credit, Dewey became very critical of communism after the episode. But the question is why did it take him so long to come around, when he had earlier been confronted by educators like Michael Demiashkevich, the brilliant Russian emigre who had been an education official in the starting days of the Revolution. Dewey's minions had been savaging Demiashkevich, as recounted in Ravitch's Left Back. For Dewey was not too picky choosing his collaborators.

And I was also hoping to a Niebuhr reaction to the Scopes trial. Luckily, on the jacket of Halliwell's edition I find a text by Paul K. Conkin which I've heard is quite good, When All the Gods Trembled: Darwinism, Scopes, and American Intellectuals.

The irony...

2009-12-18T19:59:00.000-08:00

... of Barack Obama is that he's persuaded himself to be a War President just as he was preparing to give his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize. The irony of George Bush is that he wasn't embarrassed to keep as trophy the gun of Saddam Hussein whom he refused to duel.

Doubt (2008)

2009-12-16T20:07:00.000-08:00

Director: John Patrick Shanley
Cast: Phylip Seymor Hoffman, Amy Adams, Meryl Streep

The St. Nicholas Catholic Church in Bronx and its school. Father Flynn is a revered figure in the community and among the school children. It's 1964 and the Father sermons about President Kennedy's assassination the year before. He talks about people bound together in hopelessness and despair. Imagine now you are alone in your hopelessness, he says. Nobody outside of you understands what you are going through. And, he says, now imagine someone else is alone in their despair. Can you find love and understanding in your heart for that someone else?

Sister Aloysius, the school Principal, however, is an acute judge of character. And she will not let herself be fooled by Father Flynn. She has seen him innocently touch a boy's hand. She suspects he has an affinity for young boys.

Father Flynn instructs the boys in basketball, how to keep the feet steady for a good shot. He loves the kids, and the kids feel great around him. A school girl confides to him she's in love with a class mate. Has she told him yet? No, she's too shy. What are you waiting for, he asks? Father Flynn is chiding a young boy for his dirty nails. Look at my nails, he says. Aren't they well trimmed? A boy asks him, what do you do when all the girls you've invited to dance have refused? Father Flynn responds: That's when you become a priest.

Sister James is a young teacher. Her eight graders learn addition for fractions, and common denominators. They learn history as well. What did President Roosevelt mean when he said "All we have to fear is fear itself"? And what did Patrick Henry famously say in the Continental Congress?

The young teacher lovingly gives it all in her class. But sometimes she has trouble keeping the class in check. Kids sometimes run around behind her back, and don't always listen to her. Sister Aloysius drops by to check if all things are in order. The kids are not supposed to use ball point pens, it ruins their hand writing. And kids should be immediately sent to her Principal office if they make trouble. That's what the office is for.

Sister Aloysius is concerned kids are falling behind academically. She demands to have the Pope's picture hanging in the front of class. "But it's the wrong Pope", the teacher says. No matter. If you look in the Pope's picture hanging on the wall, the Sister Aloysius responds, you can see in the reflection what kids are doing behind your back in class. It's a good tip for the teacher.

But Sister Aloysius is not that strict. The nuns are in convent for dinner. Sister Veronica is 80 years old, and is almost going blind. Sister Aloysius is quite concerned the priests will find out the old nun's eyes are failing, and will force her out to a retirement home, where she can't be helped anymore.

The phone rings in the middle of Sister James' class. Father Flynn asks to have his altar boy, Donald, excused from class, to join him in the Sacristy. When Donald later returns, he is visibly upset. What happened in the Sacristy?

The teacher is concerned, and has her suspicions. She's also seen Father Flynn return a jacket to Donald's locker. She voices her concern to the Principal, Sister Aloysius. It's the confirmation of Sister Aloysius's fears. She may have no proof, just a suspicion, but it's her duty to confront Father Flynn. She will not back down on this.

*

That is a nice setup, as far as it goes. From there on, the movie stops being as subtle. That's too bad. A chance missed. It's not that Father Flynn may have had an improper relationship with his altar boy. Or may not have had. It's not that Sister Aloysius has a duty to put to rest her suspicions, and should face the reality that she may never find out what really happened. If something happened. It's not that Catholic priests are stereotyped as molesters. And it's not that 1960's era Catholic Schools are stereotyped as medieval institutions, bent on forcing poor kids to learn pesky math and history.

Maybe the movie lays it out how it happened. If it happened. The Doubt is there, if it did. So I won't tell you how the story meets its end. Make your own end, if you will. And make it so that Father Flynn is in the end promoted to a larger church and school.

"Pedagogy of the Oppressed" - Paulo Freire

2009-05-10T18:10:00.000-07:00

"This is truly revolutionary pedagogy", states the 1970's book edition subtitle.

Paulo Freire (1929-1997) taught history and philosophy of education at the University of Recife, in Brazil. His experiments on teaching illiterates in Recife led him to develop a pedagogical method, widely used by the Catholic Church and other groups in literacy campaigns throughout the North East of Brazil. In 1964, a military coup in Brazil put an end to the Freire-inspired literacy campaigns, and imprisoned the philosopher for 70 days as a traitor.

Upon release, Freire was encouraged to leave his country. He moved briefly to Bolivia, then to Chile, where in 1967 he published his first book, Education as the Practice of Freedom. In 1969 he published Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which was translated to English in 1970 as a best seller.

Harvard University invited Freire as a Visiting Professor in 1969, and a year later Freire moved to Geneva, Switzerland, as a special education adviser to the World Council of Churches. Freire was unable to publish his work in his native country for a long while - not until 1974, when a gradual democratization process began in the country under President Ernesto Geisel. Freire was able to return to Brazil in 1980, where in 1988 he was appointed Secretary of Education for Sao Paulo.

*
Reading Freire's magnum opus, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, is an interesting experience. Freire's political views are intertwined with his philosophy of education. If one wonders which came to model the other, his political theory or his theory of education - the answer is found in the way material is ordered within the text. Freire's book starts in the 1st Chapter with a discussion of the class struggle ideology, then moving on in Chapter 2 to a philosophical dissection of pedagogy.

But what formed Freire's view of the class struggle in the 1960's Brazil? What specific examples of oppression did he see? Were them so obvious that they could go unmentioned to his readers? For there is no testimony to oppression acts in the text, and we are left to assume oppression as an axiom. Oppressed peasants may have been illiterate. But if someone in Freire's position as a theoretician of revolution does not describe the oppression acts, they might well be lost to history. We are left to assume a split-class Brazilian society without social bonds and mechanisms serving as glue to hold itself together, without enough levers of freedom to balance the imposition of the haves over the have nots.

Freire's view is that pedagogy should foremost heal oppression.

The central problem is this, he writes: How can the oppressed, as divided, unauthentic beings, participate in developing the pedagogy of their liberation? Only as they discover themselves to be "hosts" of the oppressor can they contribute to the midwifery of their liberating pedagogy. As long as they live in the duality in which to be is to be like, and to be like is to be like the oppressor, this contribution is impossible. The pedagogy of the oppressed is an instrument for their critical discovery that both they and their oppressors are manifestations of dehumanization [p. 33].

Are the illiterate peasants and slum city dwellers better served by a general education for literacy - which lets them draw their own conclusion about class emancipation? Or should their teacher take the automatic next steps for them? The paradigm of pedagogy is that it imparts knowledge, which brings equality, and equality brings emancipation, and emancipation is a political instrument. Freire sees pedagogy directly as emancipation.

As a consequence, more important than the contents of what is taught in class - in Freire's view - is how content is taught. If teachers impart knowledge, "filling" the students with the contents of their narration, then they become oppressors to the students. To Freire it is more important that students learn to free themselves from coercion, even at the expense of learning less material. This is where Freire in effect stands in the line of the older pedagogical philosophies of the pragmatist John Dewey and of the romantic Jean-Jacques Rouseeau.

One could reply to Freire that, as a matter of pedagogy, even coercion itself has less to do with the teaching style and more with the content matter. The most perfectly open and interactive class can still be a venue for political indoctrination - think of history classes which attend to national myths rather than to historic facts.

But the narrator-teacher, to Freire, is the purveyor of a banking system pedagogy, where the teacher deposits knowledge in the student, with the expectation that the student will be able cash it out unchanged. This is a very black-and-white view of the teacher-student relation. Let's go through the list of the narrator-teacher practices, as listed by Freire, which in his view mirror oppressive society as a whole: [p. 59]

a. The teacher teaches and the students are taught. Nothing controversial here.

b. The teacher knows everything and the students know nothing. This is a false antithesis. The students build on earlier knowledge. The teacher may know everything about the subject being taught that very day, but may need to glean from the students what is the most effective way to convey it - that is, in effect, what the teacher needs to learn from the student.

c. The teacher thinks and the students are thought about. The teacher, instead, teaches students how to think.

d. The teacher talks and the students listen - meekly. That is unless of course students are asked to talk and the teacher listens.

e. The teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined. True, but the subtlety lies in how the students are disciplined.

f. The teacher chooses and enforces his choice, and the students comply. The teacher knows the destination of the conversation, even if multiple paths may lead there.

g. The teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the action of the teacher. It remains unexplained what is meant by the teacher's act. But the implication is that the teacher is acting fake.

h. The teacher chooses the program content, and the students (who were not consulted) adapt to it. In fact, the school, or the education department choose the curriculum content. The students are not yet qualified to be consulted on this point.

i. The teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his own professional authority, which he sets in opposition to the freedom of the students. But freedom without reflection is freedom of poor quality. True freedom, in Hegelian sense, comes from the integration of the individual within social institutions, and that integration requires knowledge.

j. The teacher is the Subject of the learning process, while the pupils are mere objects. Students are the subject, teaching is about them not about the teacher.

In a reflection of old philosophical debates about the primacy of the world of things over the world of ideas, Freire writes [p. 63]:

Yet only through communication can human life hold meaning. The teacher's thinking is authenticated only by the authenticity of the student's thinking. The teacher cannot think for his students, nor can he impose his thought on them. Authentic thinking, thinking that is concerned about reality, does not take place in ivory tower isolation, but only in communication. If it is true that thought has meaning only when generated by action upon the world, the subordination of students to teachers becomes impossible.

In other words, Freire takes the position that abstract ideas cannot be taught. He does not clarify whether he actually believes abstract ideas really to exist; he would clearly make interesting conversation to Socrates, to whom the unseen ivory-tower ideas were the only immutable truths, opposed to the touchable but changeable things which surround us.

There is a funny paragraph about a group of intellectuals discussing the anthropological concept of culture [p. 69]:

In the midst of the discussion, a peasant who by banking standards was completely ignorant said: "Now I see that without man there is no world." When the educator responded: "Let's say, for the sake of argument, that all the men on earth were to die, but that earth itself remained, together with trees, birds, animals, rivers, seas, the stars... wouldn't all this be a world?" "Oh, no," the peasant replied emphatically. "There would be no one to say: 'This is a world'."

In other words, in absence of consciousness, the world does not exist. That is the ivory-tower idea which the peasant got across, and in doing so he gently proved to Freire that abstract ideas can be taught.

Asylum in Tennessee

2009-04-01T09:40:00.000-07:00

German family seeks asylum in the US. in order to be able to home school. Uwe Romeike and his wife, Hannelore, have alleged religious persecution back in Germany and have moved to Morristown, Tenn., last month. Snip from cleveland.com:

Lutz Gorgens, German consul general for the Southeast United States, said he's not familiar with the Romeikes' specific situation but believes the claim of persecution is "far-fetched." He defended Germany's requirements for public education.

"For reasons deeply rooted in history and our belief that only schools properly can ensure the desired level of excellent education, we go a little bit beyond that path which other countries have chosen," Gorgens said.

Germany's approach to homeschooling is starkly different from the United States and other European countries. Homeschool students have been growing by an estimated 8 percent annually in the United States and as of 2007 totaled about 1.5 million.

As upset as you may get with the laic public school system - in the end, is home schooling a good idea?

Google front page spoof

2009-04-01T08:13:00.000-07:00

On Mar 31 2009, at 11:59:99 PM, the following was linked through the Google front search page:

[...] But close though we may have come to a theory of the brain, the body - computer hardware - wasn't capable of handling the extraordinary processing demands that any reasonably "intelligent" brain would place on its circuitry until Moore's Law really kicked in a few years back and the modern ultra-dense machinery of atomic scale-sized gates and their light-based interconnections finally reached the scale of brain neurons - and then surpassed it, when, in early 2007, a tight-knit, vaguely feared quantum computing group here at Google
extended computers with quantum bits of Einstein-Bose condensate, polynomially speeding up our machines' data-processing ability.

http://www.google.com/intl/en/landing/cadie/tech.html

The Google 'shadow quantum computing' group may very well exist, but I wonder if the joke is on them.

Chris Hitchens in Beirut

2009-03-31T04:25:00.000-07:00

When he visited Beirut last February, Christopher Hitchens almost did himself in. He was happily walking on the street, when he saw a swastika poster of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party. He took it upon himself to deface it, and surely enough a party loyalist grabbed his arm and called a group of thugs. As Hitchens was pulled around towards the trunk of a car, as luck would have it the whole scene was happening in front of a chic cafe. The customers started shouting at the attackers. That scared them off for a fraction of a second, which was sufficient for Hitchens to step into a car, still with his life but with a fist in his face.

There is something to be said about Hitchens' courage to match his verbs by his deeds. One of his recurring obsessions has been to follow thoughts to their logical conclusion, wherever they may lead. If all of us were to do that, most assuredly the world would be a better place. One of Hitchens' fascinations has been with George Orwell, who went to fight for Republican Spain, but in due time had squared with the perils of the Comintern totalitarianism.

And it's not the first occasion Hitchens has had to reflect on the honest consequences of honorable thoughts. One of the most memorable pieces he's written about the Iraq was A Death in the Family. A young college-age reader of Hitchens named Mark Jennings Daily follows the writer's excitement about liberating Iraq, signs up for service, and is killed months later by an IED. Hitchens writes:

I don't exaggerate by much when I say that I froze. I certainly felt a very deep pang of cold dismay. I had just returned from a visit to Iraq with my own son (who is 23, as was young Mr. Daily) and had found myself in a deeply pessimistic frame of mind about the war. Was it possible that I had helped persuade someone I had never met to place himself in the path of an I.E.D.? Over-dramatizing myself a bit in the angst of the moment, I found I was thinking of William Butler Yeats, who was chilled to discover that the Irish rebels of 1916 had gone to their deaths quoting his play Cathleen ni Houlihan. He tried to cope with the disturbing idea in his poem "Man and the Echo":

Did that play of mine send out
Certain men the English shot? …
Could my spoken words have checked
That whereby a house lay wrecked?

Hitchens has sparred in the past with his old ideological friends regarding how to approach Islamic extremism. He's left the New Republic on the tail of a debate with Noam Chomsky, which I have not read, but should find fascinating.

Until I do that I just have one question: was Hitchens right to deface the disgusting sign in Beirut?

"And I'll take my answer off the air".

Cum mi-am petrecut Revolutia

2008-12-21T21:14:00.000-08:00

In 1989 eram in armata, la Bacau. Pe 17 s-a dat alarma, ni s-a zis ca au intrat ungurii in tara. “Hai, scoateti tunurile, aliniati-le. Le atasam la camioane, plecam”. Eram la arma artilerie.

Suna serios, nu?… Tunurile astea erau mindria armatei - de tragere in munti, romanesti. Atit ca nu percutau. De fapt singurele noastre tunuri care chiar puteau sa traga erau niste obuziere Skoda. Si unele, si altele facusera al II-lea razboi.

Asadar stam noi in umezela noptii si asteptam sa ne incolonam, discutind cum vom vedea Budapesta prin catarea tunului. Dar nimic nu se intimpla, orele trec. Ajungem sa ne punem intrebari. Incepem sa aplicam arma deductiei.

In fine, ne gindim ca poate a inceput revolutia. N-avem cum sti precis, fara radio, fara nici o sursa de informatii.

Ordinul de incolonare se contramandeaza, nu mai plecam nicaieri. Stam si pazim unitatea, cu trei cartuse in incarcator.

De ce trei cartuse? Pai orice soldat care a servit in armata comunista stie. Nu se dau mai multe cartuse, ca e pericol sa impuscam ofiterii.

Mai trec niste zile, timp in care habar n-avem ce se intimpla, pina cind la prinz pe 22 plutonul trece pe linga un tabist vesel:

- Baa, a fugit Ceausescu!…

La care nimeni nu schiteaza un gest. Mergem mai departe, sting-drept-sting, dupa care zic:

- Ati auzit, ba? A fugit Ceausescu, acum s-a terminat…
- Taci, ma, din gura, vrei sa ne bagi in bucluc? zice locotenentul.

Toti o tin milc. Numai soldatul din spatele meu, Mihai, imi da un brinci de bucurie.

Marcus Tulius Cicero

2008-07-13T21:07:00.000-07:00

Tocmai am terminat de citit cartea despre Cicero, scrisă de Anthony Everitt. Cine a fost Cicero? Un politician, avocat şi filozof roman, care a trăit puţin înainte de Christos, între 106-43.

A fost consul al Romei în 63, anul în care s-a născut viitorul împărat Octavian. Mai tîrziu, cu ascensiunea lui Pompei, i-a luat partea acestuia în războiul civil cîştigat de Cezar. A fost mai tîrziu iertat şi reprimit la Roma de către Cezar, devenit acum dictator; Cicero a fost astfel martor dar nu şi conspirator al asasinării lui Cezar din 44. În anii care au urmat Cicero a fost cel mai influent dintre senatori, trasînd o politică de salvare a republicii ca formă de guvernare a imperiului. A fost proscris, alungat şi omorît ca urmare a înţelegerii tripartite dintre Marc Antoniu, Octavian şi Lepidus, cînd aceştia au devenit aliaţi în 43 formînd al doilea triumvirat.

La distanţa în timp care ne separă de Roma lui Cicero, a lui Cezar şi a lui Octavian, ne este foarte greu să spunem cine a avut dreptate în încrîncenatele bătălii politice ale acelui timp. Dacă am fi trăit acele vremi, de partea cui am fi fost oare? L-am fi privit pe Cicero ca pe un mare orator, om politic de înaltă moralitate, dedicat trup şi suflet ţării lui, trecînd peste propriul interes ca să-şi salveze republica de dictatură? Sau l-am fi văzut ca pe un politician abil, şmecher, punînd o faţă subţire de respectabilitate şi anulîndu-şi pe la spate adversarii prin lovituri şmechere sub centură?

Răspunsul urmează un pic din varianta dintîi şi un pic mai mult din varianta a doua. Dar putem, oare, noi judeca 2000 de ani mai tîrziu o lume politică în care loviturile pe faţă şi pe la spate erau norma, nu excepţia? Nici ceilalţi actori politici ai vremii nu erau cu nimic mai prejos sau mai puţin abili decît Cicero. Să-i judecăm pe Cezar şi pe Octavian: ei au abuzat chiar sistemul republican în sine, înscăunîndu-se, prin forţă, unul dictator, şi al doilea împărat.

Lumea politică a Romei în vremea lui Cicero era, culmea, aşezată pe calapodul încă familiar al zilelor noastre, împărţită între o grupare de stînga şi una de dreapta, chiar dacă termenii 'stînga' şi 'dreapta' au fost consacraţi mult mai tîrziu, în anii revoluţiei franceze.

Stînga timpurilor romane căuta să proptească interesele plebei, adică pe ale cetăţenilor mai puţin înstăriţi şi mereu înfometaţi, ale veteranilor care doreau să primească pămînt de la stat la sfîrşitul serviciului lor militar. Stînga controla în bună măsură instituţia tribunilor, care nu aveau voie să propună legi dar aveau drept de veto.

Dreapta păzea interesele patricienilor - ale nobililor, celor înstăriţi. Instrumentul politic al dreptei era Senatul.

Stînga şi dreapta erau tot timpul într-un echilibru instabil, îmbrăţişate într-o permanentă luptă, uneori dusă mai pe ascunselea, alteori mai pe faţă prin răzmeriţe sau proscrieri. Cicero era exponentul dreptei, în tot ce făcea el încerca să întărească instituţia Senatului, care era dominat de patricieni. Cezar, însă, era de stînga, cel puţin înainte să ajungă dictator - mai tîrziu, ca dictator, a urmat o politică mai echilibrată însă tot îndeajuns de favorabilă plebeilor.

Lupta aceasta politică era pînă la urmă o competiţie individuală acerbă, prin care toţi ajungeau să se bată să-l dea jos pe oricine ajungea să ridice capul şi să apuce un pic mai multă putere. Pînă şi instituţiile Senatului, ale celor doi consuli (consideraţi capii statului) precum şi cele ale tribunilor erau organizate în aşa fel încît nimeni nu putea pune mîna pe prea multă putere.

Consulii erau doi tocmai pentru a se controla unul pe altul, iar după expirarea termenului în post erau obligaţi să părăsească Roma o perioadă pentru a fi guvernatori ai unei provincii.

În pofida acestui sistem, Cezar reuşeşte să-l alunge pe co-consulul său Pompei în 48, şi să se impună dictator. În 44, în timp ce îşi pregătea legiunile pentru o invazie a Persiei, Cezar este asasinat în urma complotului lui Marcus Junius Brutus. Republica este restaurată temporar. Noii consuli ai republicii Hirtius şi Pansa îl înfrîng pe Marc Antoniu, mîna dreaptă a lui Cezar, în două bătălii consecutive la Mutina, în 43, însă mor amîndoi în luptă, o dată cu ei dispărînd şansele restaurării republicii. Golul de putere este umplut de tînărul Octavian în alianţă cu Marc Antoniu şi Lepidus, care se înţeleg să-şi proscrie toţi duşmanii politici, incluzînd pe Cicero, declamind apoi ca Republica a cistigat dar practic desfiintind-o.