Category: education and schooling

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education and schooling folly general freedom

The Foam Rubber Bullet

OBEY

The reports say the color of the top of the Nerf gun is neon green. In the photo I saw, it seemed less colorful than “neon” — but that hardly matters. It is a toy gun. Its ammo is nerfy soft. And it was held by a boy, Isaiah Elliott, briefly, during a Zoom chat educational session as has become common during these days of the pandemic. And his teacher saw it.

And things spiraled out of control from there.

Now, while cities are burning and Marxists are sharpening their knives and dulling their wits for the summer season’s final gasps of “protest,” you might think that teachers and public school administrators would have obtained some perspective.

But no. This is 2020 and we are to be spared nothing.

In a decades-long tradition of educators freaking out at boyish (and girlish) play with pretend firearms, the teacher informed on Master Elliott — though she knew it was a toy gun. 

And the school suspended the lad for five days.

This has nothing to do with school safety, of course. The school is virtual, now. Pretense that this is about safety is an insult to not only adult intelligence, but child intelligence, too.

I guess what public school administrators want to teach their charges is that they are running a cult, that boys and girls and all on the sliding scale in-between must OBEY. 

Must not offend against the State by showing even playful reverence for the Great Taboo and Talisman of Freedom, the Gun.

Thankfully, young Isaiah is headed to a different school.

And his Nerf play days are not over.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling

The Panic Over Pods

education, equality, freedom

“You really want to get the best for your child,” a father told NBC News, describing his family’s motivation to secure private educational services.* They are part of the “Pandemic Pod” movement “now sweeping the nation” — as so many public schools offer only remote learning this fall. 

Increasingly, parents are getting together to form small groups — or “pods” — and hire a teacher to better provide instruction to their children. 

It shows initiative — and a refreshing sense of parental responsibility. Of course, not everyone can afford to hire a private teacher. 

“It just seems really privileged,” a Portland, Oregon, woman advised The Washington Post.

“The frantic activity . . . of families soliciting private tutors for their children,” San Francisco school board member Alison Collins explained, “is frightening to many black parents and parents of color.” 

L’Heureux Lewis-McCoy, associate professor of sociology of education at New York University, called the private effort: “opportunity hoarding.” 

“For those families that are most vulnerable, particularly lower-income families, black families, brown families, language-minority families,” declared the professor, “they are locked out of that.”

“Experts say that will widen the education gap,” NBC reporter Stephanie Gosk chimed in. 

Ah, the experts — and their Procrustean** obsession!

Their fixation on gaps and inequality, as opposed to enhancing opportunities and achievement where possible, leads to the absurd notion that we should deny educational opportunities to some children (our children) unless we can provide those benefits to all children . . . city-wide, statewide, nationwide — or worldwide.

Read a bedtime story to your kid or grandchild tonight. Insist on quality . . . and leave the equality to feckless education theorists.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* The father and the family happen to be black.

** Procrustes, in Greek myth, was a robber who made his victims lie on a bed and stretched them out if they were too short for the bed, or lopped parts of them off, if too tall; killed by Theseus on said bed: “Procrustean” is a synonym for absurdly strict egalitarianism.

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education and schooling ideological culture international affairs

Expelling Dissent

Drew Pavlout, China,

The University of Queensland may expel 20-year-old philosophy major Drew Pavlou. He has been protesting against the Chinese Communist Party and in support of the Hong Kong protesters, but perhaps most tellingly has criticized his school’s ties to China.

Xu Jie, the Chinese consul general in Brisbane, has blasted Pavlou for being an “anti-China activist.”

This same man, Xu Jie, also happens to be an adjunct professor at the university.

The Queensland campus is home to one of many Chinese-funded Confucius Institutes, often benignly described as promoting Chinese culture. FBI Director Christopher Wray says that the institutes “offer a platform to disseminate Chinese government or Chinese Communist Party propaganda, to encourage censorship, to restrict academic freedom.”

The Economist allows that the Institutes “project soft power” with “occasional hints of politics,” offering as an example an exhibition at the University of Maryland, whitewashing China’s relationship to Tibet. 

Just a smidgen of politics here and there.

According to Pavlou, “Beijing exercises so much financial leverage over our universities that it can stifle all criticism of the Chinese government on campus.”

Although the school nebulously accuses Pavlou of “harassing” others, his real sin seems to be not going with the flow. Threatening Pavlou with expulsion and even prosecution hardly proves that Queensland would never act to squelch dissent at the behest of China.

There is only one fair resolution. The university should apologize for its CCP ties, reject funding from China, kick out its Confucius Institute, kick out Xu, and commend Pavlou for urging the school to reform its bad conduct.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Drew Pavlout, China,

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education and schooling

End Educational Freedom Now!

home schooling, education, Harvard, authoritarianism,

“A rapidly increasing number of American families are opting out of sending their children to school,” Erin O’Donnell informs in the May-June issue of Harvard Magazine, “choosing instead to educate them at home.” 

Yippee! Thanks for the great news — right?

Not to O’Donnell, or to Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Bartholet. O’Donnell’s article is something of a friendly regurgitation of Bartholet’s Arizona Law Review article, entitled, “Homeschooling: Parent Rights Absolutism vs. Child Rights to Education & Protection.”

Bartholet “recommends a presumptive ban on homeschooling.” Why? Because, as O’Donnell offers, it “violates children’s right to a ‘meaningful education’ and their right to be protected from potential child abuse . . .”

Her evidence? Professor Bartholet offers none. Harvard Magazine does not need any.

Avoided, perhaps, because research shows students educated at home significantly outperform public school students on standardized tests. 

As for the specter of homeschooling as massive smokescreen enabling vicious child predators? “The limited evidence available shows that homeschooled children are abused at a lower rate than are those in the general public,” Dr. Brian Ray reported in 2018, adding that “an estimated 10% (or more) of public and private schoolchildren experience sexual maltreatment at the hands of school personnel.”

So, what is going on here? 

Perhaps O’Donnell provides the explanation, writing that “surveys of homeschoolers show that a majority of such families . . . are driven by conservative Christian beliefs, and seek to remove their children from mainstream culture.” 

Oh, my, can that be permitted? Should people choose their own religious and cultural beliefs? May parents freely educate their kids?

Bartholet calls that “essentially authoritarian control,” which is “dangerous.”

There, she is correct. Homeschooling is dangerous . . . to experts hell-bent on telling us what to think.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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The Awful Strain of Insurmountable Parody

Hitler, Downfall, parody,

What if “political correctness” were really a problem of rampant cowardice?

University of Massachusetts Amherst administrators removed Catherine West Lowry from her 13-year gig as an accounting lecturer because of an extra-credit project. 

She had shown a previous year’s student-produced parody video using the infamous Hitler breakdown scene in the excellent 2004 movie Downfall. I assume you’ve seen dozens of these; I know I have. Their ubiquity notwithstanding, the university claims to have received student complaints about the one Ms. Lowry showed.

The proper response to a protestation of offense at a Downfall parody? Eye rolls. Were I a professor, I’d have to resist the nearly irresistible desire to reduce office hours starting immediately. 

Any other response, especially dismissing the lecturer, is pure pusillanimity.

Or, make that cowardice of the impure variety, for I suppose something else could be going on here.

Lowry claims that she’d shown this particular effort in previous years and no one had complained. And I believe her.

Can we believe the university’s claim to have received complaints from students this year?

Before we accept such a statement, we should peruse the evidence. After all, in the case of the Wilfrid Laurier University mistreatment of the T.A. who had shown a Jordan Peterson video in class, administrators had simply lied — there had been no complaints.

Had UMass Amherst actually received complaints, then their response would be merely cowardice. But were there no complaints, the whole thing becomes far more ominous.

And I wonder: what would today’s university make of Hogan’s Heroes?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling national politics & policies

A Flip-Flop, Not an Echo

Joe Biden, school choice, meme, flip-flop,

“If I’m President, Betsy DeVos’s whole notion [of school choice], from charter schools to this, are gone.”

That’s what Joe Biden, presidential candidate, had to say this December at an education forum.

Charter schools are K-12 schools that are publicly funded but managed semi-independently— not by the standard educational bureaucracy. Biden’s repudiation represents a break with the Obama administration, which had voiced support for charter schools. 

One reason for Obama’s support may have been that so many Democratic voters, like other voters, want an alternative to standard public schools. 

According to a survey conducted by Beck Research, 56 percent of Democrats “favor the concept of school choice,” with “school choice” understood to mean giving parents “the right to use tax dollars designated for their child’s education to send their child to the public or private school which best serves their needs.”

Once upon a time, Biden supported greater educational opportunity — explicitly, not just tacitly as a member of the Obama administration. But now he slams charter schools for taking money from public schools. (But in a different way from how public schools take money from taxpayers.) More and more, this man’s “moderation” seems indistinguishable from opposition to any even halting expansion of our freedom.

Andrew Cuff of the Commonwealth Foundation suggests that a Democratic presidential candidate who advocates school choice will gain an edge over his competitors — given the popularity of school choice among Democratic voters.

How about it, Joe? Flip-flop again.

But this time in favor of freedom.

And better education.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling subsidy

The Most Foolish Bank of All

education, bank, loans, Devos,

There are few things more foolish than turning the Department of Education into a bank.

“Congress never set up the U.S. Department of Education to be a bank, nor did it define the secretary of education as the nation’s ‘top banker,’” said Betsy DeVos, Trump’s controversial Department of Education secretary, at an annual education conference in Reno. “But that’s effectively what Congress expects based on its policies.”

Secretary DeVos “recommended that Federal Student Aid (FSA) — the nation’s largest provider of financial aid — be spun off from the Education Department so student loans can be better managed and administered,” Forbes summarizes.

The FSA is a bank, but not a very good one. It makes bad bets, which Mrs. DeVos tries to make clear by asking a few rhetorical questions:

  • “Is it any surprise . . . that both principal and interest are currently being paid down for only one in four loans? 
  • “Nearly 11 million borrowers have loans that are delinquent or in default? 
  • “And 43 percent of all loans are considered ‘in distress’?”

Even worse, the loans amount to an especially cumbersome form of subsidy, one that has corrupted the university system, misallocated higher education resources and inflated tuitions, and sunk generations into debt.

While DeVos’s reforms might possibly be an improvement, what if the troubles associated with the federal government’s student loan programs are not the result of how they are managed, but that the federal government is involved at all?

Centralizing consumer credit in specialized Congress-created lending institutions (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) was at the heart of last decade’s massive financial crisis. Shouldn’t a major banking reform focus on avoiding the moral hazards involved in government-run credit and subsidies?

DeVos’s plan doesn’t strike me as educated on this angle.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling national politics & policies Popular too much government

Biden Under the Bed

Joe Biden, bed, monsters, record player, black child,

Former Vice-President Joe Biden was put on the spot, again, about race. During last Thursday’s presidential candidates’ debate, ABC newscaster Lindsey Davis asked what responsibility Americans should “take to repair the legacy of slavery in our country?”

Triple, Biden said, “the amount of money we spend. . . .”

On “very poor schools, the Title I schools.”

From $15 to $45 billion a year.

Dodging the reparations question, he offered a four-part plan for educating poor children that was very . . . educational. 

Biden’s second solution is “make sure that we . . . help the teachers deal with the problems that come from home.” 

Send in more psychologists!

Step three is to “make sure that . . . 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds go to school. School. Not daycare. School.”

Sounds like forcing every parent to put their 3-year-old into school. Or just “poor” 3-year-olds? Neither sounds good.

If my elementary school math still holds, next comes policy objective No. 4. 

And it’s a doozy. 

“We bring social workers in to homes and parents to help them deal with how to raise their children,” Sleepy Joe declared. Because as he explained “they”— wealth-challenged parents — “don’t know quite what to do.”

But Biden does. “Play the radio, make sure the television — excuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night, make sure that kids hear words.” 

The former VEEP explained that children from “a very poor background will hear four million words fewer spoken by the time they get [to school].”

Language skills matter. But do we really want the next president to station a social worker under every kid’s bed to make sure the record player isn’t skipping?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Joe Biden, bed, monsters, record player, black child,

Illustration adapted from an image by Rusty Clark

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education and schooling Second Amendment rights

Finna Be Lit?

safe2tell, tip, guns, gun control,

On the face of it, it seems like a good idea. 

After the horrific Columbine school shooting spree of 1999, “Safe2Tell” was invented to provide students, parents and schools a telephone/online interface (including iOS and Android) to report suspicious gun-related behavior.

But the devil is in the . . . ideas ricocheting in the heads of the people doing the implementing.

A student of a Loveland, Colorado, high school posted to social media his excitement about going shooting with his mother, with photos of several handguns and an AR-15. He expressed his enthusiasm with “Finna be lit,” which, Jay Stooksberry of Reason explains, means “going to have a fun time.”

Somebody anonymously alerted the Safe2Tell system, and the police stopped by the lad’s home while he was still out shooting. 

Was the anonymous notice earnest? Or was it, instead, something far more ominous? Kids have dubbed the alert system “Safe2Swat,” referring to “swatting,” which, The Complete Colorado explains, “is a term that is used when someone deceptively sends police and other emergency services to another person’s address through false reporting of an emergency or criminal action.”

Though the police were quick to dismiss the worry, the local school was not. “The following morning,” as Stooksberry tells the tale, the lad’s mother “received a voicemail from the Thompson Valley School District, stating that, until further notice, her son was not allowed to return to school.”

While the administration finally relented, its handling of the situation led to the student being harassed at school by other students.

Who may have “swatted” him in the original report.

Not a fun time — “finna be NOT lit”?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling subsidy

Sell College Short?

college, student, debt, loan, forgiveness, hat,

We are often lectured on the importance of a college education. The path to upward mobility is greased via higher education, we are informed, and all that investment in time and money pays off . . . with a lifetime of higher salaries and better opportunities.

“The typical American with a bachelor’s degree or higher,” President Barack Obama pointed out back in 2014, “earns over $28,000 more per year than someone with just a high school diploma.” 

Accordingly, Obama urged “students and parents” to “begin preparing yourself for an education beyond high school.”

Was he just pulling our legs?

After all, $28,000 extra each year for many decades isn’t chump change. Yet, if college proves such a royal road to wealth, why would highly educated folks gaining such lucrative earning-power need the bailouts . . . especially from taxpayers who didn’t make that self-investment?

That subsidy of the richer by the poorer is precisely what many Democratic Party presidential candidates are promising younger voters, with Sen. Bernie Sanders topping the proposed taxpayer-generosity by offering to cancel all $1.6 trillion in outstanding student debt.

“Not satisfied with having the government take over 20 percent of the economy with his Medicare-for-All program,” James Joyner writes at Outside the Beltway, “the Vermont Senator wants the government to assume all debt taken on for education and make college absolutely free from here on out.”

If a college education is worth what it costs, no bailout should be necessary.

And only in the political world would anyone suggest giving away such a valuable commodity for free.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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