Maggie's Farm

The NYT seems to feel that the Success Academies are too hard on the delicate snowflakes, but I think this is what education was like in the US until John Dewey and the progressives got to it. Also, what parochial schools and many private schools still are like. It seems to work well.

The emphasis on testing seems a bit excessive, though. 

Hierarchy of reasoning and disputation, via Watt's Agreeing to Disagree

Keep Washington Out of Your Kid's School

Our use of government tests as the chief way to measure school and teacher performance has corrupted schools everywhere.

Not just schools.

Are You Smart Enough to Handle W. H. Auden’s 1941 Lit Syllabus? 'Auden seems to have aimed to educate his students deeply and broadly.'

Barzun's classes had similar amounts of reading.

By Jonathan Last:

If you pay any attention to the ways in which radicalism dominates the culture of the university these days, you're likely to feel as though you've gone through the looking glass. "White privilege." "Trigger warnings." "Rape culture." All of this (and much else) has turned academia into a bizarre, Orwellian simulacrum of itself. And not only that, but the radicalism has migrated outward into the broader culture, too. It's the kind of insanity we haven't seen in America since the bad old days of the early 1970s.

The good news is that these sorts of perversions always burn themselves out-they're too untethered to reality. Eventually people realize that the radicalism is really about just one thing: power.  And once people begin to challenge the dogmas, they collapse in a cascade. Because as they lose their power to exact a price for criticism, they attract more of it.

These people are insane. They do not know any normal people.

I agree that ignorance of the law should be part of a defense except for the obvious crimes, because 300,000 laws is more than anybody could know or even understand. This is from Reynolds in USA Today:

 "Regulatory crimes" ... are incredibly numerous and a category that is growing quickly. They are the ones likely to trap unwary individuals into being felons without knowing it. That is why Michael Cottone, in a just-published Tennessee Law Review article, suggests that maybe the old presumption that individuals know the law is outdated, unfair and maybe even unconstitutional. "Tellingly," he writes, "no exact count of the number of federal statutes that impose criminal sanctions has ever been given, but estimates from the last 15 years range from 3,600 to approximately 4,500." Meanwhile, according to recent congressional testimony, the number of federal regulations (enacted by administrative agencies under loose authority from Congress) carrying criminal penalties may be as many as 300,000.

We posted about Anglo-American law and legal traditions this weekend. Here's something to get your dander up on the same topic, by Noam Chomsky of course: Magna Carta Messed Up the World, Here’s How to Fix It

The genius of Anglo-American law and its relationship to individual freedom, property rights, capitalism, contracts, and equality under the law.

The above is a section from Alan Macfarlane's excellent, or should I say "magisterial" book,  The Invention of the Modern World.

A quote from the section:

In relation to the economy, for example, Adam Smith placed ‘a due administration of justice’, alongside peace and easy taxes, as one of the three requisites for wealth. The other half of The Wealth of Nations are his recently discovered Lectures on Jurisprudence, first published in 1978.  Smith wrote about how English law seemed in its certainty, its complexity and its concern with property to be ideally suited to be a foundation for commercial capitalism. He noted for that ‘there is no country in Europe, Holland itself non-excepted, of which the law is, upon the whole more favourable in this sort of industry.’1 He also writes of ‘that equal and impartial administration of justice which renders the rights of the meanest British subject respectable to the greatest, and which, by securing to every man the fruits of his own industry, gives the greatest and most effectual encouragement to ever sort of industry…

Boring topics, I know. Boring only in part because those who write about them tend to be pure Materialists, assuming that money and bourgeois comforts are all that matter in life. I always find that strange from Lefties, but Lefties do love and envy money more than I do. As I have observed before, Maine Guides, NYC would-be actors, adjunct faculty, organic farmers, grad students, carpentry apprentices, etc. all are below the poverty level. They neither need nor want any sympathy.

I see no virtue in economic equalizing. It never worked anywhere, and efforts to impose it by force generally end up with plutocratic, privileged bureaucrats and a nation of serfs serving the State. Why ‘inequality’ can be ‘beautiful’. Furthermore, many people do not base their life choices on money but instead on things more important to them.

Related, Socialist Thomas Piketty’s Theory on Income Equality Wrecked by 26-Year-Old MIT Grad Student

Poverty in the US? Let's define it first. The US has an extensive safety net able to contain the unfortunate, the feckless, the mentally-ill, the temporarily out of work, etc., etc. We even go overboard with disability, providing for people who could easily do something useful in the world but are working the system. Nobody in the US goes without food, shelter, and a big screen TV if they want those things. Notable also is that US poverty stats do not include any government charity or private charity contributions. Of course, family always helps out first, and that is ignored too.

Still, poverty will never go away as long as it is defined as the lowest x% of US income. I am still awaiting the official study which can tell me exactly who "the poor" are in America, and whether they care. NYT: How poor are the poor?

Insty found this before I did at the esteemable Standpoint: Political Correctness Is Devouring Itself:

The American legal philosopher Joel Feinberg attacked Mill by saying that we feel offence like a wound. You only have to think about the hurt from slights that have stayed with you longer than the pain from a broken bone to see the truth in his argument. Societies and individuals feel disgust, revulsion, shock, shame and embarrassment when they hear views that don’t physically harm them, Feinberg said in the 1980s. They can and should replace Mill’s “harm principle” with his “offence principle”—that the law can stop speech that causes serious offense.

Feinberg’s mild authoritarianism buttressed the illiberal version of liberalism that flourishes to this day. It supports the laws against “hate speech” which may not be so hateful it provokes its audience to violence, but is still grossly offensive. It provides the philosophical justification for the incessant Twitter storms and media fits about “gaffes”, “misspeaks”, or to use a modern phrase that reeks of the Victorian drawing-room, “inappropriate language”.

Go into the modern university and you won’t hear much about Mill or Milton or the millions around the world who have had to learn the hard way why freedom of speech matters. Instead, you will be fed philosophers far less rigorous than Feinberg.

The totalitarian impulse is omnipresent, and must be resisted at all times. The "offence principle," however, is nothing but a self-ridiculing bullying tactic which deserves mockery rather that resistance. If you equate offense with a wound, you live on the wrong planet. I am offended by people and things continuously, and that's normal life.  But this is not really about emotional wounds - it's a bullying tactic and rarely if ever genuine. Not that that matters anyway.

"Offence" becomes offense.

Will Your Kids Go to College, or to the University of Everywhere?

One of my proposals is for kids to learn stuff anyway they can, with degrees issued by degree-offering institutions following oral and written examinations.

You can tell quickly whether a person knows their stuff in an oral exam. You can ramp up your questions to determine the limits of their knowledge and thinking. If some kids need to be spoon-fed their education, so be it. There's been enough of this overly-costly "college experience" nonsense.

You can almost do that today, but you still have to pay. One of the brightest fellows I know got his BS in Physics from a highly-prestigious university in three years without ever going to class, while playing drums in a touring rock band. Picked up the syllabi, and showed up for exams.

What's your opinion?

Without a doubt.

Why would any on-campus crime be handled any differently than an off-campus crime?  Colleges today find themselves in a funny spot. Are they in loco parentis, or not? Do they enforce morals, or not? Do they have codes of behavior, or not? They certainly seem to have absurd speech codes. In any event, I would take them out of the criminal justice business.

I don't know about sainthood, but G K Chesterton (a member of the Maggie's pantheon) certainly deserves to be read and to be remembered.

... when he was right, he was prophetically right. Fearing and detesting the centripetal, black-hole suck of the almighty modern Self, he faced the other way: into the fact of Creation. There is a reality outside the mind, Chesterton insisted—and part of his energy was his innocent, unflagging astonishment that he had to keep on making the point. To us, the great solipsists, for whom the recognition of another human being requires a galvanic imaginative act, he speaks very directly.

With the US dollar, Europe is cheaper than touring the USA.

A Review: Charles Cooke’s ‘Conservatarian Manifesto’

 What Cooke ultimately wants is a live-and-let-live framework in which people, and governments, don’t mess with each other’s business, while the federal government performs the basic yet important functions tasked to it that smaller entities cannot: In short, something like the Founding era. This is the straight line running through his support for gun rights, drug legalization, national defense, border security, and gay marriage.

Connecticut remains the most heavily-taxed state in the US (and the wealthiest, per capita), with supposedly the most government services (or maybe just the most costly) and almost the highest-paid government employees (after California): Connecticut Residents Work 6 Weeks Longer Than Louisianans to Pay Taxes

We often wonder what is gained by contributing all of this money, but in a Blue State you are at their mercy so you just try not to think about it. With all its dying cities filled with government-dependents, its liberal gentry, and the union power, you're screwed.

The higher they raise them, the faster they drive away the people who can pay them. It's a shame, because it's a wonderful little state with plenty of history, recreation, rural beauty, schools and universities, educated people, social life, every kind of church, seaside, rivers, real seasons, etc.

That was our ironic term for my all-boys boarding school. Since then, times have changed and the ruling class ain't what it usta be (and never was), but I'll tell y'all about it here, if you are interested. (No, it's not Groton)

The history of American education is fascinating to me. I'd like to write the book but it seems like too much work and my writing has no zip to it, no flair, wouldn't sell. I wish I could write like Michael Lewis.

Private boarding schools (prep schools) are a relatively recent development (late 1800s) in the northeastern US and California, but had a long history in England. Prior to that, children of the prosperous in the US were mostly home-schooled (tutors) to prepare them for college.

Public education in the US, since the mid-1800s, was based on the Prussian/German model, as are American universities. The older American private secondary schools, however, were modeled on English private ("called "public") schools. But, as always through human history, the brightest and most talented kids were/are self-educated in the end.

My school was as much about the cultural experience as it was about the information and skills acquired - but those were high-level too. In fact, they tried to pack in everything you might need to begin adulthood in a time when college was considered adulthood. Four years of this would make much of college today redundant.

Below the fold, I will tell you about it all and how it worked well even for kids like me without superior IQs.

"The German language is sufficiently copious and productive to furnish native words for any idea that can be expressed at all."

Selections from Schottenfreude: German Words for the Human Condition by Ben Schott:

Witzbeharrsamkeit - unashamedly repeating a bon mot until it is heard by everyone present

Abgrundsanziehung - toying with the non-suicidal idea of jumping from a height

Frohsinnsfascismus - the awful mediocrity of organized fun

Clashsyndrom - moments of etiquette perplexity when there is no polite way of behaving

Fetanlaushangriff - tuning in and out of a number of conversations at a party

Did higher ed suddenly begin to sell a more valuable service in 1980, or is it just another debt-fueled and government-subsidized bubble:

I like Leon Botstein as a person (I have heard him discuss music on the radio many times), but I have never agreed with his political instincts. He has an essay about education which I find appalling:  Are We Still Making Citizens?

Who is "we," pardner? While attacking straw men, bringing race into a non-racial discussion, and demonizing "individualism", he seems to be arguing for a top-down, one-size-fits-all, centrally-organized system of primary and secondary education in the USA.  He suggests that it be oriented ideologically, and claims it would be "for the common good." He is a Bismarckian with that Prussian control attitude towards the masses.

Thus it's a little dissonant to read his views, coming as they are from the president of hippy-dippy, free-spirit, granola-ridden and hugely expensive, and private, Bard College. But maybe it's not odd.

The project of public education is fundamental to the notion of public goods in America. The restoration of public education seems a precondition for making the public sphere operate properly. Education must be about something more than personal happiness and benefit, economically defined; it has to map out the idea that there is more to the public good than the belief that through some free-market-style calculus of aggregate self-interests, the greatest good for the greatest number will emerge. In other words, public education is about educating the future citizen to consider a common ground in politics that can and will secure a more rewarding notion of personal security and tranquility for all.

I'd bet home schooling drives him nuts. As usual with Liberals, "I know how to deliver your pursuit of happiness and I would like to shove it up your butt." I hate hearing the elites and the experts pontificate about what "we" should do. I'd rather hear myself pontificate about freedom and free choices in life. Even the freedom to apply to the somewhat offbeat Bard College if you want to.

The case that U.S. individualism is destroying the family and replacing it with the state.

The discussions in the comments are quite good. Conservatives often idealize the independent, self-sufficient family, but there is a debate, and not all families can measure up to that. We're not in pioneer days. Government charity and freebies can be life-saving, but they can also be "enablers" for dysfunction and immature attitudes towards life.

The guy annoys me a lot, but it's a good intro (in series, automatically) to several of the common fallacies we can all fall into: The Guide to Some Common Fallacies.

This brings to mind something I have been thinking about. I think colleges (and high schools) ought to offer lots of one or two-month courses, as my prep school did. These were mostly ways of applying basic knowledge to real life.

We had lots of short course options: intro to logic, public speaking, argumentation and fallacy, etymology, the Parthenon and Greek architecture, opera history, local geology, basics of meteorology, ornithology, paper-making, the math and science of sails and sailing, human anatomy, emergency first aid, typing (was required), the natural history of New England woodlands, intro to the American legal system (by a local lawyer), how doctors think and diagnose (by a local doc), the life and music of Brahms, Freud's main theories, What banks do and the math of banking, Adam Smith's life and work, ballistics and firearm design, geology of the sun, the US Constitution and the Federalist Papers, etc. etc., - along with the usual full trimester things and the required daily sports and daily chapel (which was, in effect, a 4-year Bible study). Wonderful. In four years, you could do a lot of them.

(We all had to be on a dirty jobs crew throughout the year too. Slave labor saved the school money, and protected us privileged boys from being complete spoiled brats. Dishwashing, leaf-raking, mowing the sports fields, serving at faculty tea, vacuuming the dorms, cleaning the chapel, and so much more!)

With the short courses, you had to learn it fast, which was good brain-training. The masters got to chose their own offerings from their own interests and hobbies. 10 kids per class, max.

Our required trimester courses? That's another topic, but they were good indeed and there were no choices at all. It's a shame that few colleges are as fine and as demanding as was my prep school. Gosh, it was fun, and they improved my Skeet skills too. The things that make preppy preppy, I guess. Not brains necessarily, but exposure, discipline, and training.