Education

How to Invest Political Power

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Roger Kimball writes:

”The usual rule is this: when Democrats win elections, they wield power. When Republicans win elections, they seek, or at least agree to, compromise.”

I will take it a step further and state the Democrats know how to leverage power, in the form of transient electoral majorities, for their long-term strategic advantage. To paraphrase Rahm Emmanuel, the Democrats do not let a majority go to waste.

The great historical examples of the past 100 years are FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society, each enacted after electoral landslides that conferred Democratic control over the White House, Senate, and House. Social Security and Medicare, enacted during the New Deal and Great Society, are the twin colossi of the welfare state both in terms of dollar amounts and their political invulnerability. With their existence, the Democrats gain a structural political advantage over the Republicans.

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Random Thoughts (2) : Education Edition

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1) Richard Fernandez:

“The actual purpose of much that is called education is not to teach a trade, or take you stumbling to the limits of the undiscovered but to put you in a position to laugh at people.”

2) From Thomas Sowell’s Ever Wonder Why?

Anyone who is serious about wanting to help minority young people must know that the place to start is at precisely the other end of the educational process. That means beginning in the earliest grades teaching reading, math and other mental skills on which their future depends. But that would mean clashing with the teachers’ unions and their own busybody agenda of propaganda and psychological manipulation in the classrooms.

“The path of least resistance is to give minority youngsters a lousy education and then admit them to college by quotas. With a decent education, they wouldn’t need the quotas.”

3) From the Brookings Institution’s SAT Math Scores Mirror and Maintain Racial Inequity

“Relying on a three-digit number to assess a student’s math ability clouds their drive, their resilience, and may impact their confidence in pursuing postsecondary education…

…..In 2019, the SAT developed an adversity score to contextualize students’ scores to their school and neighborhood. Under pressure, the College Board then abandoned the single statistic in favor of an Environmental Context Dashboard, which provides information like the portion of students at a high school receiving free and reduced lunch, median family income, and advanced-placement enrollment.

Colleges are starting to consider socioeconomic status in a more systematic way, and the College Board is too. This is vitally important, given how far achievement has already splintered along racial and class lines by the time students are about to graduate high school.”

I will add that at the end of the Brookings article the authors do detail ways of boosting disadvantaged students’ actual pre-college performance. That’s what is called in the trade as CYA, but ask yourself which is more likely to happen in the post-Fair Admissions v. Presidents and Fellows of Harvard world? Hiding affirmative action programs under some version of an “Environmental Context Dashboard” or actually breaking the rice bowls of the K-12 establishment?

More vouchers please.

Takin’ Care of Business

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Months ago in a Facebook comment thread populated by those sorts who glorify trade unionism, I conjured the following scenario: in an office setting, employees show up to work one day and find that some sort of Rapture has whisked away the world’s managers. Focusing on one single company, what are the repercussions? The responses were unanimous: nothing would change, the workers would continue to do their jobs. This illustrates a prejudice common to the left and foundational to Marxism, the notion that managers don’t really do anything.

One of my chief criticisms of public education is that it neglects to teach the workings of the business world in general. This was evident even before the ’60s counterculture took over the education establishment. I’ve long felt that comprehensive instruction on how various industries function should start at least as early as the beginning of junior high school (which my Protestant self unintentionally coincided with bar mitzvah age).

My initial concern was that too many adolescents grow up with insufficient knowledge of the business world to make rational career choices. Career development should not start with a trip to the guidance counselor’s office in 12th grade, or (like me) with a vague notion that computers are the future so a degree in computer programming should be pursued. (Demonstrating that “career” and “careen” have the same root word, I never worked in programming, and wound up in monitoring an ATM network.) There’s another vital ingredient to finding vocational direction that the classroom setting cannot facilitate: learning and discovering one’s individual talents. That rests on personal relationships.

Aside from benefits to career development, better education about the world of commerce also breaks down misconceptions about managers, other professions, and various types of businesses.

On Rustication

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Forty-five years ago today, I was “rusticated”—which is to say departed the University for a metropolitan area eight hours’ drive to the southwest, at that time less than one-fifth the population of Chicagoland and only one-eighth its density, which would certainly seem like being sent to the countryside to anyone who grew up within a forty-mile radius of the Loop. Recent events have conspired to cast my mind back to that event and reflect on its meaning.

Warning: autobiographical details ahead; and while acknowledging a certain Conradian truth quoted just below the jump, I must insist that those details are the least important. If there is anything worth pondering here, it is the lessons for our time, and the finding of a way to avoid utter catastrophe, which must include avoiding idealizing our past. When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I went to the University of Chicago, and I put away childish things.

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Finishing School

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So, the recent fiery yet “mostly peaceful” pro-Hamas demonstrations of support on various university campuses making the fiery and “mostly peaceful” headlines over the last couple of weeks may yet have unfortunate results for the affected schools. This would be a consummation devoutly desired by those of us on the sort-of-conservative side of the political spectrum, who have viewed the increasing academic lunacy and dysfunction with concern and mistrust. Honestly, it’s long been obvious that there is a massive stench emanating from those ivy-hung quadrangles of higher learning. The tuition to attend them has been increasing at a breakneck rate for two or three decades, even above the rate of inflation, while the graduates of those institutions appear dumber and dumber and the ratio of administrative staff to student body approaches 1:1. Of late, even those graduates boasting diplomas from formerly respected colleges appear barely scathed by literacy, or any kind of practical, useful-to-the-working-world knowledge and skills at all. No wonder that an increasing number of 18 year olds are coldly, rationally considering the cost-to-benefit ratio and opting for a trade school or an apprenticeship.

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