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Wednesday
October 10, 2007

Federal Censorship of Children’s Book? by Tibor R. Machan

Governments run the country’s schools and while some variation is still evident in how they are administered, there is a pretty strong movement toward a one-size-fits-all policy. Certainly, when the United States federal Congress can pass bills banning books from use in elementary schools, this does not bode well for educational pluralism and diversity. (Read more...)
Discuss this Article (13 messages)

Post 0

Wednesday, October 10, 2007 - 7:46am

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What if you treat your education as your religion? ;-)

Post 1

Wednesday, October 10, 2007 - 8:00am

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I have no religion.

Post 2

Wednesday, October 10, 2007 - 9:27am

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by legal standards, is not philosophy a religion - or are those who hold to a philosophical view precluded from constitutional protection?

Post 3

Wednesday, October 10, 2007 - 10:14am

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No, having a philosophy is not treated as being religious by the courts. For example, conscientious objectors have been denied a religious classification, although this is not always done consistently. Anyway, my point was that when government runs education, the institution will run into all kinds of problems based on the fact that government must be fair, impartial, secular, unbiased, etc., all of which cannot be expected from education.

Post 4

Wednesday, October 10, 2007 - 12:16pm

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Oh, quite agree on that - in favor of abolishing public school completely - and reducing the ad valorin taxes accordingly...

Post 5

Wednesday, October 10, 2007 - 2:03pm

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Well-put, Dr. Machan! Thanks for the excellent analysis.

Post 6

Wednesday, October 10, 2007 - 2:52pm

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Yes, beautifully put Dr. Machan. ,
A Fan

Post 7

Wednesday, October 10, 2007 - 8:06pm

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There are a number of sites that are eye-openers as to just how bad the state's one-size-fits-all education actually is. Check out John Gatto's site, for one good example: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/index.htm Gatto, BTW, was "Teacher of the Year" in the Manhatan School District, I believe, twice - and then dropped out to promote home-schooling.

To start with, consider that education today is not very different from education in the late 19th Century, when the "progressive" educational model was first implemented. While virtually every other aspect of our lives has undergone vast change and overall improvement, education languishes, pursueing ancient goals having little to do with today's needs, aimed at "socializing" the child, over and above any other goal, teaching comformity, altruism (consider all the forced "volunteer" programs now ubitquitous in the high schools accross the country, putting up with boredom, and obeying authority unconditionally.

Today's educational system is in fact based upon the research done by Cyril Burt, cofounder of Mensa, and often referred to as the "Father of Education" for the entire British Commonwealth.

He is no longer referred to that way, as, after his death, it was discovered that he had cooked the books in his famous massive study of twins separated at birth, which purported to show that intelligence was largely hereditary. I.e., accross the world, millions of children were artificially segregated into paths based on early testing, on the assumption that nothing could help you improve your intellect by more than about 20% at best, all based on a deliberate scientific fraud.

That, in the face of the demonstrable results that Montessori was getting, as Rand documented, was the pillar of objective, scientific support that both the commonwealth and the U.S. progressives relied upon. Yet, even without that intellectual foundation, the educational Titanic sails fecklessly on - just to mix metaphors.

There are so many counterexamples to any alleged success of the state school systems that it is hard to know where to start. However, the people who are the true believers in public education are not looking or listening. Public schools are seen as a bulwark against luddite creationism by those people. No matter that if the schools WERE to start taking positions, the positions taken would likely NOT be what they would prefer, in this day and political era.

Locally, in the OC, around 1994, the "Register" ran a major piece on a home-schooled girl, who was born with brain damage due to anoxia during birth. Her mother, who herself had a Masters in Education and was a professional teacher, found no help from the educational or medical establishment. So, she looked elsewhere and discovered the Doman brothers, Glen and Robert, co-founders of the "Better Baby Institute," and the pioneers who had first developed the techniques of dealing with early brain damage that everyone has used ever since.

The girl in question had been:

1> Tutoring adults in college calculus from about age 12.
2> Played violin simultaneously in three local orchestras.
3> Had won awards for her writing.
4> Was almost on the Olympic team in swimming.
5> Was on her way to being the next coloratura in opera.

plus half a dozen other fields of excellence. BTW, she is also black, so you can figure that she didn't have some of the social support that most kids get, although with an IQ that literally goes right off the charts that disadvantage probably isn't very serious. She got full scholarship offers, I believe, from virtually every school in the country. (I met her, BTW, and put in a standing offer of marriage.)

And, she never attended school before going to the local community college.

Jennifer is just one example - one of the more extreme, to be sure - of how awesomely bad our public - and most of the private schools as well, as they just copy the public school curriculum for the most part - truly are by comparison.

Her website, BTW: www.jenniferlindsay.net

And, she's an "Atlas Shrugged" fan.

Post 8

Thursday, October 11, 2007 - 6:05am

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I found this sentence especially fruitful for future debate ...

The bottom line is that education at all levels cannot be neutral.

Thank you for such illumination, Dr. Machan!

Ed

Post 9

Thursday, October 11, 2007 - 10:24am

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First5.doc 1/23/2003

Letter to the Editor.

AMENDMENT I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or

prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

"Religious freedom" is defined in Black's Law Dictionary as: Within

Constitution (First Amendment) embraces not only the right to worship God according to the dictates of one's conscience, but also the right to do, or forbear to do, any act, for conscience sake.

Black's defines "act" as: Denotes external manifestation of actor's will. In its most general sense, this noun signifies something done voluntarily by a person; the exercise of an individual's power; an effect produced in the external world.

Black's defines "Conscience" as: The moral sense; the faculty of judging the moral qualities of actions, or of discriminating between right and wrong.

The establishment and maintenance of state school systems force the children of heavily taxed parents who do not have sufficient money left to pay for schools of their choice or the time and talents to homeschool their children to be inculcated with the values and opinions of teachers of arbitrary religions and world views. Sixty years ago I was required to learn from teachers I did not respect. They held different visions than I concerning how I should live my life here on earth. The lack of a robust educational marketplace resulted in my spending most of my best learning years immersed in activities that violated my moral code. Consider the suffering of logger's children being forced to endure tree-hugging environmental camps or the terrible anguish of future engineers eager to develop their mathematical and design skills being frustrated for equity's sake and the good

Possibility that their teachers do not enjoy and appreciate difficult

Intellectual efforts.

Hence government schools violate the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America. Fortunately an increasing number of students and parents are creating richer learning environments where learners can exercise their inalienable right to develop their own consciences and futures. They are employing their own tutors, practicing self-directed learning, and using the rapidly developing tools of the Information Age. Eventually the benefits of separating school and state will be obvious and available to everyone.

Dale R. Reed

=============

References:

"Compelling Belief: The Culture of American Schooling," Stephen Arons, 1986

"Short Route to Chaos: Conscience, Community, and the Re-Constitution of American Schooling," Stephen Arons, 1997.

http://www.umass.edu/legal/Arons/arons.htm

Stephen Arons, Professor

Department of Legal Studies

217 Hampshire House, UMass/Amherst

Phone: 413-545-3536 / Fax: 413-545-1640

Email: arons@legal.umass.edu

Post 10

Thursday, October 11, 2007 - 6:33pm

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"Education cannot be neutral."

I don't see how one could reasonably disagree. Education is about imparting information, transferring knowledge or belief from one or more individual minds to someone else. There is an infinite amount of information available, thus only a tiny, finite subset can be actually transferred. A random selection would be impossible to begin with and would beg the question of what education was supposed to accomplish. Thus, the selection will always be biased to the goals, values and professional capabilities of the educators.

Most schools operate on the basis of transferring someone else's values to the students. Whether religious, traditional, progressive or Montessori, this remains the guiding agenda. Both the kind of values and the methods of teaching directly reflect the underlying philosophy of the educators.

Religious schools teach or foster belief in something supernatural or transcendent. Since this kind of value/belief cannot be transferred via logic and reason, they are left with coercion, threat and example (of character).

Traditional schools assume that whatever has already been done is best and lock the child into memorizing the ideas and attitudes of a presumed golden age of the past, as opposed to a corrupt or stupid present and potentially dangerous or evil future, emphasizing spelling (forget spell-checkers), dead languages, and memorizing of multiplication tables.

"Progressive" (and the genius who thought up using that term to refer to a collection of statist Hegelian noncepts should fry in Hell) schools are desperately trying to implement Dewey's evil vision of a glorious future society of citizen drones who are mindlessly regimented for assembly lines and trench warfare - plus a fast track for the genetically superior Platonic kings who will rule the drones.

Montessori schools focus on creating a functional epistemology in the child, by never "telling" them what to believe, but rather providing the "environment for discover," in which the child learns that truth is discovered via thought and scientific experiment. Unfortunately, while the general outcomes from Montessori are better than most competing systems, the very orderliness of the environment and its artificial constructs has apparently led to graduates having trouble dealing with the random disorder of the outside world.

Then, of course, there are the "free schools," that do try to somehow be neutral, such as Sudbury Valley School. And some of them do remarkably well. The focus of the educators in such schools is not to tell the child what to believe or value, but rather to facilitate them in achieving whatever their life goals are. Of course, that begs the question of what life goals might be proper, and one could easily assume that only chaos and random outcomes as well as general ignorance would result.

However, that assumption, I would argue, reflects a hidden Judeo-Christian premise of Original Sin. People are not naturally evil. Evil has to be learned. The reality is that if you look at outcomes, the better free schools, such as Sudbury, produce young adults who are very selfish, in the best sense as Rand defines it, and who typically leave school to start their own businesses. A lot of kids come into Sudbury with major problems. If they want to sit in the corner and knit all day in silence, then they are free to do so. Eventually, however, they always discover something that they WANT.

And that opens the door to everything else, as they pursue their own self-chosen values, rather than doing "schoolwork" out of fear or boredom or the desire to best someone else, which is what the public schools teach.

Post 11

Thursday, October 11, 2007 - 8:04pm

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Unfortunately, while the general outcomes from Montessori are better than most competing systems, the very orderliness of the environment and its artificial constructs has apparently led to graduates having trouble dealing with the random disorder of the outside world.

On what basis do you say this?

Post 12

Saturday, October 13, 2007 - 1:34pm

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I was a Montessori director - and on the Board of Directors as well - briefly at a school that I helped found in the early '70's - the College of Early Learning in Columbia, S. Carolina. So I do speak on the basis of some experience. Additionally, I visited a lot of local California Montessori schools in the intervening years to look at what they were doing - or, more often, NOT doing with computers.

On the plus side, the kids everywhere were WAY ahead of the kids in the public schools academically. If they had started with us in Columbia in '71 or '72, at ages 2 to 4, by '74 or '75, for example, they were reading at an adult level for the most part, were starting in algebra, and could find any major city or country on a globe or map, and trace the main paths of evolution from self-replicating molecules to man, among many other criteria. All this by ages 6 or 7.

Since we had instituted a school monetary system and a restitution-based justice system within the school, the kids were also capable of recognizing fine points of value and evaluation and able to voice complex moral positions, a long ways past anything that Piaget ever observed, and also a genuine innovation within the Montessori environment.

However, when some of the kids reached 6 or 7 and were moved to the public schools, suddenly they had problems, both in dealing with a totalitarian regime, as opposed to Montessori, where the kids work or not as they choose, and with trying to absorb information handed down from on high, without thought or proof. In later discussions with other Montessori teachers out here in California, several of them voiced similar concerns and went beyond that to say that there was evidence that the Montessori clean-room approach to learning how to learn, while it conformed to good scientific epistemology, did not really engage the kids on the level of how to apply it to the confused and chaotic mess in the outside world. I.e., give them a good lab to work in and they would excel. Put them on the street or in a business environment that required taking into account all kinds of interpersonal rivalries and office politics, and they had a hard time.

I don't think that the Montessori approach should be abandoned, but rather enhanced. We did that with the school monetary system (on the cookie standard) and by teaching the kids how to resolve their own disputes rationally. Using computers for what they can do best would be another major improvement. And, I suspect that something like Second Life could be used to allow kids to test ideas about how to interact in a more realistic social environment without taking risks in the real world.

(I haven't had any contact with the Columbia crew since early '76, because I came to the conclusion that they had gone collectively nuts after they made nationwide TV when the head of the group tried to kidnap his wife - who happened to be head director of the school, but that's another story.)

Meanwhile, however, the Montessori movement has unfortunately ossified into another bureaucratic establishment. If Montessori didn't do it, it's not worth doing. They not only rejected our school economy and our justice system (they base it on total top-down authority - although they do not user punishment or rewards, at least) way back then - in HORROR at changing the Montessori environment, but later, when I and various other solid Montessorians tried to introduce micro-computers for the things that simply could not be affordably done in terms of physical equipment, the reigning bureaucrats did not merely reject them as non-Montessori.

In some cases they actively plotted to ensure that no one was allowed to even find out what was being done with computers. Lecturers were forbidden to bring a computer to a class on computers at major Montessori conferences, in those rare cases in which they were even given a forum. even though those classes were packed, standing-room-only, with directors eager to find out about the new tool.

The Montessori movement overall is still stuck in 1952, when Montessori died, which is sad, as she got so much right.

(Edited by Phil Osborn on 10/13, 1:39pm)

(Edited by Phil Osborn on 10/13, 1:42pm)