Here is another snippet from my new book, Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education.
This segment is from the chapter focused on psychology. Since I am personally intellectually in sync with the behaviorist school of psychology and have in other articles maintained that free will is a mere perception with no grounding in reality, I have presented this school of psychology in this article.
Do know, though, that as a formal debater I can easily assert the cases for the psychological viewpoints associated with such schools of psychology as the humanist, cognitivist, neuropsychological, developmental, and social--- and as a transmitter of all fundamental knowledge pertinent to humanity via Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education, I present the key tenets of these schools in the chapter on psychology, giving similar space and enthusiasm of presentation.
For more on the motivating force behind Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education,
scroll on down to the two articles that immediately follow this one (posted prior to article that you are now reading):
Behaviorist School
During the 1940s and extending to his death in the 1980s, the behaviorist B. F. Skinner developed a seminal approach to psychology. Building on the work of precursors such as J. B. Watson, Skinner described human behavior as the result of operant conditioning. In Skinner’s view, all of human behavior is determined by reinforcers (rewards) and punishments acting upon the individual according to her or his unique social environment. He denied the existence of free will and all internal mental states that we normally perceive as freedom, dignity, and intention.
The key concepts in this strict behaviorist view of operant conditioning as determinative of all human behavior is given below.
A. The Essentials of Operant Conditioning
1. Positive Reinforcement
Positive reinforcement is the reward that a person receives after exhibiting a given behavior:
A father may cook a special dinner for a daughter who successfully fixes a leaky water faucet. The daughter is much more likely, for having been the recipient of the special dinner, to take on the leaky faucet task the next time the problem occurs.
A mother may pay her son $20 after he does the family laundry. The son, who had long lobbied for such a reward, is now much more likely to do the laundry cheerfully and with the desired results of very clean clothes than he would in the absence of the reward.
A teacher smiles and gives a hug to a child who has just successfully completed a double digit multiplication problem for the first time. The child, having been hesitant on the multiplication task, will now move on to a division task with much more enthusiasm in the expectation of similar approbation.
The child in turn may smile and tell the teacher that he is the best ever at explaining math. The teacher moves on to the next child or to the next task with the same child in a mood of exhilaration.
An employer may give “Employee of the Month” honors to an employee who never missed a day and performed all tasks at an exceptional level of accomplishment. If this is a reward that the employee sought, she or he will revel in the award and maintain the behavior in expectation of a possible “Employee of the Year” award.
All of these situations feature some behavior that was rewarded in a timely fashion with what Skinner called positive reinforcement: the special dinner, the $20, the smile and hug combination, the returned smile and words of praise, the two kinds of employee awards. Skinner maintained that the presentation of a positive reinforcer for a desired behavior is the single most effective means of encouraging and maintaining that behavior.
2. Punishment
Punishment is the aversive consequence that one receives for exhibiting an undesirable behavior:
If a daughter had given indication that she could fix the faucet but fails to do so, dad frowns and says, “You are always promising things that you cannot do.”
A son who says that he will do a super job if mom pays him son $20 for doing the family laundry does only half of what he said he’d do and leaves most of the clothes damp, leaving mom to finish up. Mom tells her son that he cannot participate in the family card game that evening but instead will have to write a three-page essay explaining how he will do the laundry better the next time.
A teacher frowns and says, “You never try hard enough on assignments I give to you,” when a child makes insufficient effort to solve a double-digit multiplication problem for the first time. The child tears up in the receipt of this reprobation from a beloved teacher.
The child, now emotionally hurting as a result of the teacher’s stinging words, slams her fist on the table and shouts, “You are the most useless teacher I’ve ever had.”
An employer may reduce the hours of an employee who failed to perform all tasks requested at an acceptable level of accomplishment. The employee, not a slacker by habit, feels terrible that she has disappointed her employer and lost needed income.
All of these situations feature some behavior that was punished in close proximity to the undesirable performance of an activity. Skinner would have labeled as punishment each of the negative consequences: the frown and harsh words from dad; missing the family card game and having to write the essay about becoming a better launderer; the frown and words of condemnation from the teacher; the slammed fist and insulting words leveled at the teacher; the reduced hours and lost pay.
3. Negative reinforcement
Like positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement rewards rather than punishes a given behavior, but the reward is in essence having the punishing circumstance terminated:
Negative reinforcement is the removal of an aversive stimulus (punishment):
Dad stands frowning and saying, “You are always promising to do things that you cannot do,” as the daughter is trying to fix the faucet, but his frown fades and his negative comments disappear when the daughter in fact fixes the faucet.
Mom maintains a steady monologue about how her son has never done the family laundry properly in his life and how she knows that the current effort will result in similar failure but stills her tongue when he surprisingly gets it right this time.
A teacher frowns and says, “You never try hard enough on assignments I give to you,” but stops the words of condemnation amidst a fading frown when the child solves a double-digit multiplication problem for the first time.
The child fights through lingering emotional pain but, relieved at the absence of insulting words, does not slam her fist on the table or shout, “You are the most useless teacher I’ve ever had,” as she has done so many times before.
An employer shows a schedule of reduced the hours to an employee who seems to be failing on a given night to perform all tasks requested at an acceptable level of accomplishment--- but tears up the schedule with the atypically reduced number of hours when the employee gets busy and completes all tasks in good form.
All of these situations feature some behavior that was rewarded with the removal of an aversive situation in close proximity to the adroit performance of an activity. Skinner would have labeled each instance of removal of an aversive consequence as negative reinforcement: the fading of dad’s frown and the termination of harsh words from dad when the faucet is in fact fixed; the ceasing of mom’s litany of invective when the son does a good job with the family laundry; the teacher no longer speaking words of condemnation and no longer wearing a frown; the absence of a slammed fist and insulting words leveled at the teacher; the employer tearing up the schedule of reduced hours.
B. Schedules of Reinforcement
There are four fundamental schedules of reinforcement, each built on pairing important concepts related to the variability of the routine and whether the reinforcement is timed or delivered according to a quantity of reinforced behaviors.
In terms of variability, schedules may be either fixed or varied. A fixed schedule of reinforcement delivers the reinforcement on a dependably regular schedule; a variable schedule of reinforcement delivers the reinforcement on an irregular schedule, one that is not predictable by observers other than the designer of the experiment.
In terms of the factors of timing or quantification, schedules may be either based on interval or ratio. Interval schedules deliver the reinforcement after the passage of so much time; ratio schedules deliver the reinforcement according to the number of behaviors exhibited.
Examples of these schedules of reinforcement are given below:
1) fixed interval >>>>>
A fixed interval schedule of reinforcement rewards behavior exhibited over an exact time period.
For example, a father may reward his son for doing his chore of washing the dishes every night that the family eats at home each week by giving him his allowance every Saturday afternoon.
2) variable interval >>>>>
A variable interval schedule of reinforcement rewards behavior dependably over an identifiable long-term period but not precise in the short term.
For example, a father may reward his son for doing his chore of washing the dishes every night that the family eats at home each week by giving him his allowance four times each month----- but not on a set day or time.
3) fixed ratio >>>>>
A fixed ratio schedule of reinforcement rewards each behavior right after exhibition of the behavior.
For example, a father may reward his son for doing his chore of washing the dishes each time he completes the task, for the agreed upon amount of $5.00.
4) variable ratio >>>>>
A variable ratio schedule of reinforcement rewards a certain number of behaviors but not after right after exhibition of the behavior; hence, while the average number of exhibited behaviors rewarded may be the same as with a fixed ratio schedule, the exact moment of presentation of the reward is not predictable by the recipient.
For example, a father may reward his son for doing his chore of washing the dishes according to the number of times he completes the task, for the agreed upon amount of $5.00 per task, but not necessarily paid right after completion of the task.
C. Further Comments
All of the schedules of reinforcement given above are highly effective and result in what behaviorist psychologists call behavior acquisition (beginning to manifest a given behavior in the presence of reinforcement) and maintenance (continuing a behavior in the presence of ongoing enforcement). When reinforcement is discontinued, the behavior of the organism (the human or other creature exhibiting the behavior) is extinguished.
Because the exact delivery of reinforcement is not predictable with variable reinforcement on either an interval or a ratio schedule, behavior on variable reinforcement schedules takes longer to be extinguished: The organism continues to manifest the behavior for a while in the absence of reinforcement, expecting that the reward (reinforcement) will eventually be gained, but when this does not happen the behavior comes to an end (is extinguished).
Behaviorist psychologists observe that all creatures respond in similar ways to the schedules of reinforcement. The schedules given above are for positive reinforcement but work similarly for negative reinforcement and for punishment. Because they tend to be convenient subjects under laboratory conditions, behaviorist experimental psychologists frequently use creatures other than humans to observe responses to reinforcers and punishments; for example, they frequently use rats as the subjects (organisms) for their experiments.
With animals, primary reinforcers are frequently used.
Primary reinforcers are those such as food, liquids, and sex--- similar to the aspects of the human being that Sigmund Freud located in the Id.
With humans, various other kinds of rewards, called secondary reinforcers, are often used (and may be used with other creatures, as well).
Secondary reinforcers may involve smiles, words of praise, and material rewards such as the monetary allowance that the father gave the son for doing the dishes in the examples give above.
Behaviorist psychologists say that all responses to secondary reinforcers can be traced back to those biological imperatives that make the organism predisposed to respond to primary reinforcers. They maintain that all behavior (doing well on a job; leading a volunteer effort with great skill; or seeking to attract a mate) is related to the need or desire to satisfy biological imperatives.
Behaviorist psychologists say that free will is a perception, not a reality:
Behaviorists deny the existence of free will.
They hold that all behavior is acquired and maintained as a result of the presentation of positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, or punishment.
Of these three, experimental psychologists have found that positive reinforcement is the most efficient for achieving behavior acquisition in the organism, and that positive reinforcement along with punishment is even more efficient and effective in getting the organism to deliver the desired response under experimental conditions.
Aug 21, 2015
Aug 20, 2015
Another Snippet from My New Book, >Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education< : Introduction to Macroeconomics
So as to emphasize my seriousness about teaching my students all of what they need to know in the realm of the liberal arts in math, natural science (biology, chemistry, physics), humanities and social science (world history, American history, African American history, economics, psychology, world religions), language arts (literature and English usage), and fine arts (visual arts and musical arts) in one two-hour academic session per week--- I am providing another snippet from my new book, Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education. Please also scroll down to the next article on the blog (posted before this one) to read more comments on the necessity of the book, and to read the other sample provided thus far, the part on World War I, falling within an approximately 50-page (single-spaced) chapter on world history.
The segment provided below is from my chapter on (micro- and macro-) economics, specifically from the introductory part on macroeconomics. Once macroeconomics is introduced, this part is then heavy on key terms. Successive pages in the full chapter include a sample federal budget featuring revenue sources, mandatory (entitlement) spending, and discretionary spending; a description of the Federal Reserve System and the mechanisms through which the Federal Reserve Board of Governors under Janet Yellen determine monetary policy (control money supply); and a presentation of the views of three great, seminal economists (Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes).
Here, then, is the snippet from the economics chapter that introduces macroeconomics and provides key terms:
Macroeconomics
Macroeconomics is the major category of economics concerned with aggregate production and consumption, the functioning of the national economy taken as a whole, and involving policy made at the national level of governance.
Topics studied in macroeconomics include federal fiscal policy in securing revenues and making expenditures, with the resulting structure of the federal budget, thereby determining the level of national debt and national deficit; and monetary policy, requiring the release of money by the Federal Reserve System into the economic system of consumers and producers. Inevitably, this policy responds to and affects conditions of inflation and deflation, and conditions of recession and depression.
Macroeconomics also involves matters pertinent to Gross National Product (GNP), Gross Domestic Product (GDP), standard of living, median income, and taxation as affecting workers, businesses, and industries. Sectoral divisions indicating categories of the national economy include the primary sector (agriculture); secondary sector (industry); and tertiary sector (service).
Terms most likely to need clarification are given below:
1) federal fiscal policy >>>>> policy made by decision-makers at the national level as to expenditures and revenue
2) federal monetary policy >>>>> policy made by decision-makers at the national level as to supply of money from the Federal Reserve
3) Federal Reserve System >>>>> the system of 12 banks into which national currency printed at the National Mint is deposited and from which currency is released through loans and transfers
4) federal budget >>>>> structure of expenditure and revenue identified by policy makers at the national level of governance
5) balanced budget >>>>> situation in which expenditure and revenue are in equilibrium (perfectly matched or in sync)
6) national deficit (federal deficit) >>>>> situation for a given year in which the federal government has less revenue than expenditure; currently is about $476 billion
7) national debt (federal debt) >>>>> accumulated national deficits resulting in total federal government expenditure exceeding total revenue; currently is about $18.15 trillion
8) inflation >>>>> situation in which prices rise because demand exceeds supply; or because banks and consumers hold dollars for which the availability for needed or wanted goods and services are not available
9) deflation >>>>> situation in which prices decline because supply exceeds demand; or because banks and consumers hold too few dollars to pay for needed or wanted goods and services
10) fiscal quarters >>>>> division of the year into three-month groups for measuring economic growth
11) economic growth >>>>> percentage increase of the Gross Domestic Product, annually or quarterly
12) Gross Domestic Product (GDP) >>>>> total value of goods and services provided within the nation
13) Gross National Product (GNP) >>>>> total value of goods and services provided by domestic companies for sale within the nation or in foreign countries
14) standard of living >>>>> quantitative measure of the ability of consumers to pay for the goods and services that they want or need
15) median income >>>>> the level of income that falls exactly at the middle in a distribution of income from highest to lowest (or lowest to highest)
The segment provided below is from my chapter on (micro- and macro-) economics, specifically from the introductory part on macroeconomics. Once macroeconomics is introduced, this part is then heavy on key terms. Successive pages in the full chapter include a sample federal budget featuring revenue sources, mandatory (entitlement) spending, and discretionary spending; a description of the Federal Reserve System and the mechanisms through which the Federal Reserve Board of Governors under Janet Yellen determine monetary policy (control money supply); and a presentation of the views of three great, seminal economists (Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes).
Here, then, is the snippet from the economics chapter that introduces macroeconomics and provides key terms:
Macroeconomics
Macroeconomics is the major category of economics concerned with aggregate production and consumption, the functioning of the national economy taken as a whole, and involving policy made at the national level of governance.
Topics studied in macroeconomics include federal fiscal policy in securing revenues and making expenditures, with the resulting structure of the federal budget, thereby determining the level of national debt and national deficit; and monetary policy, requiring the release of money by the Federal Reserve System into the economic system of consumers and producers. Inevitably, this policy responds to and affects conditions of inflation and deflation, and conditions of recession and depression.
Macroeconomics also involves matters pertinent to Gross National Product (GNP), Gross Domestic Product (GDP), standard of living, median income, and taxation as affecting workers, businesses, and industries. Sectoral divisions indicating categories of the national economy include the primary sector (agriculture); secondary sector (industry); and tertiary sector (service).
Terms most likely to need clarification are given below:
1) federal fiscal policy >>>>> policy made by decision-makers at the national level as to expenditures and revenue
2) federal monetary policy >>>>> policy made by decision-makers at the national level as to supply of money from the Federal Reserve
3) Federal Reserve System >>>>> the system of 12 banks into which national currency printed at the National Mint is deposited and from which currency is released through loans and transfers
4) federal budget >>>>> structure of expenditure and revenue identified by policy makers at the national level of governance
5) balanced budget >>>>> situation in which expenditure and revenue are in equilibrium (perfectly matched or in sync)
6) national deficit (federal deficit) >>>>> situation for a given year in which the federal government has less revenue than expenditure; currently is about $476 billion
7) national debt (federal debt) >>>>> accumulated national deficits resulting in total federal government expenditure exceeding total revenue; currently is about $18.15 trillion
8) inflation >>>>> situation in which prices rise because demand exceeds supply; or because banks and consumers hold dollars for which the availability for needed or wanted goods and services are not available
9) deflation >>>>> situation in which prices decline because supply exceeds demand; or because banks and consumers hold too few dollars to pay for needed or wanted goods and services
10) fiscal quarters >>>>> division of the year into three-month groups for measuring economic growth
11) economic growth >>>>> percentage increase of the Gross Domestic Product, annually or quarterly
12) Gross Domestic Product (GDP) >>>>> total value of goods and services provided within the nation
13) Gross National Product (GNP) >>>>> total value of goods and services provided by domestic companies for sale within the nation or in foreign countries
14) standard of living >>>>> quantitative measure of the ability of consumers to pay for the goods and services that they want or need
15) median income >>>>> the level of income that falls exactly at the middle in a distribution of income from highest to lowest (or lowest to highest)
A Sampling from My New Book, >Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education<: A Compact History of World War I
I once had some faith that public school systems such as the Minneapolis Public Schools taught students something. For those students who eventually acquire a solid knowledge base from teachers in Advanced Placement courses, and increasingly in the field of mathematics, some truth may still be claimed for that supposition. But other students learn so little in their 13 years of K-12 education that I got tired of having to stop and deliver mini-courses for every realm of knowledge as I conducted my already wide-raging instruction in math and reading across the liberal arts curriculum.
So in the knowledge that most of what my students learn, they learn from me, I am now five chapters into a book that will include a solid knowledge base in economics, psychology, political science, world religions, world history, American history, African American history, literature, English composition, fine arts (visual and musical), biology, chemistry, and physics.
All of my students will read Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education on their own and with me. As a supporter of the principle, but ardent critic of, the Minneapolis Public Schools and other central school districts, I will continue to witness their receiving meals and extracurricular activities in their public schools of official attendance, while knowing that most of their knowledge and skill sets will come from me.
I have now written, and my students are already receiving instruction in, five chapters, those concerning the following academic areas: economics, psychology, political science, world religions, and world history. I intend to complete writing the book by October 2015 for the full curricular presentation to my students; the work will soon thereafter be offered to the general public, most likely by an imprint of the company that has published my other books.
Following is a sampling from the world history chapter--- the section on World War I. As you read, consider the multiplicity of events and themes that a person would have to know from just this one episode in humankind's past to grasp the origins and meaning of a great multitude of happenings reported in the news media on this very day:
World War I
Nationalism and imperialism were on a crash course of global dimensions.
The Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires had for centuries competed for territory in Eastern Europe, but in the course of the 19th century the Ottomans became less and less a factor. The Ottoman Empire lost its control of territory in Serbia and Hungary early in the 19th century, and after the Balkan Wars (1912-1913) had little power on the European continent. The Austro-Hungarian Empire sought to include Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, and Montenegro; the empire’s leaders were able to annex Bosnia in 1908, but the Serbians had fought hard to throw off Ottoman attempts at re-conquest and proved formidable; neither did they like Austro-Hungary’s control of Bosnia, because a large population of Serbians lived in Bosnia.
A young Serbian, Gavrilo Princip, showed his contempt for Austro-Hungarian policy by assassinating the empire’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand as he was riding a motorized vehicle through the streets of Sarajevo on 28 June 1914.
This was the precipitating event of World War I, setting into motion the latest alliances (Triple Alliance: Germany, Austro-Hungary, Italy; and Triple Entente: France, Russia, Great Britain) formed in an era of global competition and suspicion. On 28 July 1914, Austro-Hungary declared war on Serbia when the leaders of the latter refused annexation. Russia mobilized against Austro-Hungary, Germany declared war on Russia (1 August 1914) and then on France (3 August 1914), motivating Great Britain to declare war on Germany (4 August 1914).
In wartime, the Italians refrained from abiding by their alliance with the Germans and Austro-Hungarians, but the latter participants were eventually joined by the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria as the Central Powers, while France, Great Britain, and Russia were known as the Allied Powers or Allies; with Russia’s inaction from 1917 forward, the United States would effectively replace that country in affiliation with the Allies upon entry into the war as of 1917.
War is regrettable and stupid. World War I was enormously regrettable and abominably stupid.
The British and French halted a German advance just 45 miles outside of Paris. By late autumn 1914, the French and German opponents had dug a system of trenches stretching from the North Sea almost to Switzerland, forming the Western Front of the war. Trenches moved by inches if they moved at all, day after day. Soldiers died from multiple epidemics, including “trench foot” (with damp and infected flesh rotting away). When soldiers did manage to break out of the trenches, they often became entangled in barbed wire and took deadly fire from recently invented machine guns. Germans were the first to use poison gas (chlorine) in battle at Ypres in April 1915. From February into December 2015, fighting at the highly strategic fortress city of Verdun cost 700,000 casualties, and a battle along the Somme cost 300,000 lives.
Very little had changed in terms of alignments along the trenches, but so delighted were military decision-makers on both sides that they planned more of the same sorts of contests for the months ahead.
On the much longer Eastern Front, digging trenches was blessedly impractical, so that Germany and Russia fought more mobile battles that were bloody but not quite as strategically and tactically stupid. War on the eastern front, though, was also largely inconclusive, with a Russian victory at Tannenburg and the Massurian Lakes in August-September 1914; German victory in the Gorlice-Tarnow Offensive of May 1915; and Russian recapturing of much lost ground in the Brusilov Offensive in June 1916. But by June 1917, Russians were swiftly traveling down the road to the Bolshevik (Communist) Revolution in Russia, and many of their units were refusing to fight. This allowed the Germans to refocus attention and commit more resources to the Western Front.
The war at sea involved mostly German and British fleets and was also generally indecisive, as in the Battle for Jutland (off Denmark, 31 May-1 June 1916). The British did destroy the German East Asia Squadron in December 1914, leading the Germans to resort to “unrestricted warfare” with submarine attacks. But the sinking of the passenger liner Lusitania with United States citizens aboard in 1915 contributed to American entry into the war that year.
At great human cost, the maneuvering and machinations of World War I were changing the terms of life on earth forever. Deadly weapons portended a future in which war would be too horrific to contemplate if people just stopped to think--- which they generally would continue not to do. Nationalism was now a major force in the consciousness of people everywhere on the planet, a force which for all of its rational historical dialectic was dubious in its moral implications and potential for perversion (as would be the case with Nazi Germany). And as nationalism rose on the tide of human need for affiliation, old empires that were conglomerations of nationalities who were all asked to revere a common emperor found that their entreaties were falling on unsympathetic folk no longer willing to identify as imperial subjects.
There was considerable irony in the fact that the forces of a relatively new empire, that of Great Britain, took the lead in demolishing the morale of those superintending administration in the old empire of the Ottomans, with British soldiers entering Jerusalem in December 1917 to deliver a crushing defeat in Palestine that pushed the tottering Ottomans into terminal disequilibrium. The British were only thirty years away from having the foundations of their own empire destroyed by nationalists in India.
Then, in that very year of 1917, here came fresh troops from the United States, on the cusp of its own surge toward international prominence. Blessedly spared the worst of the trenches, four complete American divisions had arrived by 1918, contributing mightily to Allied victories along the Marne River in July, around Amiens in August, and at the last German fortifications running along the Hindenburg line in September and October. The German Kaiser, facing a potential revolution, signaled that the Germans comprehended their defeat: His agents signed an armistice on 11 November 1918 that brought this astoundingly foolish but historically huge event to an end.
At the Paris Peace Conference that convened on 18 January 1919, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George and U. S. President Woodrow Wilson substantially relented to the desire of French Prime Minister George Clemenceau to inflict a punitive treaty on Germany. By the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, signed by the German representatives on 28 June 1919, Germany acknowledged guilt for waging the war, agreed to pay onerous reparations, and relented to the demand that the Kaiser be put on trial. The nation’s army was to be reduced to less than 100,000 troops and no tanks, its navy relegated to a token existence, and its aircraft grounded. Hugely aggravating to the Germans, territorial concessions and losses included Alsace-Lorraine (a long-disputed French-German border region) to France, the area of Schlesswig to Denmark, many square miles (kilometers) in Prussia and Silesia to Poland, and the Saarland region to an international force of occupation. Representatives of Great Britain and France signed the treaty, but the two-thirds vote for ratification in the United States Senate could not be secured. Ironically, those Senators who refused to vote for ratification objected to the Treaty of Versailles not on the basis of overwrought punishment of Germany, but rather on the provision of a League of Nations. The idea for such an international convention originated in the Fourteen Points of Woodrow Wilson, part of his plan to “make the world safe for democracy” and to recognize the nationalist aspirations of people formerly living under empires.
Most of the root causes of the second great global confrontation known as World War II (1939-1945) lay embedded in the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, especially in the way that the treaty provided an environment in which a particularly virulent form of nationalism could grow on the reduced territory of a defeated and chagrined German people to inflict a corporal and moral Holocaust on humankind.
So in the knowledge that most of what my students learn, they learn from me, I am now five chapters into a book that will include a solid knowledge base in economics, psychology, political science, world religions, world history, American history, African American history, literature, English composition, fine arts (visual and musical), biology, chemistry, and physics.
All of my students will read Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education on their own and with me. As a supporter of the principle, but ardent critic of, the Minneapolis Public Schools and other central school districts, I will continue to witness their receiving meals and extracurricular activities in their public schools of official attendance, while knowing that most of their knowledge and skill sets will come from me.
I have now written, and my students are already receiving instruction in, five chapters, those concerning the following academic areas: economics, psychology, political science, world religions, and world history. I intend to complete writing the book by October 2015 for the full curricular presentation to my students; the work will soon thereafter be offered to the general public, most likely by an imprint of the company that has published my other books.
Following is a sampling from the world history chapter--- the section on World War I. As you read, consider the multiplicity of events and themes that a person would have to know from just this one episode in humankind's past to grasp the origins and meaning of a great multitude of happenings reported in the news media on this very day:
World War I
Nationalism and imperialism were on a crash course of global dimensions.
The Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires had for centuries competed for territory in Eastern Europe, but in the course of the 19th century the Ottomans became less and less a factor. The Ottoman Empire lost its control of territory in Serbia and Hungary early in the 19th century, and after the Balkan Wars (1912-1913) had little power on the European continent. The Austro-Hungarian Empire sought to include Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, and Montenegro; the empire’s leaders were able to annex Bosnia in 1908, but the Serbians had fought hard to throw off Ottoman attempts at re-conquest and proved formidable; neither did they like Austro-Hungary’s control of Bosnia, because a large population of Serbians lived in Bosnia.
A young Serbian, Gavrilo Princip, showed his contempt for Austro-Hungarian policy by assassinating the empire’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand as he was riding a motorized vehicle through the streets of Sarajevo on 28 June 1914.
This was the precipitating event of World War I, setting into motion the latest alliances (Triple Alliance: Germany, Austro-Hungary, Italy; and Triple Entente: France, Russia, Great Britain) formed in an era of global competition and suspicion. On 28 July 1914, Austro-Hungary declared war on Serbia when the leaders of the latter refused annexation. Russia mobilized against Austro-Hungary, Germany declared war on Russia (1 August 1914) and then on France (3 August 1914), motivating Great Britain to declare war on Germany (4 August 1914).
In wartime, the Italians refrained from abiding by their alliance with the Germans and Austro-Hungarians, but the latter participants were eventually joined by the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria as the Central Powers, while France, Great Britain, and Russia were known as the Allied Powers or Allies; with Russia’s inaction from 1917 forward, the United States would effectively replace that country in affiliation with the Allies upon entry into the war as of 1917.
War is regrettable and stupid. World War I was enormously regrettable and abominably stupid.
The British and French halted a German advance just 45 miles outside of Paris. By late autumn 1914, the French and German opponents had dug a system of trenches stretching from the North Sea almost to Switzerland, forming the Western Front of the war. Trenches moved by inches if they moved at all, day after day. Soldiers died from multiple epidemics, including “trench foot” (with damp and infected flesh rotting away). When soldiers did manage to break out of the trenches, they often became entangled in barbed wire and took deadly fire from recently invented machine guns. Germans were the first to use poison gas (chlorine) in battle at Ypres in April 1915. From February into December 2015, fighting at the highly strategic fortress city of Verdun cost 700,000 casualties, and a battle along the Somme cost 300,000 lives.
Very little had changed in terms of alignments along the trenches, but so delighted were military decision-makers on both sides that they planned more of the same sorts of contests for the months ahead.
On the much longer Eastern Front, digging trenches was blessedly impractical, so that Germany and Russia fought more mobile battles that were bloody but not quite as strategically and tactically stupid. War on the eastern front, though, was also largely inconclusive, with a Russian victory at Tannenburg and the Massurian Lakes in August-September 1914; German victory in the Gorlice-Tarnow Offensive of May 1915; and Russian recapturing of much lost ground in the Brusilov Offensive in June 1916. But by June 1917, Russians were swiftly traveling down the road to the Bolshevik (Communist) Revolution in Russia, and many of their units were refusing to fight. This allowed the Germans to refocus attention and commit more resources to the Western Front.
The war at sea involved mostly German and British fleets and was also generally indecisive, as in the Battle for Jutland (off Denmark, 31 May-1 June 1916). The British did destroy the German East Asia Squadron in December 1914, leading the Germans to resort to “unrestricted warfare” with submarine attacks. But the sinking of the passenger liner Lusitania with United States citizens aboard in 1915 contributed to American entry into the war that year.
At great human cost, the maneuvering and machinations of World War I were changing the terms of life on earth forever. Deadly weapons portended a future in which war would be too horrific to contemplate if people just stopped to think--- which they generally would continue not to do. Nationalism was now a major force in the consciousness of people everywhere on the planet, a force which for all of its rational historical dialectic was dubious in its moral implications and potential for perversion (as would be the case with Nazi Germany). And as nationalism rose on the tide of human need for affiliation, old empires that were conglomerations of nationalities who were all asked to revere a common emperor found that their entreaties were falling on unsympathetic folk no longer willing to identify as imperial subjects.
There was considerable irony in the fact that the forces of a relatively new empire, that of Great Britain, took the lead in demolishing the morale of those superintending administration in the old empire of the Ottomans, with British soldiers entering Jerusalem in December 1917 to deliver a crushing defeat in Palestine that pushed the tottering Ottomans into terminal disequilibrium. The British were only thirty years away from having the foundations of their own empire destroyed by nationalists in India.
Then, in that very year of 1917, here came fresh troops from the United States, on the cusp of its own surge toward international prominence. Blessedly spared the worst of the trenches, four complete American divisions had arrived by 1918, contributing mightily to Allied victories along the Marne River in July, around Amiens in August, and at the last German fortifications running along the Hindenburg line in September and October. The German Kaiser, facing a potential revolution, signaled that the Germans comprehended their defeat: His agents signed an armistice on 11 November 1918 that brought this astoundingly foolish but historically huge event to an end.
At the Paris Peace Conference that convened on 18 January 1919, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George and U. S. President Woodrow Wilson substantially relented to the desire of French Prime Minister George Clemenceau to inflict a punitive treaty on Germany. By the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, signed by the German representatives on 28 June 1919, Germany acknowledged guilt for waging the war, agreed to pay onerous reparations, and relented to the demand that the Kaiser be put on trial. The nation’s army was to be reduced to less than 100,000 troops and no tanks, its navy relegated to a token existence, and its aircraft grounded. Hugely aggravating to the Germans, territorial concessions and losses included Alsace-Lorraine (a long-disputed French-German border region) to France, the area of Schlesswig to Denmark, many square miles (kilometers) in Prussia and Silesia to Poland, and the Saarland region to an international force of occupation. Representatives of Great Britain and France signed the treaty, but the two-thirds vote for ratification in the United States Senate could not be secured. Ironically, those Senators who refused to vote for ratification objected to the Treaty of Versailles not on the basis of overwrought punishment of Germany, but rather on the provision of a League of Nations. The idea for such an international convention originated in the Fourteen Points of Woodrow Wilson, part of his plan to “make the world safe for democracy” and to recognize the nationalist aspirations of people formerly living under empires.
Most of the root causes of the second great global confrontation known as World War II (1939-1945) lay embedded in the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, especially in the way that the treaty provided an environment in which a particularly virulent form of nationalism could grow on the reduced territory of a defeated and chagrined German people to inflict a corporal and moral Holocaust on humankind.
Aug 12, 2015
The Abysmal Presentation on Educational Equity by Kimberly Matier and Lanise Block at the Tuesday, 11 August 2015, Meeting of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education
To understand just how wretched was the presentation of the document, Acceleration 2020/ Educational Equity: Developing a Framework for Student Achievement for All by Kim Matier and Lanise Block at the Tuesday, 11 August 2015, meeting of the Minneapolis Board of Education, you must first grasp the major conditions for educational equity.
Understand this first, then, with regard to educational equity:
Educational equity results from three sources:
1) excellent education;
2) excellent teachers;
3) warm relationships with students and their families.
Hence, with this understanding, we have again the definitions for excellent education and excellent teachers, with a comment also on building relationships with students and their families
1)
An excellent education is a matter of excellent teachers imparting a rich liberal arts curriculum in math, natural science, history, economics, literature, and the fine arts in grade-by-grade sequence to all students throughout the K-12 years.
2) An excellent teacher is a professional of deep and broad knowledge with the pedagogical ability to impart that knowledge to all students.
When educational excellence (by definition including excellent teachers who, in turn by definition, have the ability to impart knowledge to all students) prevails, educational equity is attained. Therefore, we must set about specifying curriculum for each grade throughout the K-12 years, and we must at the central school district level retrain teachers capable of delivering the challenging, deep, and broad liberal arts curriculum to all students by the time they walk across the stage at high school graduation.
3)
An excellent teacher, building principal, and any central school district personnel responsible for imparting an education of excellence to all of our precious children, should have a high level of comfort in connecting with families of students, necessarily entailing comfort with people of numerous ethnicities and economic levels.
When families understand the steps that are being taken to ensure excellent education for their children, they will respond with gratitude. So we must make sure that all school district personnel are highly adept and sensitive as they establish connections and relationships with the families of the students for whom they have the sacred duty to provide an excellent education.
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Rather than focus on the delivery of excellent education in the context of excellent relationships with students and their families, Lanise Block and Kimberly (Kim) Matier delivered a jargon-infested travesty of banal generality as apparently the best that the Office of Academic Affairs at the Minneapolis Public Schools can promote as a program for achieving equity.
In their presentations, Matier and Block stuck closely to a power point document that stated goals for the presentation to be the provision of the rationale and history for achieving educational equity; explanation of this new effort’s relationship to an existing Equity and Diversity Impact Assessment (EDIA); and designation of the timeline for steps toward finalizing the framework of the equity program, with reference to ongoing efforts synchronous with this new initiative.
The need for an equity framework was stated to be the elimination of racial predictability, development of racial and cultural skill, and the acceleration of student outcomes.
This verbiage was then tied to a stated Equity Policy 1304, which reads: “Embracing our diversity through inclusion creates an environment that leverages diversity and creates schools where students, families, community members, and employees feel welcomed, valued, and supported; and where students and staff can perform to their personal bests."
Clustered around the goal of equity, a graphic presented the following priorities: culturally linguistically responsive practices, inclusive and innovative systems, positive school-wide engagement, and effectively assessed quality core instruction and 21st century skills.
Matier and Block stated that they started by convening a group of “internal equity practitioners,” reviewing research and existing equity frameworks in the interest of developing a common understanding. They vow that they “committed to key elements of the framework” and then requested initial feedback from key community partners.
The “Draft for Educational Equity” was presented in triangular visualization placing “Collective Accountability” at the center, with “instructional transformation,” “personal transformation,” and “structural transformation” each located pictorially at one of the three angles. Then outside the triangle, on each of the three sides were given the values, “evidence-based research”; “families and communities”; and “integrated systems”; with “pedagogy of equity” topping the visual at the triangle’s apex.
These values then gained a bit of additional comment on another page with the heading, “Desired Outcomes for Systemic Change.“
Additional comment highlighted the following:
>>>>> “evidence-based policy, program, and practice,” so as to “integrate racial/ cultural competency in the development and implementation of systems to rapidly improve outcomes";
>>>>> "pedagogy of equity," so as to “ensure targeted groups access learning with the cultural and linguistic assets of students in mind";
>>>>> “integrated systems,” so as to “build and manage interdependent relationships that create and sustain adaptive systems to meet diverse needs” ;
>>>>> “families and communities as education partners,” so as to “normalize the inclusion of the perspectives of our families of color and American Indian communities to interrupt marginalization.”
The next steps in the process are given according to the following timetable:
Phase One
>>>>> April 2015-October 2015
>>>>> Identify Desired Outcomes
>>>>> Develop Draft Framework and Recommend Changes to EDIA
Phase Two
>>>>> November 2015-June 2016
>>>>> Stakeholder Groups Formed
>>>>> Action Plans Developed for Desired Outcomes
>>>>> EDIA Piloted, Feedback Collected, and Final Adjustments Made
Phase Three
>>>>> January 2016-June 2016
>>>>> Board Update on Equity Framework and EDIA (January and June)
>>>>> Board Training
>>>>> Equity Audit
The document and presentation ends with a citation of work that will continue, according to certain existing offices and programs: Racial Equity Institute/ Professional Development, Coaching for Equity, B.L.A.C.K. (not listed in the power-point, so that Block explained helpfully that this acronym stands for “Black Lives Acquiring Cultural Knowledge”), Ethnic Studies Courses, Social Justice Fellows, Vendor Diversity Work, and EDIA.
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Phew. That’s a lot of verbiage, which we can decode as follows:
Since we’ve got a raging achievement gap, we’re going to pretend one more time that we’re addressing a problem by creating a program. We created the Office of Black Male Achievement to no noticeable effect, but no matter. You, school board members; and you, the public; can be distracted as always from the problems at hand as we assure you that we are going to move forward with processes designed to make teachers, administrators, and people throughout the Minneapolis Public Schools more culturally sensitive. Even though we already have offices and highly paid personnel in place who should be reaching out to all parents and creating a climate that embraces ethnic diversity---- we’re really, really, really going to do it this time.
Really.
Really, really.
Really.
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
But school board members squirmed almost as much as I did during this presentation.
Each in her or his own, way, District Members Samuels, Bates, Asberry, Gagnon, Inz, Ali, and even Ellison and Arneson asked,
“But haven’t we heard this before? How will this program be measured more effectively, and don’t we already have the Equity and Diversity Impact Assessment (EDIA) for doing this? Do we really have the luxury of time?”
To the latter question, District Member Reimnitz noted, in essence, that the board had not itself been vigilant enough as to previous equity issues and needs now to give this new process time to work.
Bates, having been among the most forceful in objecting to the innocuous generality of the presentation by Matier and Block, agreed with Reimnitz that at this point the board did need to be patient, but with a heightened sense of vigilance.
To all questions, Matier and Block offered more banal bromides and empty rhetoric, with Interim Superintendent Goar chiming in to the prevailing atonality with his usual choral double-talk.
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
So again be reminded that
Educational equity results from three sources:
1) excellent education;
2) excellent teachers;
3) warm relationships with students and their families.
These sources of educational equity should be observable right now, and could be if we had the abiding components of an excellent education in place.
But since these components of an excellent education are not in place, and decision-makers at the Minneapolis Public Schools have not the vision to recognize educational excellence, the understanding of the teacher training necessary, or the empathic ability to reach out to students and families right where they live--- we are forever creating distractions that divert us from the pathway to educational excellence.
Thus it is that I have decided that the time is now for saying that the time is now. We cannot afford to wait.
Babies are dying.
Young people, especially young African American males, are headed disproportionately to prison.
Young African American female bodies are being sold.
Human beings of great potential are missing their chance in this one earthly sojourn for lives of cultural enrichment, civic preparedness, and professional satisfaction because we do not care enough.
But I intend to broadcast the message that all we need to do is get the right vision of an excellent education, apply the elbow grease necessary to realize the vision, and thus complete the last stage of the Civil Rights Movement.
Hence, we must have a revolution in K-12 education.
And for that to happen, you must look again in the mirror.
Understand this first, then, with regard to educational equity:
Educational equity results from three sources:
1) excellent education;
2) excellent teachers;
3) warm relationships with students and their families.
Hence, with this understanding, we have again the definitions for excellent education and excellent teachers, with a comment also on building relationships with students and their families
1)
An excellent education is a matter of excellent teachers imparting a rich liberal arts curriculum in math, natural science, history, economics, literature, and the fine arts in grade-by-grade sequence to all students throughout the K-12 years.
2) An excellent teacher is a professional of deep and broad knowledge with the pedagogical ability to impart that knowledge to all students.
When educational excellence (by definition including excellent teachers who, in turn by definition, have the ability to impart knowledge to all students) prevails, educational equity is attained. Therefore, we must set about specifying curriculum for each grade throughout the K-12 years, and we must at the central school district level retrain teachers capable of delivering the challenging, deep, and broad liberal arts curriculum to all students by the time they walk across the stage at high school graduation.
3)
An excellent teacher, building principal, and any central school district personnel responsible for imparting an education of excellence to all of our precious children, should have a high level of comfort in connecting with families of students, necessarily entailing comfort with people of numerous ethnicities and economic levels.
When families understand the steps that are being taken to ensure excellent education for their children, they will respond with gratitude. So we must make sure that all school district personnel are highly adept and sensitive as they establish connections and relationships with the families of the students for whom they have the sacred duty to provide an excellent education.
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Rather than focus on the delivery of excellent education in the context of excellent relationships with students and their families, Lanise Block and Kimberly (Kim) Matier delivered a jargon-infested travesty of banal generality as apparently the best that the Office of Academic Affairs at the Minneapolis Public Schools can promote as a program for achieving equity.
In their presentations, Matier and Block stuck closely to a power point document that stated goals for the presentation to be the provision of the rationale and history for achieving educational equity; explanation of this new effort’s relationship to an existing Equity and Diversity Impact Assessment (EDIA); and designation of the timeline for steps toward finalizing the framework of the equity program, with reference to ongoing efforts synchronous with this new initiative.
The need for an equity framework was stated to be the elimination of racial predictability, development of racial and cultural skill, and the acceleration of student outcomes.
This verbiage was then tied to a stated Equity Policy 1304, which reads: “Embracing our diversity through inclusion creates an environment that leverages diversity and creates schools where students, families, community members, and employees feel welcomed, valued, and supported; and where students and staff can perform to their personal bests."
Clustered around the goal of equity, a graphic presented the following priorities: culturally linguistically responsive practices, inclusive and innovative systems, positive school-wide engagement, and effectively assessed quality core instruction and 21st century skills.
Matier and Block stated that they started by convening a group of “internal equity practitioners,” reviewing research and existing equity frameworks in the interest of developing a common understanding. They vow that they “committed to key elements of the framework” and then requested initial feedback from key community partners.
The “Draft for Educational Equity” was presented in triangular visualization placing “Collective Accountability” at the center, with “instructional transformation,” “personal transformation,” and “structural transformation” each located pictorially at one of the three angles. Then outside the triangle, on each of the three sides were given the values, “evidence-based research”; “families and communities”; and “integrated systems”; with “pedagogy of equity” topping the visual at the triangle’s apex.
These values then gained a bit of additional comment on another page with the heading, “Desired Outcomes for Systemic Change.“
Additional comment highlighted the following:
>>>>> “evidence-based policy, program, and practice,” so as to “integrate racial/ cultural competency in the development and implementation of systems to rapidly improve outcomes";
>>>>> "pedagogy of equity," so as to “ensure targeted groups access learning with the cultural and linguistic assets of students in mind";
>>>>> “integrated systems,” so as to “build and manage interdependent relationships that create and sustain adaptive systems to meet diverse needs” ;
>>>>> “families and communities as education partners,” so as to “normalize the inclusion of the perspectives of our families of color and American Indian communities to interrupt marginalization.”
The next steps in the process are given according to the following timetable:
Phase One
>>>>> April 2015-October 2015
>>>>> Identify Desired Outcomes
>>>>> Develop Draft Framework and Recommend Changes to EDIA
Phase Two
>>>>> November 2015-June 2016
>>>>> Stakeholder Groups Formed
>>>>> Action Plans Developed for Desired Outcomes
>>>>> EDIA Piloted, Feedback Collected, and Final Adjustments Made
Phase Three
>>>>> January 2016-June 2016
>>>>> Board Update on Equity Framework and EDIA (January and June)
>>>>> Board Training
>>>>> Equity Audit
The document and presentation ends with a citation of work that will continue, according to certain existing offices and programs: Racial Equity Institute/ Professional Development, Coaching for Equity, B.L.A.C.K. (not listed in the power-point, so that Block explained helpfully that this acronym stands for “Black Lives Acquiring Cultural Knowledge”), Ethnic Studies Courses, Social Justice Fellows, Vendor Diversity Work, and EDIA.
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Phew. That’s a lot of verbiage, which we can decode as follows:
Since we’ve got a raging achievement gap, we’re going to pretend one more time that we’re addressing a problem by creating a program. We created the Office of Black Male Achievement to no noticeable effect, but no matter. You, school board members; and you, the public; can be distracted as always from the problems at hand as we assure you that we are going to move forward with processes designed to make teachers, administrators, and people throughout the Minneapolis Public Schools more culturally sensitive. Even though we already have offices and highly paid personnel in place who should be reaching out to all parents and creating a climate that embraces ethnic diversity---- we’re really, really, really going to do it this time.
Really.
Really, really.
Really.
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
But school board members squirmed almost as much as I did during this presentation.
Each in her or his own, way, District Members Samuels, Bates, Asberry, Gagnon, Inz, Ali, and even Ellison and Arneson asked,
“But haven’t we heard this before? How will this program be measured more effectively, and don’t we already have the Equity and Diversity Impact Assessment (EDIA) for doing this? Do we really have the luxury of time?”
To the latter question, District Member Reimnitz noted, in essence, that the board had not itself been vigilant enough as to previous equity issues and needs now to give this new process time to work.
Bates, having been among the most forceful in objecting to the innocuous generality of the presentation by Matier and Block, agreed with Reimnitz that at this point the board did need to be patient, but with a heightened sense of vigilance.
To all questions, Matier and Block offered more banal bromides and empty rhetoric, with Interim Superintendent Goar chiming in to the prevailing atonality with his usual choral double-talk.
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
So again be reminded that
Educational equity results from three sources:
1) excellent education;
2) excellent teachers;
3) warm relationships with students and their families.
These sources of educational equity should be observable right now, and could be if we had the abiding components of an excellent education in place.
But since these components of an excellent education are not in place, and decision-makers at the Minneapolis Public Schools have not the vision to recognize educational excellence, the understanding of the teacher training necessary, or the empathic ability to reach out to students and families right where they live--- we are forever creating distractions that divert us from the pathway to educational excellence.
Thus it is that I have decided that the time is now for saying that the time is now. We cannot afford to wait.
Babies are dying.
Young people, especially young African American males, are headed disproportionately to prison.
Young African American female bodies are being sold.
Human beings of great potential are missing their chance in this one earthly sojourn for lives of cultural enrichment, civic preparedness, and professional satisfaction because we do not care enough.
But I intend to broadcast the message that all we need to do is get the right vision of an excellent education, apply the elbow grease necessary to realize the vision, and thus complete the last stage of the Civil Rights Movement.
Hence, we must have a revolution in K-12 education.
And for that to happen, you must look again in the mirror.
Aug 11, 2015
The Multi-Culpability for Poor Quality K-12 Education in Minnesota and the United States
Many people and institutions are culpable with regard to the poor quality of K-12 education in the United States, very much including the incarnation of that beast in Minneapolis, Minnesota. For conditions are the same in central school districts across the nation, especially those serving students living at the urban core.
Among those culpable are the following institutions and people:
1) Universities >>>>> Departments, colleges, and schools of education are cash cows for institutions of would-be higher learning. Many folk campus-wide know that education professors are academic light-weights rendering atrocious teacher training to prospective teachers. But no one raises a voice for a multiplicity of reasons.
These reasons include the financial boon to the university for the tuition paid by students who are effectively buying their certification--- and, in application of salt to the wound, then buy advanced degrees in education unworthy of the appellations, “master’s” and “doctorates.” The latter not only secure pathways to higher pay in the degraded “step and lane” system, they also give the needed professional boost to those aspiring to administrative positions.
Also, university professors are smugly hypocritical with regard to K-12 education and the teachers who dwell therein. Most university professors do not have very clear notions of what constitutes an excellent education broadly construed, so they’re in a poor position to weigh in on pertinent matters. Yet they regard themselves as superior to those they obnoxiously dub, “schoolteachers.” Having a low level of understanding that knowledge, imparted for broad and deep internalization, is the essence of education--- university professors frequently sign off on the shibboleths of “critical thinking” and “lifelong learning.”
These same professorial hypocrites nevertheless love to rail about how students arrive to them math-deprived, reading-challenged, writing-deficient, and ignorant of all manner of subjects.
With regard to K-12 matters, there is hypocrisy and false hubris everywhere one turns in university departments and offices.
2) Churches and do-gooders
Churches collect a lot of money from church-folk, but very little of it goes to address the deepest needs of our own society. A lot it goes to church administration and then to select missionary efforts and to hot-topic international relief efforts. I am perpetually attune to the labor and funding that can be generated when hurricanes or famine strike far, far away--- but so little is done for needy people who may live either down the street or just a few feet away as the bird flies (say, across the Walker Art Museum from Lowry Hill, toward North Minneapolis).
And inasmuch as the overhaul of K-12 education is the paramount societal imperative of our time, church-folk give bare smidgeons of money and elbow grease to any activity that would ever produce the necessary transformation.
3) Politicians and the citizens who elect them
Politicians time after time use education issues to promote their own career aspirations.
But Democrats are bought and paid for by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) or the National Education Association (NEA)--- affiliations combined in Minnesota as Education Minnesota.
And Republicans are wildly inconsistent and chronically confused--- at one stage, for example, presenting themselves as supporters of No Child Left Behind and tough standards, then turning on that very program with the assertion of intrusive government.
And citizens clearly are variously selfish and muddled in their own views. Abused themselves in most instances by horrid public schools, they themselves are ill-educated and in no position to offer any instructive counsel on K-12 education. Yet these same citizens will weigh in on matters particularly pertinent to their own children, or arrogate to themselves an ability to run charter schools that they do not have.
Culpability for the atrocity that is K-12 education in Minnesota and in the United States is multiple.
If you are genuinely concerned about K-12 education and are seeking to find the source of its difficulty, take another look in that mirror.
Among those culpable are the following institutions and people:
1) Universities >>>>> Departments, colleges, and schools of education are cash cows for institutions of would-be higher learning. Many folk campus-wide know that education professors are academic light-weights rendering atrocious teacher training to prospective teachers. But no one raises a voice for a multiplicity of reasons.
These reasons include the financial boon to the university for the tuition paid by students who are effectively buying their certification--- and, in application of salt to the wound, then buy advanced degrees in education unworthy of the appellations, “master’s” and “doctorates.” The latter not only secure pathways to higher pay in the degraded “step and lane” system, they also give the needed professional boost to those aspiring to administrative positions.
Also, university professors are smugly hypocritical with regard to K-12 education and the teachers who dwell therein. Most university professors do not have very clear notions of what constitutes an excellent education broadly construed, so they’re in a poor position to weigh in on pertinent matters. Yet they regard themselves as superior to those they obnoxiously dub, “schoolteachers.” Having a low level of understanding that knowledge, imparted for broad and deep internalization, is the essence of education--- university professors frequently sign off on the shibboleths of “critical thinking” and “lifelong learning.”
These same professorial hypocrites nevertheless love to rail about how students arrive to them math-deprived, reading-challenged, writing-deficient, and ignorant of all manner of subjects.
With regard to K-12 matters, there is hypocrisy and false hubris everywhere one turns in university departments and offices.
2) Churches and do-gooders
Churches collect a lot of money from church-folk, but very little of it goes to address the deepest needs of our own society. A lot it goes to church administration and then to select missionary efforts and to hot-topic international relief efforts. I am perpetually attune to the labor and funding that can be generated when hurricanes or famine strike far, far away--- but so little is done for needy people who may live either down the street or just a few feet away as the bird flies (say, across the Walker Art Museum from Lowry Hill, toward North Minneapolis).
And inasmuch as the overhaul of K-12 education is the paramount societal imperative of our time, church-folk give bare smidgeons of money and elbow grease to any activity that would ever produce the necessary transformation.
3) Politicians and the citizens who elect them
Politicians time after time use education issues to promote their own career aspirations.
But Democrats are bought and paid for by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) or the National Education Association (NEA)--- affiliations combined in Minnesota as Education Minnesota.
And Republicans are wildly inconsistent and chronically confused--- at one stage, for example, presenting themselves as supporters of No Child Left Behind and tough standards, then turning on that very program with the assertion of intrusive government.
And citizens clearly are variously selfish and muddled in their own views. Abused themselves in most instances by horrid public schools, they themselves are ill-educated and in no position to offer any instructive counsel on K-12 education. Yet these same citizens will weigh in on matters particularly pertinent to their own children, or arrogate to themselves an ability to run charter schools that they do not have.
Culpability for the atrocity that is K-12 education in Minnesota and in the United States is multiple.
If you are genuinely concerned about K-12 education and are seeking to find the source of its difficulty, take another look in that mirror.
Aug 7, 2015
For the Face of the K-12 Revolution, You Must Look in the Mirror
I have come in painful steps toward the most definite conclusion that there is no existing entity outside myself that can lead the way toward the complete overhaul of K-12 education that we need.
I have as my first responsibility superintending all aspects--- including teaching--- of the New Salem Educational Initiative, a program of total academic support for students living at the urban core of Minneapolis. My program now includes 125 students and family members receiving teaching, mentoring, resource referrals, and many other items of my personal attention. I teach seven days a week, conducting small-group academic sessions (three to five students per group, with a few two-hour slots set aside for just one student). I instruct students of all ages, from Grade K (kindergarten) through Grade 12, and now continue mentoring and academic instruction to those students who have graduated from high school and are matriculating at colleges and universities. I also have several adults in the program, mostly parents of students seeking to burnish and boost their English language skills or get the K-12 education that they never really received so that they can improve their career position or go on to college. That would all be quite enough, so I’d be most grateful if someone else would lead the effort to overhaul K-12 education.
But I have discovered the following:
>>>>> Michelle Rhee (former Chancellor of the Washington, D. C., public schools and now heading StudentsFirst) cannot lead the overhaul. She is more comfortable sporting those foot-damaging high heels, overlaid with that cosmetic fraud dubbed “make-up,” sitting with would-be or actual powerbrokers in big-shot settings, than she is going into the trenches where real education change must happen. Rhee closed down the Minnesota chapter of Students First and her Minnesota point person (Kathy Saltzman) has been very quiet ever since.
Elsewhere >>>>>
>>>>> Joe Nathan has been directing the Center for School Change for about 20 years. He is primarily an advocate for ineffectual charter schools--- and very little has changed for the better.
>>>>> Daniel Sellars at MinnCAN claims great shakes for his organization, but it works at the state capital level for the most part, much in the manner of StudentsFirst. Anytime there is any sort of legislation that can be construed to move the education reform effort forward, MinnCAN claims the same credit that Students First and other such organizations claim.
These organizations accomplish very little from the tower, never going into the trenches, trying to change K-12 education through legislation, rather than by pressuring systems as they exist to do what they should be doing.
>>>>> There are a number of gadflies on the education change scene who sing the same tired songs in slightly different verses time after time.
>>> Ted Kolderie sings the song of innovation, with very little specificity.
>>> Dane Smith recently seemed to audition for the Kolderie chorus.
>>> Mitch Pearlstein (head of the Center of the American Experiment [not just for the experiment, mind you, but at the very center of the experiment] in Minneapolis) considers himself an “education guy” on the strength of a degree that bears the word, “education.” But the guy has only one, really bad, idea: “We must fix the family first.” (This reminds me of Henry Kissinger, who fooled legions of politicos with his mysteriously lingering German accent, and one idea: balance of power, a la the Austrian Prince Metternich at the Congress of Vienna [1814-1815].) And Pearlstein’s single idea is absurd, because in fact we must first overhaul K-12 education so that familial cycles of poverty end and historically abused families may heal.
>>> R. T. Rybak spent 12 years as mayor, then said effectively, “Oh, wow, I should have been doing more about K-12 education,” then settled into a cushy job at Generation Next, which thus far has supposedly done studies about the K-12 dilemma and offered a few ideas related to early childhood education and the importance of reading in the early grades--- as if we really needed a lot of research to understand that one.
And that really homes in on the main point. We don’t need a whole bunch of new research to know what to do in conducting the K-12 revolution. We need instead applications of logic and elbow grease to accomplish the following:
We need to set about defining a rich, highly sequenced, grade-by grade K-12 curriculum in the liberal and technical arts.
And we need to train the teachers capable of imparting that curriculum, because our wretched departments, colleges, and schools of education can never do so.
So I have set about pressuring the Minneapolis Public Schools to do these things, by launching a new academic journal (Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota); premiering a new television show (The K-12 Revolution with Dr. Gary Marvin Davison, televised Wednesdays at 6:00 PM on Channel 17 or streaming in real time on the MTN [Minneapolis Telecommunications Network] and found also at Holy4Grace, YouTube), and speaking frequently at public venues, including the monthly meetings of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education.
I am also five chapters into the writing of my ninth book, Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education, to enable me to deliver with ever greater efficiency to my students in their two hours per week with me the education that they are not receiving during their 30-35 hours or so in their regular schools of attendance.
I am doing these things, in addition to teaching 17 two-hour academic sessions over the course of a seven-day week, because no one else is advocating for the needed changes in K-12 education. The situation became a matter of, “If not me, who? If not now, when?”
So know that if you really want to change K-12 education, you cannot count on the numerous gadflies flitting about the real issues:
You can support my efforts (I am not hard to find in this technologically route-laden age), or you can start to make something like the time commitment that I make by starting your own street-level, in-the-meetings-and-at-the-venues approach that I have adopted.
Either way, you must look in the mirror and know that when it comes to change in K-12 education, you are both the problem and the potential solution.
No more studies---
Just logic and elbow grease---
You yourselves must get to work to revolutionize K-12 education, overturn the injustice of history, and make a better world for young people and families who have been waiting for decades and even centuries for the change that must come.
I have as my first responsibility superintending all aspects--- including teaching--- of the New Salem Educational Initiative, a program of total academic support for students living at the urban core of Minneapolis. My program now includes 125 students and family members receiving teaching, mentoring, resource referrals, and many other items of my personal attention. I teach seven days a week, conducting small-group academic sessions (three to five students per group, with a few two-hour slots set aside for just one student). I instruct students of all ages, from Grade K (kindergarten) through Grade 12, and now continue mentoring and academic instruction to those students who have graduated from high school and are matriculating at colleges and universities. I also have several adults in the program, mostly parents of students seeking to burnish and boost their English language skills or get the K-12 education that they never really received so that they can improve their career position or go on to college. That would all be quite enough, so I’d be most grateful if someone else would lead the effort to overhaul K-12 education.
But I have discovered the following:
>>>>> Michelle Rhee (former Chancellor of the Washington, D. C., public schools and now heading StudentsFirst) cannot lead the overhaul. She is more comfortable sporting those foot-damaging high heels, overlaid with that cosmetic fraud dubbed “make-up,” sitting with would-be or actual powerbrokers in big-shot settings, than she is going into the trenches where real education change must happen. Rhee closed down the Minnesota chapter of Students First and her Minnesota point person (Kathy Saltzman) has been very quiet ever since.
Elsewhere >>>>>
>>>>> Joe Nathan has been directing the Center for School Change for about 20 years. He is primarily an advocate for ineffectual charter schools--- and very little has changed for the better.
>>>>> Daniel Sellars at MinnCAN claims great shakes for his organization, but it works at the state capital level for the most part, much in the manner of StudentsFirst. Anytime there is any sort of legislation that can be construed to move the education reform effort forward, MinnCAN claims the same credit that Students First and other such organizations claim.
These organizations accomplish very little from the tower, never going into the trenches, trying to change K-12 education through legislation, rather than by pressuring systems as they exist to do what they should be doing.
>>>>> There are a number of gadflies on the education change scene who sing the same tired songs in slightly different verses time after time.
>>> Ted Kolderie sings the song of innovation, with very little specificity.
>>> Dane Smith recently seemed to audition for the Kolderie chorus.
>>> Mitch Pearlstein (head of the Center of the American Experiment [not just for the experiment, mind you, but at the very center of the experiment] in Minneapolis) considers himself an “education guy” on the strength of a degree that bears the word, “education.” But the guy has only one, really bad, idea: “We must fix the family first.” (This reminds me of Henry Kissinger, who fooled legions of politicos with his mysteriously lingering German accent, and one idea: balance of power, a la the Austrian Prince Metternich at the Congress of Vienna [1814-1815].) And Pearlstein’s single idea is absurd, because in fact we must first overhaul K-12 education so that familial cycles of poverty end and historically abused families may heal.
>>> R. T. Rybak spent 12 years as mayor, then said effectively, “Oh, wow, I should have been doing more about K-12 education,” then settled into a cushy job at Generation Next, which thus far has supposedly done studies about the K-12 dilemma and offered a few ideas related to early childhood education and the importance of reading in the early grades--- as if we really needed a lot of research to understand that one.
And that really homes in on the main point. We don’t need a whole bunch of new research to know what to do in conducting the K-12 revolution. We need instead applications of logic and elbow grease to accomplish the following:
We need to set about defining a rich, highly sequenced, grade-by grade K-12 curriculum in the liberal and technical arts.
And we need to train the teachers capable of imparting that curriculum, because our wretched departments, colleges, and schools of education can never do so.
So I have set about pressuring the Minneapolis Public Schools to do these things, by launching a new academic journal (Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota); premiering a new television show (The K-12 Revolution with Dr. Gary Marvin Davison, televised Wednesdays at 6:00 PM on Channel 17 or streaming in real time on the MTN [Minneapolis Telecommunications Network] and found also at Holy4Grace, YouTube), and speaking frequently at public venues, including the monthly meetings of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education.
I am also five chapters into the writing of my ninth book, Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education, to enable me to deliver with ever greater efficiency to my students in their two hours per week with me the education that they are not receiving during their 30-35 hours or so in their regular schools of attendance.
I am doing these things, in addition to teaching 17 two-hour academic sessions over the course of a seven-day week, because no one else is advocating for the needed changes in K-12 education. The situation became a matter of, “If not me, who? If not now, when?”
So know that if you really want to change K-12 education, you cannot count on the numerous gadflies flitting about the real issues:
You can support my efforts (I am not hard to find in this technologically route-laden age), or you can start to make something like the time commitment that I make by starting your own street-level, in-the-meetings-and-at-the-venues approach that I have adopted.
Either way, you must look in the mirror and know that when it comes to change in K-12 education, you are both the problem and the potential solution.
No more studies---
Just logic and elbow grease---
You yourselves must get to work to revolutionize K-12 education, overturn the injustice of history, and make a better world for young people and families who have been waiting for decades and even centuries for the change that must come.
Aug 3, 2015
The Immature Provincialism of Dane Smith
As if channeling Ted Kolderie, Dane Smith gave us another muddled and provincial presentation of opinion in the Sunday, 2 August 2015, edition of the Star Tribune.
Smith cites several “educational partnership groups” working with the education establishment to improve K-12 education. These groups include the Itaska Area Initiative for Student Success, Partnership for Student Success (St. Cloud and Sauk Rapids), Northfield Promise, Promise Neighborhoods (Northside Minneapolis and St. Paul), Generation Next (Minneapolis and St. Paul), and Every Hand Joined (Red Wing). He’s all excited about and makes excessive claims for the potential of these unproven and nascent groups--- the existence of which play into Smith’s false assumptions about “ordinary people” at the local level being the best sources for ideas on educational improvement--- offering routes to success for the students within their spheres of action.
Smith is also energized by an Aspen Ideas Festival appearance by author (Bowling Alone [2000]; Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis [2015]) Robert Putnam, at which the latter perpetuated the myth that great education movements typically don’t flow from Washington, D. C.
So Dane Smith is animated by the usual errors typically emanating from most of our Twin Cities pontificators and promulgators on K-12 education issues:
There have been few great education movements of any sort in the United States, so no source--- local or federal--- has been all that seminally insightful. The few decent and socially responsible ideas that we have had in this nation have emanated from a mix of individual, local, and federal sources, but have all required at least the legislative approval and the budgetary backing of the federal government. Such legislation has resulted in our K-12 schools having greater accessibility and equity across lines of ethnicity, economic status, and gender.
But neither local nor federal initiative has done much to make of K-12 schools in the United States effective institutions for the delivery of an excellent education. The best school systems in the world, revealed by such international rankings as PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment), are highly centralized at the national level, with curriculum well-defined across both the liberal and vocational arts, and with teacher qualifications rigorously detailed for reference by teacher training programs across each nation. These best public education systems tend to be situated in East Asia (South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore [located in Southeast Asia but fundamentally a Chinese-led society]) and northern Europe (Germany and the Scandinavian nations (of most recent note, Finland]).
Hence, the assertion that the best ideas bubble up from local communities inhabited by “ordinary people” is nonsense. This is no more true for education than it is for health care, another area of human service toward which the United States is engaged in a comparative crawl toward the sort of universal systems that work best for the most people across the globe. People in the United States are so inured with the illusions of rugged individualism and local control that they fail to observe that the fairest and most equitable governments in the world are those that are either of the democratic socialist type or those that have a history of central government involvement and have in contemporary times borrowed intelligently from the social democracies.
The problem with the Dane Smith and Ted Kolderie types is that they are reticent to be adults capable of emerging from their provincial perspectives.
Young people deserve instead to have adults making decisions about K-12 education who are willing to say, “This is what all of you need to know about mathematics, natural science (biology, chemistry, physics), history, government, economics, literature, and the fine (visual and musical) arts.”
And they deserve to have well-informed people making key decisions affecting their lives who actually understand the best systems for health care and educational delivery from an international perspective--- people willing to assert themselves as adults. Mature internationalists making decisions that affect our precious young people have an obligation to convey the clear message that well-informed citizens must have training in shared knowledge and skill sets in order to be culturally enriched, civically prepared, and professionally satisfied to live life to the fullest in this one earthly sojourn--- regardless of original economic and geographic circumstances at birth.
Inasmuch as many high-profile people in our society dwell in fame that far exceeds the significance of their deeds, I do not make the distinction that the shallow-thinking Dane Smith makes between “ordinary people” and those presumably less “ordinary.” I revere most, rather, those of low profile who transform the world for the better every day their feet hit the ground. It will be these people, rather than the Dane Smiths and the Ted Kolderies of this world, who will eventually apply the elbow grease necessary to revolutionize central school districts such as the Minneapolis Public Schools.
Courageous activists will be forced to start at this level because they live in a nation in which the promise of “local control” is proven false by the weighty achievements of students in the best public education systems in the world, located in highly centralized social democracies. Using the central school system as a surrogate for the central government, extraordinary low-profile education activists will aim toward the ultimate goal of inaugurating nation-wide curriculum and standards for teacher training.
In so doing, these low-profile change-makers will reveal in their efforts a maturity and worldliness in the best interests of the young people whose futures are their adult responsibility. The rising generation of citizens is awaiting genuine rather than merely chronological adults capable of showing them the way toward an education of excellence--- an education capable of giving them the lives of cultural enrichment, civic preparation, and professional satisfaction that they deserve in this one earthly sojourn.
Smith cites several “educational partnership groups” working with the education establishment to improve K-12 education. These groups include the Itaska Area Initiative for Student Success, Partnership for Student Success (St. Cloud and Sauk Rapids), Northfield Promise, Promise Neighborhoods (Northside Minneapolis and St. Paul), Generation Next (Minneapolis and St. Paul), and Every Hand Joined (Red Wing). He’s all excited about and makes excessive claims for the potential of these unproven and nascent groups--- the existence of which play into Smith’s false assumptions about “ordinary people” at the local level being the best sources for ideas on educational improvement--- offering routes to success for the students within their spheres of action.
Smith is also energized by an Aspen Ideas Festival appearance by author (Bowling Alone [2000]; Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis [2015]) Robert Putnam, at which the latter perpetuated the myth that great education movements typically don’t flow from Washington, D. C.
So Dane Smith is animated by the usual errors typically emanating from most of our Twin Cities pontificators and promulgators on K-12 education issues:
There have been few great education movements of any sort in the United States, so no source--- local or federal--- has been all that seminally insightful. The few decent and socially responsible ideas that we have had in this nation have emanated from a mix of individual, local, and federal sources, but have all required at least the legislative approval and the budgetary backing of the federal government. Such legislation has resulted in our K-12 schools having greater accessibility and equity across lines of ethnicity, economic status, and gender.
But neither local nor federal initiative has done much to make of K-12 schools in the United States effective institutions for the delivery of an excellent education. The best school systems in the world, revealed by such international rankings as PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment), are highly centralized at the national level, with curriculum well-defined across both the liberal and vocational arts, and with teacher qualifications rigorously detailed for reference by teacher training programs across each nation. These best public education systems tend to be situated in East Asia (South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore [located in Southeast Asia but fundamentally a Chinese-led society]) and northern Europe (Germany and the Scandinavian nations (of most recent note, Finland]).
Hence, the assertion that the best ideas bubble up from local communities inhabited by “ordinary people” is nonsense. This is no more true for education than it is for health care, another area of human service toward which the United States is engaged in a comparative crawl toward the sort of universal systems that work best for the most people across the globe. People in the United States are so inured with the illusions of rugged individualism and local control that they fail to observe that the fairest and most equitable governments in the world are those that are either of the democratic socialist type or those that have a history of central government involvement and have in contemporary times borrowed intelligently from the social democracies.
The problem with the Dane Smith and Ted Kolderie types is that they are reticent to be adults capable of emerging from their provincial perspectives.
Young people deserve instead to have adults making decisions about K-12 education who are willing to say, “This is what all of you need to know about mathematics, natural science (biology, chemistry, physics), history, government, economics, literature, and the fine (visual and musical) arts.”
And they deserve to have well-informed people making key decisions affecting their lives who actually understand the best systems for health care and educational delivery from an international perspective--- people willing to assert themselves as adults. Mature internationalists making decisions that affect our precious young people have an obligation to convey the clear message that well-informed citizens must have training in shared knowledge and skill sets in order to be culturally enriched, civically prepared, and professionally satisfied to live life to the fullest in this one earthly sojourn--- regardless of original economic and geographic circumstances at birth.
Inasmuch as many high-profile people in our society dwell in fame that far exceeds the significance of their deeds, I do not make the distinction that the shallow-thinking Dane Smith makes between “ordinary people” and those presumably less “ordinary.” I revere most, rather, those of low profile who transform the world for the better every day their feet hit the ground. It will be these people, rather than the Dane Smiths and the Ted Kolderies of this world, who will eventually apply the elbow grease necessary to revolutionize central school districts such as the Minneapolis Public Schools.
Courageous activists will be forced to start at this level because they live in a nation in which the promise of “local control” is proven false by the weighty achievements of students in the best public education systems in the world, located in highly centralized social democracies. Using the central school system as a surrogate for the central government, extraordinary low-profile education activists will aim toward the ultimate goal of inaugurating nation-wide curriculum and standards for teacher training.
In so doing, these low-profile change-makers will reveal in their efforts a maturity and worldliness in the best interests of the young people whose futures are their adult responsibility. The rising generation of citizens is awaiting genuine rather than merely chronological adults capable of showing them the way toward an education of excellence--- an education capable of giving them the lives of cultural enrichment, civic preparation, and professional satisfaction that they deserve in this one earthly sojourn.
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