4 things

• Wilkerson pegs the lack of ideology with McCain and Obama with

  McCain doctrine and Obama doctrine for use of force in humanitarian situations: Obama: There might be moral issues at stake. Surely we should stop Holocaust. Rwanda. Standing idly by diminishes us. Basically, I have no principle. I leave it at the discretion of my evolved moral intuition.

  Why do we have to guess what these people want to do?
  
• This graphic gets it right
• Death to the Four Year Degree - I've felt this way for a while actually.
  
• And we need this guy back again
  
  

Quote of the moment

I was perusing Marginal Revolution (about vouchers) and came across this comment

In other words, even if a child’s chance of going to the state university is not increased by his new school, the kid’s chance of ending up in the state penitentiary is radically decreased. This consideration might not be of primary concern to many who support vouchers, but to those who live in the ghetto, it is of PRIMARY concern. Schools, more than anything, breed gangs. Like the projects of old, when you are FORCED to a geographical location, you make gang recruiting easier - and your kids chances of entering the prison system that much greater.

I saw a lecture by Nobel Laureate James Buchanan many years ago and before he veered off into pure math he said that there were three types of social organization, which he dubbed (something like this anyway), the closed circle, the open circle, and the broken circle. The closed circle is a prison, the open is free association, specifically where members have the right to exit and the right to exile rouge members and the broken circle, which is no association at all.

The Buchanan point came to mind...

A civics quiz

I got this from Megan McArdle, it's the Civic Literacy Quiz!

I scored 57 out of 60 correctly — 95.00 %!

How about y'all?

Bashing the education system

Reading the AJC's education articles are always a source of malicious fun for me. The articles can be tedious, but the forums are always fun. For some reason people like to pretend that if only we could crack down on some group (the parents, the taxpayer, the students) the problem would solve itself. Grammar and spelling tend to leave quickly as well. This one was my favorite

I'm a career educator with more graduate degrees that the detractors of public education.

Let's put it in a sports analogy so the neo-luddites can understand, break the legs of the starting offense of the GA Bulldogs and complain about why thy can't win a championship.

He starts off with a misspelling, and then misuses "Luddite". Luddite is a proper name, and has no sports meaning.

When one thinks about it, it's amazing public education works as well as it does. When you have a system where the producer, the consumer and the financier are all different people, why should it work at all?

One other thing that annoys me is the pejorative refrain of "teaching to the test". Of course, teachers should teach to the test the same way drivers should "drive to the road" and cops should "enforce to the law". That's their job after all.

As I'm in rant mode, I suppose I'll share the other annoying shibboleth of the teaching establishment, which is saying someone is a good student "but doesn't test well" which is like saying someone is very tall, "but doesn't measure well".

Reason #93,843 for private schools

This is quite weird

Teachers Stage Fake Gun Attack on Kids
MURFREESBORO, Tenn. — Staff members of an elementary school staged a fictitious gun attack on students during a class trip, telling them it was not a drill as the children cried and hid under tables.

The mock attack Thursday night was intended as a learning experience and lasted five minutes during the weeklong trip to a state park, said Scales Elementary School Assistant Principal Don Bartch, who led the trip.

"We got together and discussed what we would have done in a real situation," he said.

Fun with education

While it's strange that the priests of the education establishment always maintain that the presence of middle and upper class students helps out lower-class students, what is actually most interesting about this article is that the misspellings of "lose" (as in not win) are equal to it's correct spellings (3 apiece).

Well put

From Dr Sowell

It is a shame that ancient history is seldom taught in our schools. Finding out that people thousands of years ago were basically pretty much the way they are today — people of every race, color, creed, national origin, political ideology and sexual orientation — would reduce our chances of having Utopian hopes for big changes any time soon.

Friday rapid fire

• Assess your risks! - this is the first time I've said this, but there is a very good series over at the Daily Kos about disaster preparedness
• Pay for blog pay rates
• Texas Emergency Management blog - oddly enough I've heard of this guy before. Good stuff, he quotes Clausewitz with

  Everything is very simple in war, but the simplest thing is difficult. These difficulties accumulate and produce a friction, which no man can imagine exactly who has not seen war...
  
  Friction is the only conception which, in a general way, corresponds to that which distinguishes real war from war on paper. The military machine, the army and all belonging to it, is in fact simple; and appears, on this account, easy to manage. But let us reflect that no part of it is in one piece, that it is composed entirely of individuals, each of which keeps up its own friction in all directions...
  
  This enormous friction, which is not concentrated, as in mechanics, at a few points, is therefore everywhere brought into contact with chance, and thus facts take place upon which it was impossible to calculate, their chief origin being chance, As an instance of one such chance, take the weather...

  
  Which is a quote well worthy of reflection.
  
• GreenPeace vs Kennedys - about time.
• An oldie but a goodie by one of my favorite lefties, David Corn, about the infrastructure of the modern anti-war movement.
• Federalism RIP - mandatory evacuations of pets? debated in the US Senate.
• In this rather ordinary column by Steven Moore in Opinion Journal, he does the math and finds that the current numbers currently slated to be spent on Katrina work out to $400,000 to every family displaced by Katrina.
  
• The AJC on school "Resegregation" - Education central planners are a plague upon our society, a quote

  Typically in New York, they'll go to a high school in which there are 4,000 kids, all black and Latino except for maybe 10 whites and 15 Asian kids, and they'll say, "This is a diverse population, with many minorities." Diverse has come to be a euphemism for segregated. And when they say many minorities, it's very deceptive to readers, as if these were Albanians. No, these are apartheid schools. But if you won't name reality, you can't change it.

  Why does anyone take these people seriously, let alone regard them as humanitarians? They want to micromanage society in ways that Mussolini only dreamed about, but they precede it with 5 fuzzy adjectives and they're heroes.
• Kaus has a nice post about the serious and long-term effects of the Davis-Bacon Act
• Chris Nolan has an incoherent post in favor of (as near as I can tell) inertia and the status quo. The criticism she replies to does seem to be very valid though.
  

Hehe. I do a spell check and the spell checker wants to replace Micromanage with "necromancer".

Thought of the moment

A random notion I had while walking Drex (and mind you this just throwing out an idea)

Three True Points:

• The internet has made educational material very, very cheap, realistically the only cost is time.
• The return on human capital (brains) is at an all time high and climbing
• It is easier to learn points of fact via the web than it is to learn matters of mathematical principle and logic
  

Therefore we should stop teaching the following in the lower grades:

• History
• Literature
• Anything labeled "Social Studies"
• Applied Science

Why not concentrate the classroom time into learning grammar, logic/science and math? The student has due incentive to learn all of the subjects excised from the classroom, and it would not be filtered though our complicated education bureaucracy.

Thoughts anyone? I do realize that this would not be an issue if education were properly privatized.