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Never Forget

May 28, 2012 7:19 am \ 1 Comment \ by Ray Watkins

The report I reviewed [“Do Our Public Schools Threaten National Security?‘] was written by a task force chaired by Joel Klein and Condaleeza Rice. I believe the report is part of a campaign to undermine public education. Public education needs constant improvement, of that there can be no doubt. But it does not need to be disparaged and demeaned as a national security threat.

As I say in the review, the real threat to our future is growing poverty and income inequality and intensifying racial isolation. The report mentions these issues but fails to offer any suggestions to reduce their negative impact on our society.

“Stop the Campaign Against Public Schools!” Diane Ravitch

It’s time to demand a new model: classrooms that eschew rote memorization and test prep; teachers with the power to implement effective and flexible teaching strategies; students who are connected to their teachers and love to learn. Policymakers will find it hard to argue with that.

‘Is this really what education is about?’ Valerie Strauss

It’s Memorial Day, and I suppose I ought to be writing something about my father, who drove a tank in WWII, and died of a heart attack in 1982. He’s buried in the National Cemetery in Houston, Texas. It’s a very moving place and it’s exactly where he ought to be buried. He was proud of his service. I have to say, though, that even a few days of memorializing soldiers is very depressing. It doesn’t make me feel in any way patriotic, or grateful; it makes me feel that I live in world whose history is long chain of brutal collective violence.

It also reminds me that my Dad , and many of his generation, felt that social development and education, not violence, was the only long-term solution to authoritarianism and fascism. Ironically, but perhaps not surprisingly, the ideology of the standardized test, deeply rooted in eugenics, has ties to the same racist nationalism that has fed so many conflicts. Then, as now, some sought an objective proof of superiority; the shift from defining race to determining merit is mercurial at best, a supremacist slight of hand at worst.

We don’t need the standardized test or its attendant distortions of classroom practice– and wars against collective bargaining– to pursue the long-term goal that was so important to men like my father. There are lots of alternatives, all of them related in some fashion to a projects approach of the sort outlined in “A Step-by-Step Guide to the Best Projects.” (A petition to end the over use of standardized testing is here, too.) A revitalized system of public education would be the best memorial to collective sacrifices.

Posted in: Autobiographical, Miscellaneous, Professional

Dala “Levi Blues”

May 25, 2012 5:00 am \ Leave a Comment \ by Ray Watkins

Posted in: Writing

Imagine

May 23, 2012 9:34 am \ Leave a Comment \ by Ray Watkins

For some time now, the general trend on our nation’s campuses has pointed toward the elimination of traditional core courses in the history and culture of Western civilization, in favor of alternative canons or no requirements at all.

Fortunately, there are exceptions to the rule, and the past few years have seen commendable efforts by professors who have set up programs in the study of Western civilization at their institutions. The American Freedom Alliance, a nonpartisan, nonpolitical organization in California, which, according to its mission, “promotes, defends and upholds Western values and ideals,” has awarded its annual Heroes of Conscience Award to five such courageous professors…

ACTA, “Congratulations to the five Heroes of Conscience!”

Imagine dredged up some half baked Romantic notions and presented a vision of a world free of conflict. Attached to an ethereal melody it seem to float in a sea of mysticism, painting a picture of a utopia that most Communist leaders in the 1970s would have recognized.

Avi Davis, “What John Lennon Failed to Imagine” (“This Week’s Editorial” from the American Freedom Alliance)

I’m not certain that we can know someone well by knowing their friends, but I find this pairing interesting and, perhaps, symptomatic, as we used to say. On the face of it, this notion of “saving the study of Western Civilization” seems a little loopy. It’s a little like saying that we need to make sure that there are white people on television.

The real problem, of course, isn’t that “the study of Western Civilization” is fading away, it’s that certain things that were once very important to a certain segment of academia, now fading into retirement– Shakespeare is the perennial and tedious example– are not as important to many contemporary academics. Among other things it’s what was once called a “generation gap.”

It’s in this vein that the ACTA fancies itself a guardian of “Western Civilization”– as long as “Western Civilization” means William Shakespeare more than Toni Morrison. “Western Civilization” is often (polite) right-wing short hand for “White dominated American culture.” ACTA prefers the language of the former– the politely coded and euphemistic right– rather than the latter.

They apparently feel real kinship with the less-than-polite right, though, including Avi Davis, who believes that we have to recognize the link between today’s peace movement and John Lennon’s song, which “naïvely” endorses “the notion that we can embrace those sworn to our destruction in a ‘brotherhood of man.’” That’s communism, not “Western Civilization.”

Lennon’s ideal, of course, is Biblical (aka “the second great commandment“), an irony that he could not have missed, even if it escapes Davis, and linked to Gandhi and Martin Luther King, among other half-bakers. Davis, whom the ACTA suggest–sans irony, one supposes– is a “hero of conscious,” calls it “a chimera reflecting nothing more than an irresponsible failure of imagination.”