eye of the storm

our greatest nightmare is that terrorists might obtain nuclear weapons, perhaps when the government of pakistan collapses into an incomprehensible heap of slag, though it might actually be difficult to tell when or whether that has occurred. i don't negotiate with terrorists! but if i couldn't stop them anyway and if they would accept hostess twinkies in exchange for some input on the target list, i'd nudge them toward the department of "education."

sorry no blogging of late. for me, i've been kind of furiously busy. 

at any rate i like the idea that obama's telling kids they are responsible for their own education. seems obviously true, and bizarrely out of keeping with his educational program and the entire discourse about education in our culture, but there it is. really our whole idea is to interrupt or actually destroy any taint of individual responsibility or identity in our children. on this, we are unanimous.

you can't be non-stop gung-ho for keeping people in an utterly authoritarian context, and then also hold them responsible for the results. if you wanted to inculcate individual responsibility, you needed to reverse direction entirely a hundred years ago or so.

surely schools are good at absolutely anything compared to their ability to teach individual responsibility. they're more effective at nurturing an extreme ethic of concealment, even as they try to encourage a culture of anonymous denunciation of others etc. and of course what you're subjected to in terms of actual subject-matter is standardized across all individuals, and the behavioral goals are uniformity, silence, and detailed control over people's movements and expressions to achieve homogeneity. 

if you then come back with "and you are responsible for your own education," you must be speaking...ironically?

well the first thing i'd do is eliminate the department of education and remove the matter entirely from the purview of the federal government.if god did not intend us to vaporize the department of education, why did He invent high explosives?

some things are simply unforgivable here in obamaworld, such as failing to put your education system wholly at the service of test scores.

here's the basic problem with...all political positions, more or less. let's say that you have some really good ideas about how the future should be. and let's leave out of consideration your fallibility, and just stipulate that these are, really, good ideas. it's a further assertion, and does not follow trivially, that you should seize and wield political power sufficient to realize these goals. and whether the idea with all the mechanisms needed to enforce it is still a good idea is an open question. education is good and important, and is basically to be articulated in a no child left behind kind of way. this is wrong. but say it was obviously right. now would it follow that you should not allow high school dropouts to drive? or that you should triple taxes and invest them in schools? or that you should remove truants from their families? well, no. not at all: a thousand other considerations, policies, values, budgets are engaged.

now partly this is a matter of figuring out what the priorities are among competing agendas, or the effectiveness or cost/benefit or unforeseen consequences, of a particular policy. but it also raises  fundamental matters of value: to what extent does implementing this idea compromise freedom or whatever else you might value? what does it imply about power relations in the culture? if you thought that essentially no policy passes this test - that the power required to implement an idea was never sufficiently justified by the outcome, then you'd be an anarchist. for example, since every implementation of every policy legitimates power inequalities and expands them, you might think no political program could be justified.

but it's also a basic problem within mainstream politics: you just nod along going: health care, energy independence, environment, education. but what resources are necessary and to what extent are these in competition? and what powers are you consituting and what might be done with them in...the palin administration?

the casual totalitarianism of the technocrat:

I was at a conference in St. Petersburg, Russia, a few weeks ago and interviewed Craig Barrett, the former chairman of Intel, about how America should get out of its current economic crisis. His first proposal was this: Any American kid who wants to get a driver’s license has to finish high school. No diploma — no license. Hey, why would we want to put a kid who can barely add, read or write behind the wheel of a car?

let me briefly enumerate some of the ways this is wrong. first of all, it does not follow from the fact that you didn't finish high school that you can barely add. friedman appears to believe that the only way to find out anything is in an institution. and of course it doesn't follow from the fact that you can barely add that you don't drive well.  second, driving is an embodied skill, not measurable by the sats, though the idea that anything of human value might not be standardized testable is of course profoundly alien to an intelligence of friedman's caliber. but that's of course not the point: the point for friedman is how, by hedging people's lives around with police power, we can manufacture the sort of people he thinks ought to exist. third, this is a flat redoubling of class divisions, a way to make poverty or family/neighborhood problems ever more endemic, to just literally stick people where they are like a roach motel. just consider the way a regulation like that would differentially effect black people, or poor people, or latinos, etc. fourth, it just casually assumes that extreme limitations on basic freedoms - such as mobility - can legitimately be imposed unilaterally by state authorities. in other words, it gives you a perfect view of a certain kind of american liberalism, a mind-numbing totalitarian rational standardization of the species. we'd be far better served by...i don't know, a shiite theocracy.

notice that this little brownshirt moment is followed by a series of cliches to which it is entirely irrelevant; it's just there to establish the forward-looking totalitarian bona fides, so that when we go on to say "innovate!" no one can misunderstand what the mechanism of innovation is going to be.

since someone just asked, offline, about my use of the term bush-obamaism: i see bush and obama as in some ways continuous. reagan/bush1/clinton were a bit chastened and slow on government expansion. bush and obama are nonstop gogo enthusiasts, despite all their differences. a new bureaucracy for every problem. i love spending and debt. they coincide in some ways, as in federal regulation of k-12 ed: no child etc. and in other respects, they're complementary: bush beefed up the national security apparatus extremely: the department of homeland security, amazing new surveillance programs, and so on. obama will do the same for domestic/welfare/healthcare/environmental programs. notice that obama isn't at all trying to dismantle the bush institutions. so by the time the bush-obama era is over, everybody gets a slice.

as it happens, i agree with much of what mark taylor has to say. but i'm just flummoxed by this sentence:

If American higher education is to thrive in the 21st century, colleges and universities, like Wall Street and Detroit, must be rigorously regulated and completely restructured.

oddly, none of the proposals that taylor actually makes do anything with "regulation." maybe it's just a rhetorical flourish, to connect his proposals to our beautiful mood of enthusiasm for huge bureaucracies, the bush-obamaism of the 131st century, the new green authoritarian economy. but what can he mean? a new department of higher ed, a cabinet-level position, standardized testing (="accountability")? legislation to ban dissertations on duns scotus? obama or arne duncan personally firing university presidents and demanding restructuring plans? congressional hearings on deconstruction? in five years - during the palin administratrion, when tom coburn is majority leader of the senate - you're going to love yourself for having made proposals like this

speaking of totalitarian schools, the supreme court is hearing arguments in a case where a 13-year-old girl was strip-searched at her school on the suspicion that she was concealing...ibuprofen. if i was antonin scalia (which i am) i'd simply arrest the searchers for assault and clap them in irons. one thing i like about the case: the search was based on a report from another student. i think it's very important that we destroy anti-snitching culture, and encourage denunciations to the authorities, even in cases where there's nothing wrong at all. this is very important to citizenship responsibilities in a democracy.

obviously if this account is anything like true, child porn charges are absurd. what is disturbing, rather, is just the routine mindless totalitarianism of the public school. so, the assistant principal hears something on the news about "sexting."  he calls in some random student and more or less demands to see the images on his phone. what? why? then it all goes into some nightmare of arbitrary surveillance, censorship etc. why in the world do these idiots feel that it's part of their responsibility to monitor communications or police their students' sex lives? that in itself should be prosecutable. there'll be the usual mindless, utterly vague appeals to maintaining an atmosphere for learning and so on. the truth is that your average high school assistant principal is a martinet, a little baby dictator who's not about learning in any form but only the exercise of arbitrary power. why, in a democracy, should a school be a zone of completely anti-democratic values, a kind of internment camp, run on the presumption that every kid is a potential dissisent, and every dissident must be crushed?

yeah and don't forget hernando de soto, explorer.

obama's education program, offhand, is an intensification of - and is worse and more disturbing than - bush's. obviously, "accountability," "rewarding good teachers," "progress" etc - in short every aspect and every phrase, every strategy and every slogan - only means standardized testing: the entire discipline and discourse is now entirely composed of euphemisms for an ever-more-rigid, ever-less-humanistic, ever-more-impoverished, and ever-more-mindless rote recall. in addition: ever-more-centralized, ever-more-uniform, ever-more-bureaucracy-ridden, ever-more-authoritarian. obama shares the beautiful vision of clinton, gore, or tom friedman: little bobby the american first-grader is in competition with little li the chinese first-grader, in the global economy of the 23rd century: those words should be engraved on arne ducan's cattle prod. nothing could be more irrelevant to the actual education of an actual child, or more reprehensible as a conception of human life. it actually constitutes an extremely convincing case for a worldwide spiral into economic disintegration: it makes poverty, ignorance, and chaos look beautiful.

i've heard some mindless moralizing or idiotic music criticism masquerading as science in my day, but the idea that hip hop has caused a reduction in reading among black folks is about as bad as it gets. right up there with country music causes suicide.or mathematical proof that the rolling stones are better than the beatles.

that the new, leftish ed reform movement is just ever-more extreme mechanical testing is sad. it leaves us with no, let's say, liberatory, or for that matter actually educational, alternative. as explicitly as possible, it discourages any sort of critical reflection on the junk being taught. it deploys a model of knowledge as little fact-chunks, has no use for integration. it's us, inserting stuff into you, the passive receptacle. when i teach writing now, i have to start by breaking: there is no correct way to write an essay. this my students regard as simply bizarre, whereas i'd like them to think it was exhilarating. ok: let's have a glance at the great essayists. did montaigne use the five-paragraph form? har har. you could, yourself, in your own voice, explore this subject in any direction you like. they're like, no! what??? but how can i get an 'a'? will this help me on the lsats? what's you're template, your metric? and then they turn in the mechanical essay anyway, something utterly bloodless, joyless. but the idea that there could be pleasure or passion in writing is, to the products of american education, incomprehensible. (i should add that there *are* students, say 10%, who *do* find it exhilarating. we'll have to crush such personalities completely in the next cohort, or hold their teachers accountable.)

michelle rhee, the superbitch superintendent of the dc public school system, has become a celebrity. the atlantic piece linked above does a good job of describing the decades-long idiotic disaster that is the dc public schools, which i attended in the sixties and seventies. i wanted to blow them up, which would have been a net gain to the world. (i did actually manage to stink-bomb alice deal junior high so thoroughly that they had to close it for a couple of days. probably, thirty-seven years later, it still smells of drano and rotten eggs.) in a way, that's what rhee is doing, and the dc schools long ago reached the point where any change is by definition an improvement. but the new wave of school reform is, ultimately, sad and disgusting, because entirely based on standardized testing (i.e. "accountability"). all the merit pay stuff is built around it. it's a parody of education, based on a complete incomprehension of what learning is. i see the products of this all the time: high sat's, not a thought in their heads: extremely conventional, mechanical intellects: lockstep conformists. the system is totalitarian in spirit, and is literally anti-educational. so i wish rhee well in blowing up the school system. but i think we're in for a nice little era of even more extreme stupidity.

so 64% of american students cheat. let me say this: that would be bad if education were not compulsory. if i enter into a contest - a sporting event, a game of chess or poker - because i want to play, then to cheat is disgusting. but if you put a gun to my head and make me play, then i have no obligation to abide by the rules; no one should blame me if i do whatever i can get away with. indeed, under such circumstances, cheating would be a nice little act of resistance. i think it's deeply reprehensible when an author plagiarizes, but if writing books were compulsory, plagiarism would be understandable and at worst morally neutral. in other words, compulsory education abrogates anything we might think of as educational ethics: destroys it, vitiates it, suspends it. that's one reason (of many) why compulsory education is an absurd concept, or merely a contradiction in terms. our educational institutions teach that capitulation is the essence of honor, which of course is exactly the center of our moral training of young people. if they come out of that cheaters, you're getting what you deserve, what you're begging for.

so. tomorrow i am going to give a little talk on american popular music to a group of middle eastern students in harry pohlman's class at dickinson. i threw together a taxonomy, but i would appreciate any help with this in comments, particularly actual important stylistic or genre or format categories i am overlooking so far. obviously this has the greatest possible scope and no specificity.

(African-)American Musical Styles:

Ragtime: Jelly Roll Morton

Blues: W. C. Handy, Robert Johnson, Willie McTell, Bessie Smith, Muddy Waters, B.B. King [Eric Clapton, Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin]

Jazz: Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Bennie Goodman, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis [bop], John Coltrane, Wynton Marsalis

Soul: Sam Cook, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, Smokey Robinson, Al Green
Funk: James Brown, Parliament/Funkadelic
Disco: Chic, Donna Summer
Hop Hop: Grandmaster Flash, Run-DMC, Dr. Dre, Atmosphere

Country (bluegrass): Carter Family, Jimmie Rogers, Hank Williams, Bill Monroe, Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Johnny Cash, etc
    bluegrass: Bill Monroe, Flatt and Scruggs, Stanley Brothers, Emmylou Harris
    honky-tonk: Buck Owens, Dwight Yoakam

Rock (rockabilly, rhythm and blues): Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Beatles
    folk: Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, John Prine, Bruce Springsteen
    rockabilly: Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley
    surf: Dick Dale, Beach Boys
    heavy metal: Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, [Metallica]
    southern rock: Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd, [Drive-By Truckers]
    art rock: Yes, Pink Floyd
    punk: Ramones, Sex Pistols, Clash, Green Day, Blink 182
    hardcore: Minor Threat, Black Flag
    "alternative": Nirvana, Pearl Jam, [Weezer]

[Ska/Rock Steady/Reggae: Toots and the Maytals, Bob Marley, Lee Perry, Augustus Pablo, Lady Saw, Sean Paul etc etc [Alpha Blondy]]

One reason that students (and many others) have come to believe that they have these rights is a confusion between education and democracy. It is in democratic contexts that people have claims to the rights enumerated in the constitution and other documents at the heart of our political system – the right to free speech, the right to free assembly, the right to determine, by vote, the shape of their futures.

Educational institutions, however, are not democratic contexts (even when the principles of democracy are being taught in them). They are pedagogical contexts and the imperatives that rule them are the imperatives of pedagogy – the mastery of materials and the acquiring of analytical skills. Those imperatives do not recognize the right of free expression or any other right, except the right to competent instruction, that is, the right to be instructed by well-trained, responsible teachers who know their subjects and stick to them and don’t believe that it is their right to pronounce on anything and everything.

thus stanley fish , today. stanley is my old teacher and one of the sweetest people in the world. but he is so, so wrong about this. at any rate, i'm not even gonna argue. but what i'll do is reply in the guise of my 15-year-old self, who went through this in every possible way. whatever. you will not fucking shut me up. bring your fucking bouncers, your assistant principals, your policemen. i will post what i want where i want. you can pull down the posters or duct-tape me to a chair, but in the long run i will win. and if you keep telling me i can't say what i like, i will blow this school up, figuratively and then literally. i own this place. this is my fucking school; these are my fucking people. i will wear what i like and say what i like. i  have no fucking "rights" except those i take. stop me, you fucking fucks.

in a slightly more thoughtful mode: it's true, education isn't democracy, although perhaps you should read some dewey. education, as fish beautifully argues, is sheer totalitarianism.

 

so today was the last day of classes at dickinson. and in my "recent political thought" class i asked (after i did some card tricks) "for how many of you is this your actually last college class"? half! well that's kind of melancholy and stuff, or hopeful too. actually these people are pretty smart and good, and i shouldn't be a cynic (asshole). plus that class, where we went foucault/habermas/rawls/nozick/walzer was amazingly good and lively. so here's to you, pete backof, mike perinelli (!), matt ropeik,  the amazing alex brown,  brian (inyourface) booher, kate (magic) binetti, jd!, michael (underrated) o'brien, aaron (kickyoass) williams, lamya al-sakkaf (it's been a great run, woman), caroline (college dems) newbould, jon (ok) calka, guy (wherethefuckareyou) citron, hank (mofo) fenton, eric (studmonkey) dube, maya (biceps) ginsberg, even ryan and ryan (and ryan and ryan). 

so, as i often do, i'm teaching thoreau's civil disobedience in my political philosophy class. i asked how many read the thing in high school and got a respectable show of hands. but the idea of teaching this essay in a large public high school is absurd. how would you behave in high school if you followed only the dicates of your own conscience? how would any administration treat any kid who did? and indeed, now grading through my quizzes, i can see (again) that a lot of students simply cannot read it; they cannot believe he's actually arguing that we ought flatly to disobey unjust laws, withold taxes in time of war, etc.