A Romney win: 53 to 47 in the popular vote; 295 to 243 in the Electoral College.
I give Romney the obvious states plus Colorado, Ohio, New Hampshire, Iowa, and Wisconsin.
I’m a reluctant Romney supporter: I favored Ron Paul in the primaries, and I am doubtful that Romney and Ryan understand the magnitude of the task they face – an unsound monetary system, a “dependency society” that cannot possibly survive long-term, an over-extended system of global military and geopolitical commitments, a culture vehemently opposed to serious learning, a chattering class committed to fads ranging from “Waiting for Superman” to catastrophic climate change (yes, as a physicist, I know that the globe has warmed, but it is an open scientific question as to how large future warming will be), etc.
I’m not sure the Governor and the Congressman have the courage and insight to turn this around, much less the political skill to bring the country with them.
I do wish Romney the best, if he wins, just as I sincerely wished Obama the best when he won.
So, if I am not a fierce Romney partisan, why do I think he will dramatically outperform the polls?
Four reasons:
Turnout and the polls: the most important reason. I’ve followed the debates from Fox to MSNBC, and, as a guy who loves the number-crunching game (I had a great time in 2000 running the numerical extrapolations in my head and seeing that the networks were clearly wrong both when they called the election for Gore and when they called it for Bush – this really is my idea of fun!), I think that the skeptics have the better case: I.e., the polls seem to be substantially over-weighting Democrats.
Enthusiasm. Both the polls and the anecdotal reportage from journalists, along with my own personal observations, show a lot more enthusiasm for the GOP. It’s hugely different from ’08: I only talked to one acquaintance in ’08 who was enthusiastic for McCain.
Late deciders. When an incumbent has trouble getting to fifty percent in the polls, common sense and historical experience suggest that late deciders (who are these people?) are not likely to discover that they really do like the incumbent after being unable to decide for four years.
The Bradley effect. For some reason, a small number of voters seem to like to tell pollsters that they are going to vote for a black guy and then do the opposite (the “effect” is named for what happened to the black Democratic candidate for governor out here in California, Tom Bradley, back in the ’80s). This seems bizarre to me, but it does seem to happen.
The last two effects are no doubt pretty small this year – there are, after all, few late deciders. And, enthusiasm can be grossly misleading: after all, McGovern had lots of enthusiasm and “Tricky Dick” Nixon had very little – I remember it well.
So, in the end, it is the issue of turn-out models, as assumed in the polls, versus who really turns out tomorrow.
And, while those who are skeptical of the polls seem, to me, to have the stronger statistical arguments, no one really knows.
A lot of people will turn out to be really wrong, including, perhaps, me.
(However, if I am right, I wonder if the New York Times will fire Nate Silver and hire me!)
I predict the GOP will pick up three seats in the Senate, which will tie the upper house, with the new Vice-President holding the tie-breaking vote. I.e., I think Romney will have short coattails.
And, I think the GOP will lose five seats in the House – the blowout election in 2010 blew in some weak winners, a few of whom are likely to lose tomorrow.
After we find out whose predictions are right and whose are wrong, we will face the real problems: Bernanke has printed a huge amount of money that should ignite a firestorm of inflation when the recovery really starts moving. A robust recovery will help the deficit situation a bit, but there are structural problems that are pushing the federal government towards bankruptcy – and, unfortunately, the entire world monetary, financial, and economic systems are closely tied to the securities (i.e., debt) issued by the United States government.
And, underlying it all, the culture: a century of frivolity, irresponsibility, and unbelievable mendacity not just in the popular culture but especially among the intellectuals – the “serious” media, the universities, the “social scientists,” etc.
If Romney wins, he has not only my best wishes but also my condolences. He may have taken on an impossible task.
I hope he will prove me wrong.
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
Thursday, March 18, 2010
The World We Have Lost
All of us homeschoolers have rejected, to some degree, the modern, bureaucratized society in which we live, simply by the fact that we have chosen the alternate path of homeschooling.
But, I think, most of us still do not realize how unthinkingly we are caught up in the values and attitudes of the modern world and how radically, and often disastrously, that world differs from the world of our forebears.
My great-grandmother was born in 1883: she passed away when I was a senior in college, so I knew her well throughout my childhood. It is very revealing to compare the world she grew up in to the society and culture we ourselves, our parents, and our own children inhabit.
Child-rearing and education
The most obvious difference, especially in the context of homeschooling, is in the area of child-rearing and education.
My great-grandmother only finished fourth grade. Yet, unlike many high-school graduates today, she had acquired basic skills in reading, writing, and arithmetic.
There was no “teen-age” rebelliousness, no “teen-age” youth culture, in her generation simply because there were no ‘teenagers.”
There were of course young people whose ages lay between thirteen and nineteen, but there was not a general expectation and acceptance of young people’s having a unique “culture” that took an adversarial stand against the adult world, intentionally creating music, dress styles, etc. calculated to annoy or outrage adults.
“Teenagerhood” – both the word and the idea – was an invention of the first half of the twentieth century, largely a result of the “consolidated” high school created in the first half of the twentieth century. Partly because of a desire to keep adolescents out of the workforce so that they would not compete with working fathers during the Depression, partly out of the “progressive” belief that more schooling was better for everyone, American adolescents were forced to spend twelve years in the school system.
As Grace Palladino explains in the first chapter of her comprehensive Teenagers: An American History:
Since many of the kids forced into the new comprehensive high schools lacked either the desire or the ability to engage in serious academic work, the curriculum was dramatically “dumbed down” (for a non-polemical, scholarly study of this “dumbing down,” see Kliebard’s The Struggle for the American Curriculum: 1893 – 1958), forcing kids to pursue pointless make-work until they could “graduate” from high school.
Is there any surprise that this has created anger, rebelliousness, and a youth culture based on contempt and resentment towards the adult world?
In the nineteenth century, there was a real purpose to the lives of most adolescent kids: they were working, on the farm, in the home, or at outside jobs, doing things (or learning to do things) that actually needed doing.
That is not true of most “teenagers” today.
Thomas Hine, in the final chapter of his The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager, a broad-ranging study of youth through American history, concludes:
Our forebears were not convinced that Lord of the Flies was inevitable adolescent behavior.
Culture and the attitude towards learning
American (and British) culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was imbued with the ideal of intellectual self-improvement: to recognize that, one need only read Franklin or Emerson or recall Lincoln’s eagerness to acquire learning however he could. To be truly well-educated before the twentieth century was at least to know Latin (and, ideally, ancient Greek), and also a modern language (French or German).
There is a story that Lincoln, as a lawyer riding circuit, took a copy of Euclid’s Elements with him so that he could sharpen his reasoning powers.
How many American adults today seriously try to learn an intellectually difficult subject – a new area of mathematics, a new foreign language – unless they are required to do so for their job?
In fact, the idea of actually doing proofs – the axiomatic method of axioms / theorems / proofs – that has dominated serious mathematics since the time of the Greeks – has been largely eliminated from American high schools in recent decades (see this lament published in the LA Times, written by then-chair of the math department at Caltech, the most selective science university in the country).
We live today in a society that despises learning.
Consider:
No doubt part of this is due to memories of the “twelve-year sentence” that most Americans were forced to endure in the public schools.
But there is also a positive respect for delinquency and irresponsibility: the “trend-setters” of our popular culture are often the dregs of our society. It is not just the kids who are enraptured by “gangsta rap” or whatever the latest symbol of youth rebellion happens to be, but also adults who hold up failed human beings as objects of emulation or even veneration, whether “celebrities” such as Michael Jackson or fictional characters such as Holden Caulfield.
This is not the historical norm. Our forebears did not model themselves on petty thugs, juvenile delinquents, and people who clearly lacked the ability to live a normal life.
Rather than publicly honoring real, substantive achievement based on serious intellectual effort, we accept as our public “role models” the products of our “cult of entertainment”: professional sports is, of course, a prime example of modern entertainment. Again, this is not the historical norm: sports heroes and popular entertainers were not national icons throughout most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
One result of our modern obsession is such an exaltation of style and personality over character and substantive achievement that even the Presidency is filled not on the basis of actual ability but rather on how well the candidate can theatrically play the role of being President on television (“he looks Presidential,” as we say).
During the recent 2010 Winter Olympics, General Electric ran a funny commercial in which physicians ran into a stadium and were cheered by a crowd of thousands. What makes the ad funny – and poignantly sad – is that we all know that the cure for cancer, the replacement for fossil fuels, etc. will be found by some studiously nerdy drudges who will never be cheered by tens of thousands in a stadium in the way football players and baseball players are normally cheered.
On the contrary, we all know the insulting terms and jokes aimed at those who strive to develop their intelligence. To spend hours and hours every day training for athletic competitions makes one a hero, but to put similar effort into developing one’s intellectual abilities makes one a “nerd, “a “geek,” etc.
Have Americans acquired so much hatred for serious learning, due to their experiences in the public schools, that they cannot admire those who develop the intellectual skills needed to move the world forward?
There is far more to learn than there has ever been in human history, yet, paradoxically, most of our children are learning less than educated people learned a century ago.
During the course of the twentieth century, more was discovered about the nature of the natural world via science and about the possible structures of space and number in mathematics than was discovered in all of human history prior to the twentieth century. Even in learning about the human past, archaeologists and historians have dramatically expanded our knowledge during the last hundred years.
And, yet, those who pursue serious intellectual effort, especially as adolescents, are now denigrated in much the way that drunkards or tramps were despised when my great-grandmother was a child.
The loss of middle-class independence
The old middle-class ideal was self-sufficiency and independence: a self-respecting person would not let himself be on the government dole and would plan for his and his family’s long-term personal and financial needs.
That is no longer true: most Americans believe they are “entitled” to Social Security, Medicare, public schooling for their kids, etc. – all at taxpayers’ expense. A large number of Americans believe they are “entitled” to government-provided daycare, to government-provided medical insurance, etc.
Government policies have systematically engineered this culture of dependency: during the last ninety-seven years, since the government founded the Federal Reserve System, the inflation of the currency by the “Fed” has destroyed more than ninety-five percent of the value of the dollar, according to the government’s own statisticians.
Combined with a plethora of new taxes never paid by Americans before the twentieth century, notably FICA (“Social Security”), and the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment (legitimizing the federal “income” tax), this has made it much more difficult for families to become financially independent by saving the money they have earned, and has therefore encouraged dependence on the state.
Even what is now considered a “modest” rate of inflation of, say, three percent per year, will eat away half of one's savings in less than a quarter century. And any rise in interest rates that partially offsets the price inflation will be taxed as “income,” making it even more difficult to keep up with the inflation created by the ongoing expansion of the money supply by the government.
These financial depredations against the American people have also encouraged both spouses to join the workforce. This “liberating” of mothers (how odd that women being forced to enter the workforce to make ends meet is considered “liberation”!) has meant that the functions traditionally provided at home by a parent are increasingly expected to be filled by government.
This loss of middle-class independence is of central importance to all the changes I am discussing. Specifically, when middle-class families no longer have the financial wherewithal to allow one parent to stay home with the kids, it is inevitable that responsibility for the kids is handed over to “experts,” to the schools, and to a barbaric “youth culture.”
More broadly, citizens who feel that it is neither necessary nor even possible to take personal responsibility for their own retirement, for possible periods of unemployment, for health care, etc. are taught the lesson that they are not responsible and competent adults in general. It is no wonder that such adults doubt their ability to tend to their children's education and child-rearing and instead abdicate those responsibilities to irresponsible “experts.”
Bureaucractization and the rule of experts
We have entrusted “experts” with everything from education to the criminal-justice system to the proper approach to child-rearing to regulating the nation's financial system.
Those “experts” insisted on “whole-language” reading instruction instead of phonics, on “rehabilitating” violent criminals instead of punishing them, on a “permissive” approach to child-rearing, and on economically insane policies for the nation's financial system.
None of that has worked.
We all know this, and, yet, we continue to entrust such “experts” with enormous power in education, the criminal-justice system, the “helping” professions, and even business management.
Numerous jobs that, fifty or a hundred years ago, did not require a college (or even high-school) diploma now require applicants to be college graduates. Sadly, there is evidence that college graduates today are only about as literate as the average high-school graduate of a half century ago. In 2002, the Zogby polling organization, at the behest of the National Association of Scholars, carried out a study to test the general academic knowledge of Americans today compared to a half century ago by repeating questions used in a series of polls taken at mid-century. The result was:
We have a society based on credentials that guarantee knowledge and expertise, but those credentials are in fact fraudulent (see sociologist Randall Collins' classic work The Credential Society.)
The issue of turning over large fractions of our lives to bureaucracies goes beyond the enormous economic waste and the everyday frustrations of dealing with bureaucracies. Millions of reasonably intelligent Americans spend decades of their lives acquiring a meaningless “education” to get themselves “jobs” that are utterly pointless, often positively destructive: for example, simply pushing paper to comply with (or, worse, create) meaningless, often economically destructive, regulations. Anyone who doubts this should look, for instance, at the huge salaries paid to those who wrecked “Fannie Mae.”
The rule of experts, the dominance of bureaucracy, a society of paper-pushers engaged in meaningless, pointless jobs – this is not the America that once existed. It is not a society that produces free and independent human beings that live meaningful, purposeful lives.
Regimentation, militarism, and the dominance of the “group”
The twentieth century was the century of “total war”: hundreds of millions of human beings died horrifying deaths as the result of the numerous wars and “civil terrors” pursued by the world’s governments during the last century.
War means militarization, and the results of that militarization has spilled over into society at large.
The traditional middle-class virtues – prudence, caution, independent thinking, planning for the long-term future – are not the military virtues.
A military high command does not want its “cannon fodder” to consist of thoughtful, cautious, calculating individualists.
Combat soldiers, whose life might end tomorrow on the battlefield, tend to have short “time horizons”: “Eat, drink, and be merry, for, tomorrow we die.” There is truth in the stereotype of the hard-drinking soldier or sailor; it makes sense that soldiers are known for short-term sexual liaisons formed without concern for long-term consequences.
Furthermore, a military runs on “esprit de corps,” which, pragmatically speaking, boils down to “submerge yourself in the group.” “Individualism” is not a military virtue.
The majority of Americans of course have never served in the military, but the never-ending wars in which the U.S. government has chosen to involve the United States for more than a century have resulted in a widespread acceptance of the military mindset, even among those (perhaps especially among those) who consider themselves not to be militarists.
This is evident not only in the contempt for cautious, prudent, middle-class behavior, but, above all, in the fervent belief in the need for “group activities” and “socialization” for children to teach them to “fit in” with the group.
To put this “groupism” in a historical context, recall that Thomas Jefferson never played on a Little League team; Abe Lincoln was never a Cub Scout.
Indeed, as Robert H. MacDonald explains in detail in his Sons of the Empire: The Frontier and the Boy Scout Movement – 1890-1918, Lord Baden-Powell created the Scouting movement in imitation of his own wartime experience as an actual military Scout. Scouting employs military rituals such as uniforms, bugle calls, salutes, etc. because one of its major purposes was to accustom young boys to military attitudes so that they would be prepared to “do their duty” as soldiers to advance the imperial cause when they became adults.
Progressives who stress the need for “group activities” and “socialization” may not consciously think of their goals as being militaristic. But, the military is in fact the very model of a bureaucratic, regimented institution. To raise children to think of themselves not as independent individuals but as members of a group is to encourage in them a militaristic mindset.
Of course, there are some worthwhile activities that can only be achieved by being part of a group: one cannot perform a symphony, play a basketball game, or dance the Nutcracker without being part of a team. I am not suggesting that it is wrong to be part of a team when that makes sense to achieve a common goal. But all of human history shows that it is not necessary to be immersed in formal group activities throughout one’s childhood in order to become a happy and productive adult.
The radical change from the traditions of our forefathers is not that we encourage our kids to do some activities that may involve them in groups. Rather the change is the belief that doing things in a group is good in and of itself, conveying to our children the belief that submerging one's individuality in the consciousness of group membership is proper and desirable.
That is the heart of militarism.
Can Homeschoolers Repeal the Twentieth Century?
Haven’t I grossly oversimplified?
Sure – I am talking about very broad social and cultural changes spanning a century. To blame the insistence on “group socialization” solely on the need to get everyone to share the proper group attitudes in our never-ending wars against never-ending enemies (first the Kaiser, then Hitler / Tojo, then Stalin / Khrushchev / Brezhnev / Mao, promptly followed by Qaddafi / Saddam / bin Laden, etc.) is of course over-simplifying.
After all, “group socialization” was also a key part of the “progressive” agenda, which in turn was one of the main sources for the cult of “experts.”
These cultural changes are indeed intertwined in many, very complicated ways.
But these changes are nonetheless very real: most Americans have come to accept regimentation, bureaucratization, control of their lives by “experts,” dependence on government, a collapse in education, a collapse of the currency, a punitive tax system, and a strange new approach to child-rearing that would have stunned and outraged most Americans when my great-grandmother was born in 1883, much less the American Founders.
My central point really is the inter-linking and reinforcement among these different changes. The contempt for serious learning produces “citizens” who are willing to be controlled by bureaucrats and by self-proclaimed “experts” and who are willing to accept the multiple lies of our “Commander-in-Chief,” whoever he may be. The emphasis on “fitting in” with the group discourages people from becoming self-reliant, independent individuals who can think for themselves. The collapse of parental responsibility for raising their own kids means that those kids are turned over to the tender mercies of the self-proclaimed “experts.”
Let me emphasize that I have said nothing about the explosion in crime, or illegitimacy, or broken homes in the last one hundred years. The social changes I have discussed have occurred even among normal, stable middle-class American families: most of what I have described is not even viewed any longer as “social pathology.”
What I have described is now taken for granted as “normal” American life. And yet it differs radically from the life and culture into which my great grandmother was born.
This transcends the hackneyed liberal vs. conservative political divisions. Liberals may be the ones insisting on “group learning” in the schools, but it is conservatives who focus on the Pledge of Allegiance to insure that we are all part of one “indivisible” nation (officially “under God,” ignoring the fact that God might have His own opinion on the matter!).
If there is any single source for these changes, it is probably the “progressive” movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. We tend to forget that progressivism was a bipartisan movement (Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican, was the first “progressive” President) and that it was the two “progressive” Presidents, Wilson and Roosevelt, who initiated the policy of never-ending wars to fight never-ending enemies.
Why should all this matter for homeschoolers?
First, because if we think that our homeschooling is a response simply to the failure of the schools, we are missing the broader picture. The collapse of education in the U.S. is just a small part of a much broader web of social change.
Second, if we do not understand those changes, we risk replicating much of the worst aspects of present-day society in our own homeschooling: e.g., a belief in the need to be “socialized” in order fit in with the group, or to swear our “allegiance” to the government, or to trust in “experts,” or to take “celebrities” and contemporary “entertainment” seriously.
Finally, the changes I have sketched out are the history of the United States during the last century. Understanding these changes matters far more than understanding the historical influence of John F. Kennedy, or Ronald Reagan, or Bill Clinton, or Newt Gingrich.
Indeed, one of the most important things to understand about Gingrich and Reagan is that they accepted and perpetuated this disaster in American society just as much as Clinton or Kennedy.
Why should our kids bother to learn this history?
Primarily because learning is, despite the contrary spirit of our time, a good thing in and of itself; but also because our kids cannot understand where we are unless they understand where we have come from.
Those who do not understand the past are prisoners of the past.
Can we repeal the twentieth century and simply turn the clock back to 1883 when my great-grandmother was born?
No, of course not, and no one really wishes to do that – no one wishes to give up antibiotics or airplanes or weather satellites. The point is not to “turn back the clock”; the point, rather, is to recognize that the changes that have happened during the last century in American society were not inevitable: they were the result of human choices.
We can consciously judge those changes and actively make decisions as to what our own values should be. We can welcome antibiotics and yet reject “gangsta rap.” We can fly on airplanes but also reject the present-day contempt for serious learning.
One of the first step towards helping our kids to avoid the mindset in which most Americans are trapped, so that our children can make serious, conscious choices for themselves, is to help our kids to understand that the contemporary American mindset is, in so many ways, a historical aberration, that most of our ancestors did not think this way, and that our kids can themselves choose to reject the attitudes and values that now pervade our society.
But to reject those attitudes and values, we must identify them and understand their source.
We must look back at the “world we have lost,” and help our kids to do so, in order to understand the values that were once taken for granted by most Americans and to understand how those values were so catastrophically lost.
But, I think, most of us still do not realize how unthinkingly we are caught up in the values and attitudes of the modern world and how radically, and often disastrously, that world differs from the world of our forebears.
My great-grandmother was born in 1883: she passed away when I was a senior in college, so I knew her well throughout my childhood. It is very revealing to compare the world she grew up in to the society and culture we ourselves, our parents, and our own children inhabit.
Child-rearing and education
The most obvious difference, especially in the context of homeschooling, is in the area of child-rearing and education.
My great-grandmother only finished fourth grade. Yet, unlike many high-school graduates today, she had acquired basic skills in reading, writing, and arithmetic.
There was no “teen-age” rebelliousness, no “teen-age” youth culture, in her generation simply because there were no ‘teenagers.”
There were of course young people whose ages lay between thirteen and nineteen, but there was not a general expectation and acceptance of young people’s having a unique “culture” that took an adversarial stand against the adult world, intentionally creating music, dress styles, etc. calculated to annoy or outrage adults.
“Teenagerhood” – both the word and the idea – was an invention of the first half of the twentieth century, largely a result of the “consolidated” high school created in the first half of the twentieth century. Partly because of a desire to keep adolescents out of the workforce so that they would not compete with working fathers during the Depression, partly out of the “progressive” belief that more schooling was better for everyone, American adolescents were forced to spend twelve years in the school system.
As Grace Palladino explains in the first chapter of her comprehensive Teenagers: An American History:
The Great Depression had finally pushed teenage youth out of the workplace and into the classroom.... a shift that helped to create the idea of a separate teenage generation. When a teenage majority spent the better part of their day in high school, they learned to look to one another and not to adults for advice, information, and approval.... they revolutionized the very concept of growing up. This remarkable transformation had as much to do with the high school experience as with raging hormones or adolescent insecurity...(It is interesting to recall that Golding's dystopian novel, Lord of the Flies, involved a group of schoolboys left on their own.)
Since many of the kids forced into the new comprehensive high schools lacked either the desire or the ability to engage in serious academic work, the curriculum was dramatically “dumbed down” (for a non-polemical, scholarly study of this “dumbing down,” see Kliebard’s The Struggle for the American Curriculum: 1893 – 1958), forcing kids to pursue pointless make-work until they could “graduate” from high school.
Is there any surprise that this has created anger, rebelliousness, and a youth culture based on contempt and resentment towards the adult world?
In the nineteenth century, there was a real purpose to the lives of most adolescent kids: they were working, on the farm, in the home, or at outside jobs, doing things (or learning to do things) that actually needed doing.
That is not true of most “teenagers” today.
Thomas Hine, in the final chapter of his The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager, a broad-ranging study of youth through American history, concludes:
By looking at history as we have done, we see that the teenager that emerged in the mid-twentieth century was but one of many ways in which American young people have responded to the circumstances of their times... If we are going to persist in our notion that all young people should spend their teems simply waiting for adulthood, we have to find ways of making this teenage experience more satisfying and effective.Hine does not deny that serious, rigorous, challenging academic work makes sense for those children willing to pursue it and able to benefit from it. But does it make sense to warehouse kids who are unable to or unwilling to pursue serious academic work in “schools” that serve only to artificially prolong adolescents' period of irresponsibility and dependency?
Alternatively, we can decide that the idea of the teenager is one that has outlived its usefulness, then move on to other possibilities
Our forebears were not convinced that Lord of the Flies was inevitable adolescent behavior.
Culture and the attitude towards learning
American (and British) culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was imbued with the ideal of intellectual self-improvement: to recognize that, one need only read Franklin or Emerson or recall Lincoln’s eagerness to acquire learning however he could. To be truly well-educated before the twentieth century was at least to know Latin (and, ideally, ancient Greek), and also a modern language (French or German).
There is a story that Lincoln, as a lawyer riding circuit, took a copy of Euclid’s Elements with him so that he could sharpen his reasoning powers.
How many American adults today seriously try to learn an intellectually difficult subject – a new area of mathematics, a new foreign language – unless they are required to do so for their job?
In fact, the idea of actually doing proofs – the axiomatic method of axioms / theorems / proofs – that has dominated serious mathematics since the time of the Greeks – has been largely eliminated from American high schools in recent decades (see this lament published in the LA Times, written by then-chair of the math department at Caltech, the most selective science university in the country).
We live today in a society that despises learning.
Consider:
We have more leisure today, more access to tools of learning such as books, libraries and the Internet than ever before in history, and, yet, there is active contempt, bordering on hatred, for the idea of learning simply for the sake of learning.
- How many living sports stars or entertainers can the average American name off the top of her head?
- How many living scientists, mathematicians, or medical researchers can the average American name off the top of her head?
- How many American teen-agers can identify who Babe Ruth was vs. who Jonas Salk was?
No doubt part of this is due to memories of the “twelve-year sentence” that most Americans were forced to endure in the public schools.
But there is also a positive respect for delinquency and irresponsibility: the “trend-setters” of our popular culture are often the dregs of our society. It is not just the kids who are enraptured by “gangsta rap” or whatever the latest symbol of youth rebellion happens to be, but also adults who hold up failed human beings as objects of emulation or even veneration, whether “celebrities” such as Michael Jackson or fictional characters such as Holden Caulfield.
This is not the historical norm. Our forebears did not model themselves on petty thugs, juvenile delinquents, and people who clearly lacked the ability to live a normal life.
Rather than publicly honoring real, substantive achievement based on serious intellectual effort, we accept as our public “role models” the products of our “cult of entertainment”: professional sports is, of course, a prime example of modern entertainment. Again, this is not the historical norm: sports heroes and popular entertainers were not national icons throughout most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
One result of our modern obsession is such an exaltation of style and personality over character and substantive achievement that even the Presidency is filled not on the basis of actual ability but rather on how well the candidate can theatrically play the role of being President on television (“he looks Presidential,” as we say).
During the recent 2010 Winter Olympics, General Electric ran a funny commercial in which physicians ran into a stadium and were cheered by a crowd of thousands. What makes the ad funny – and poignantly sad – is that we all know that the cure for cancer, the replacement for fossil fuels, etc. will be found by some studiously nerdy drudges who will never be cheered by tens of thousands in a stadium in the way football players and baseball players are normally cheered.
On the contrary, we all know the insulting terms and jokes aimed at those who strive to develop their intelligence. To spend hours and hours every day training for athletic competitions makes one a hero, but to put similar effort into developing one’s intellectual abilities makes one a “nerd, “a “geek,” etc.
Have Americans acquired so much hatred for serious learning, due to their experiences in the public schools, that they cannot admire those who develop the intellectual skills needed to move the world forward?
There is far more to learn than there has ever been in human history, yet, paradoxically, most of our children are learning less than educated people learned a century ago.
During the course of the twentieth century, more was discovered about the nature of the natural world via science and about the possible structures of space and number in mathematics than was discovered in all of human history prior to the twentieth century. Even in learning about the human past, archaeologists and historians have dramatically expanded our knowledge during the last hundred years.
And, yet, those who pursue serious intellectual effort, especially as adolescents, are now denigrated in much the way that drunkards or tramps were despised when my great-grandmother was a child.
The loss of middle-class independence
The old middle-class ideal was self-sufficiency and independence: a self-respecting person would not let himself be on the government dole and would plan for his and his family’s long-term personal and financial needs.
That is no longer true: most Americans believe they are “entitled” to Social Security, Medicare, public schooling for their kids, etc. – all at taxpayers’ expense. A large number of Americans believe they are “entitled” to government-provided daycare, to government-provided medical insurance, etc.
Government policies have systematically engineered this culture of dependency: during the last ninety-seven years, since the government founded the Federal Reserve System, the inflation of the currency by the “Fed” has destroyed more than ninety-five percent of the value of the dollar, according to the government’s own statisticians.
Combined with a plethora of new taxes never paid by Americans before the twentieth century, notably FICA (“Social Security”), and the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment (legitimizing the federal “income” tax), this has made it much more difficult for families to become financially independent by saving the money they have earned, and has therefore encouraged dependence on the state.
Even what is now considered a “modest” rate of inflation of, say, three percent per year, will eat away half of one's savings in less than a quarter century. And any rise in interest rates that partially offsets the price inflation will be taxed as “income,” making it even more difficult to keep up with the inflation created by the ongoing expansion of the money supply by the government.
These financial depredations against the American people have also encouraged both spouses to join the workforce. This “liberating” of mothers (how odd that women being forced to enter the workforce to make ends meet is considered “liberation”!) has meant that the functions traditionally provided at home by a parent are increasingly expected to be filled by government.
This loss of middle-class independence is of central importance to all the changes I am discussing. Specifically, when middle-class families no longer have the financial wherewithal to allow one parent to stay home with the kids, it is inevitable that responsibility for the kids is handed over to “experts,” to the schools, and to a barbaric “youth culture.”
More broadly, citizens who feel that it is neither necessary nor even possible to take personal responsibility for their own retirement, for possible periods of unemployment, for health care, etc. are taught the lesson that they are not responsible and competent adults in general. It is no wonder that such adults doubt their ability to tend to their children's education and child-rearing and instead abdicate those responsibilities to irresponsible “experts.”
Bureaucractization and the rule of experts
We have entrusted “experts” with everything from education to the criminal-justice system to the proper approach to child-rearing to regulating the nation's financial system.
Those “experts” insisted on “whole-language” reading instruction instead of phonics, on “rehabilitating” violent criminals instead of punishing them, on a “permissive” approach to child-rearing, and on economically insane policies for the nation's financial system.
None of that has worked.
We all know this, and, yet, we continue to entrust such “experts” with enormous power in education, the criminal-justice system, the “helping” professions, and even business management.
Numerous jobs that, fifty or a hundred years ago, did not require a college (or even high-school) diploma now require applicants to be college graduates. Sadly, there is evidence that college graduates today are only about as literate as the average high-school graduate of a half century ago. In 2002, the Zogby polling organization, at the behest of the National Association of Scholars, carried out a study to test the general academic knowledge of Americans today compared to a half century ago by repeating questions used in a series of polls taken at mid-century. The result was:
The overall average of correct responses for the entire general knowledge survey was 53.5% for today’s college seniors, 54.5% of the 1955 high school graduates, and 73.3% for the 1955 college graduates.In short, although college is demanded for more students today, it seems to be accomplishing no more for most of those students than high school accomplished half a century ago: we are insisting on educational credentials that are in fact meaningless. Our “experts” are not experts; our “educated” college graduates are not in fact educated.
We have a society based on credentials that guarantee knowledge and expertise, but those credentials are in fact fraudulent (see sociologist Randall Collins' classic work The Credential Society.)
The issue of turning over large fractions of our lives to bureaucracies goes beyond the enormous economic waste and the everyday frustrations of dealing with bureaucracies. Millions of reasonably intelligent Americans spend decades of their lives acquiring a meaningless “education” to get themselves “jobs” that are utterly pointless, often positively destructive: for example, simply pushing paper to comply with (or, worse, create) meaningless, often economically destructive, regulations. Anyone who doubts this should look, for instance, at the huge salaries paid to those who wrecked “Fannie Mae.”
The rule of experts, the dominance of bureaucracy, a society of paper-pushers engaged in meaningless, pointless jobs – this is not the America that once existed. It is not a society that produces free and independent human beings that live meaningful, purposeful lives.
Regimentation, militarism, and the dominance of the “group”
The twentieth century was the century of “total war”: hundreds of millions of human beings died horrifying deaths as the result of the numerous wars and “civil terrors” pursued by the world’s governments during the last century.
War means militarization, and the results of that militarization has spilled over into society at large.
The traditional middle-class virtues – prudence, caution, independent thinking, planning for the long-term future – are not the military virtues.
A military high command does not want its “cannon fodder” to consist of thoughtful, cautious, calculating individualists.
Combat soldiers, whose life might end tomorrow on the battlefield, tend to have short “time horizons”: “Eat, drink, and be merry, for, tomorrow we die.” There is truth in the stereotype of the hard-drinking soldier or sailor; it makes sense that soldiers are known for short-term sexual liaisons formed without concern for long-term consequences.
Furthermore, a military runs on “esprit de corps,” which, pragmatically speaking, boils down to “submerge yourself in the group.” “Individualism” is not a military virtue.
The majority of Americans of course have never served in the military, but the never-ending wars in which the U.S. government has chosen to involve the United States for more than a century have resulted in a widespread acceptance of the military mindset, even among those (perhaps especially among those) who consider themselves not to be militarists.
This is evident not only in the contempt for cautious, prudent, middle-class behavior, but, above all, in the fervent belief in the need for “group activities” and “socialization” for children to teach them to “fit in” with the group.
To put this “groupism” in a historical context, recall that Thomas Jefferson never played on a Little League team; Abe Lincoln was never a Cub Scout.
Indeed, as Robert H. MacDonald explains in detail in his Sons of the Empire: The Frontier and the Boy Scout Movement – 1890-1918, Lord Baden-Powell created the Scouting movement in imitation of his own wartime experience as an actual military Scout. Scouting employs military rituals such as uniforms, bugle calls, salutes, etc. because one of its major purposes was to accustom young boys to military attitudes so that they would be prepared to “do their duty” as soldiers to advance the imperial cause when they became adults.
Progressives who stress the need for “group activities” and “socialization” may not consciously think of their goals as being militaristic. But, the military is in fact the very model of a bureaucratic, regimented institution. To raise children to think of themselves not as independent individuals but as members of a group is to encourage in them a militaristic mindset.
Of course, there are some worthwhile activities that can only be achieved by being part of a group: one cannot perform a symphony, play a basketball game, or dance the Nutcracker without being part of a team. I am not suggesting that it is wrong to be part of a team when that makes sense to achieve a common goal. But all of human history shows that it is not necessary to be immersed in formal group activities throughout one’s childhood in order to become a happy and productive adult.
The radical change from the traditions of our forefathers is not that we encourage our kids to do some activities that may involve them in groups. Rather the change is the belief that doing things in a group is good in and of itself, conveying to our children the belief that submerging one's individuality in the consciousness of group membership is proper and desirable.
That is the heart of militarism.
Can Homeschoolers Repeal the Twentieth Century?
Haven’t I grossly oversimplified?
Sure – I am talking about very broad social and cultural changes spanning a century. To blame the insistence on “group socialization” solely on the need to get everyone to share the proper group attitudes in our never-ending wars against never-ending enemies (first the Kaiser, then Hitler / Tojo, then Stalin / Khrushchev / Brezhnev / Mao, promptly followed by Qaddafi / Saddam / bin Laden, etc.) is of course over-simplifying.
After all, “group socialization” was also a key part of the “progressive” agenda, which in turn was one of the main sources for the cult of “experts.”
These cultural changes are indeed intertwined in many, very complicated ways.
But these changes are nonetheless very real: most Americans have come to accept regimentation, bureaucratization, control of their lives by “experts,” dependence on government, a collapse in education, a collapse of the currency, a punitive tax system, and a strange new approach to child-rearing that would have stunned and outraged most Americans when my great-grandmother was born in 1883, much less the American Founders.
My central point really is the inter-linking and reinforcement among these different changes. The contempt for serious learning produces “citizens” who are willing to be controlled by bureaucrats and by self-proclaimed “experts” and who are willing to accept the multiple lies of our “Commander-in-Chief,” whoever he may be. The emphasis on “fitting in” with the group discourages people from becoming self-reliant, independent individuals who can think for themselves. The collapse of parental responsibility for raising their own kids means that those kids are turned over to the tender mercies of the self-proclaimed “experts.”
Let me emphasize that I have said nothing about the explosion in crime, or illegitimacy, or broken homes in the last one hundred years. The social changes I have discussed have occurred even among normal, stable middle-class American families: most of what I have described is not even viewed any longer as “social pathology.”
What I have described is now taken for granted as “normal” American life. And yet it differs radically from the life and culture into which my great grandmother was born.
This transcends the hackneyed liberal vs. conservative political divisions. Liberals may be the ones insisting on “group learning” in the schools, but it is conservatives who focus on the Pledge of Allegiance to insure that we are all part of one “indivisible” nation (officially “under God,” ignoring the fact that God might have His own opinion on the matter!).
If there is any single source for these changes, it is probably the “progressive” movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. We tend to forget that progressivism was a bipartisan movement (Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican, was the first “progressive” President) and that it was the two “progressive” Presidents, Wilson and Roosevelt, who initiated the policy of never-ending wars to fight never-ending enemies.
Why should all this matter for homeschoolers?
First, because if we think that our homeschooling is a response simply to the failure of the schools, we are missing the broader picture. The collapse of education in the U.S. is just a small part of a much broader web of social change.
Second, if we do not understand those changes, we risk replicating much of the worst aspects of present-day society in our own homeschooling: e.g., a belief in the need to be “socialized” in order fit in with the group, or to swear our “allegiance” to the government, or to trust in “experts,” or to take “celebrities” and contemporary “entertainment” seriously.
Finally, the changes I have sketched out are the history of the United States during the last century. Understanding these changes matters far more than understanding the historical influence of John F. Kennedy, or Ronald Reagan, or Bill Clinton, or Newt Gingrich.
Indeed, one of the most important things to understand about Gingrich and Reagan is that they accepted and perpetuated this disaster in American society just as much as Clinton or Kennedy.
Why should our kids bother to learn this history?
Primarily because learning is, despite the contrary spirit of our time, a good thing in and of itself; but also because our kids cannot understand where we are unless they understand where we have come from.
Those who do not understand the past are prisoners of the past.
Can we repeal the twentieth century and simply turn the clock back to 1883 when my great-grandmother was born?
No, of course not, and no one really wishes to do that – no one wishes to give up antibiotics or airplanes or weather satellites. The point is not to “turn back the clock”; the point, rather, is to recognize that the changes that have happened during the last century in American society were not inevitable: they were the result of human choices.
We can consciously judge those changes and actively make decisions as to what our own values should be. We can welcome antibiotics and yet reject “gangsta rap.” We can fly on airplanes but also reject the present-day contempt for serious learning.
One of the first step towards helping our kids to avoid the mindset in which most Americans are trapped, so that our children can make serious, conscious choices for themselves, is to help our kids to understand that the contemporary American mindset is, in so many ways, a historical aberration, that most of our ancestors did not think this way, and that our kids can themselves choose to reject the attitudes and values that now pervade our society.
But to reject those attitudes and values, we must identify them and understand their source.
We must look back at the “world we have lost,” and help our kids to do so, in order to understand the values that were once taken for granted by most Americans and to understand how those values were so catastrophically lost.
Monday, February 1, 2010
Homeschooling Political Philosophy:
Natural Rights – “We Hold These Truths to Be Self-Evident…”
This blog is about homeschooling, not politics, but, of course, learning about political systems, political thought, etc. is a necessary and important part of a serious education.
For that reason, I want to mention a fellow homeschooler’s essays on the natural-rights principles that are the basis of the Declaration of Independence and that were central to the founding of the American republic (see her section titled “The Proper Role of Government, My commentary as I study his article”: the essays are written from an LDS perspective) and also to expand further on her comments.
There is a tendency nowadays to view “natural rights” as simply a fuzzy rhetorical flourish used by the Founders to justify their breaking away from Britain.
The Founders, specifically Jefferson, did not see it that way: they thought they were actually describing some important, central, objective facts about human life and the nature of government.
I think they were right.
I despise fuzzy thinking, and I certainly would not put it past even the Founders (who were, after all, politicians) to engage in political propaganda.
But, the principles of natural rights did not in fact simply advance the interests of the Founders: for example, as Jefferson himself recognized, slavery stands condemned as a horrendous crime from a natural-rights perspective. Jefferson and the other slaveholders among the Founders were faced with that uncomfortable fact when they advocated natural rights.
There is also a tendency nowadays to view “natural rights” as simply an old-fashioned religious concept, inappropriate to our modern secular age.
Again, the Founders disagreed.
Of course, anyone who believes in God will believe that everything from natural rights to quarks and neutron stars are, ultimately, due to God.
But, the Founders came from a wide variety of religious perspectives, ranging from evangelical Christians to deists or agnostics: they did not find that their religious differences impeded their common understanding of the concept of natural rights.
The idea of natural rights is not specific to any particular religious tradition.
The natural-rights perspective is in fact based on a careful, systematic analysis of the nature of human action that combines abstract logic with a keen awareness of the realities of human history.
Most of us homeschoolers are rightly reluctant to get into the typical Republican vs. Democrat, liberal vs. conservative “flame wars.”
But, in various conversations with other homeschoolers, I am seeing an increasing interest in the broader philosophical issue of natural rights. Aside from the essay I linked to above, a homeschooling friend recently recommended to me Bastiat's classic The Law, and I think there is also a growing interest among homeschoolers in understanding the underpinnings of the Founders' thinking.
That interest among homeschoolers is, I think, not only understandable, but vital. I’ll go into this in more detail in future posts, but I’ll mention here some basic sources from which one can learn about the concept of natural rights..
One of the best-known sites on the Web that consistently advocates natural rights is LewRockwell.com. The Mises Institute is the best site both for serious, scholarly work from a natural-rights perspective, as well as for popular introductions, commentary on current events, etc.
The novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand wrote two essays that succinctly summarized the classical natural-rights perspective: “The Nature of Government” and “Man’s Rights.” (I do not entirely agree with Rand’s political perspective, and I disagree strongly with some of her current followers, but these essays do very clearly present the classical limited-government version of the natural-rights perspective.)
My own views on natural rights come largely from an economics perspective (I considered majoring in economics, and actually had an offer to do a post-doc in econ after I got my Ph.D. in physics). The single greatest influence on me was the late economist Murray Rothbard – see, e.g., his books Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays, The Ethics of Liberty, and For a New Liberty.
Thoreau’s Essay on Civil Disobedience is generally remembered for its anti-militarism and its emphasis on the importance of individual conscience, but it is in fact a passionate, humane, and readable defense of the natural-rights philosophy, which emphasizes the danger that any government poses to individual rights. Thoreau’s opening declaration could well serve as the motto for defenders of natural rights:
Locke is difficult reading for those of us educated in the twentieth or twenty-first centuries, but anyone seriously interested in natural rights or the founding of the United States ultimately has to read it.
Most of the sources I have linked to above are available online, though I would recommend getting hard copies of Locke's Second Treatise and Rothbard's The Ethics of Liberty.
Isn't this an awful lot to read?
Well, yes. But spread out over the course of the middle-school and high-school years, it really is not that burdensome.
After all, learning math, from arithmetic through calculus, requires a lot of reading, too. And, any reasonable study of English and American literature requires thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of pages of reading.
Isn't it possible to read just one or two of the essays or books I have linked to above?
Well... yeah, just as it is possible to read one play by Shakespeare and one book by Dickens and declare that you have finished English literature.
But, you're fooling yourself.
Any serious education involves the study of history and of human nature. The idea of natural rights is central to the history of our own country, and, the Founders believed, central to understanding both history in the broader sense and the nature of human beings.
The Founders were, I think, correct.
If the idea of natural rights is central, as the Founders thought it was, to understanding human nature, history, economics, and politics, then it merits serious and sustained study. It is not a topic that one should try to briefly “slip in” to one's schooling, as one might “slip in” origami or basket-weaving if you and your child happen to have some spare time (nothing wrong with either origami or basket-weaving – but neither are essential parts of a serious education).
In all honesty, I think a firm understanding of natural rights does require reading, at the very least, all of the essays and books I have listed above.
Locke and Thoreau are, of course, the most demanding of these, but they are also key historical documents that any educated person must read: unfortunately, they are not likely to be required reading nowadays even at good universities, so it is important to include them in your homeschooling. Rand's essays are quite brief, and Rothbard's books are quite readable.
Am I then suggesting that kids should learn about the idea of natural rights only in middle school or high school?
No. The Founders expected ordinary people to grasp the references to natural rights in the Declaration of Independence. The basic concept is not difficult: natural rights are those rights human beings possess automatically by nature, granted neither by other human beings nor by any rulers or any government.
To give a concrete example, humans can, after birth, normally breathe on their own. Normally, breathing is therefore a natural right. On the other hand, humans are not automatically provided by nature with free health care: therefore, free health care is not a natural right.
The distinction is straightforward and obvious: even a child in early grade school can grasp it.
Why this distinction matters, what it implies about the nature of politics, economics, history, etc. – all of that cannot be fully grasped by a first-grader, of course. But we tell first-graders that the earth moves around the sun, even though they cannot yet grasp Kepler's laws of planetary motion. A similar point applies to teaching the idea of natural rights.
Further along, as a student learns history, economics, etc., the idea of natural rights should be deepened and used to illuminate those other subjects.
In short, reading Locke, Thoreau, etc. when the student is older should be not the first introduction to the idea of natural rights, but rather an opportunity to see how the idea was created and fully developed historically.
Of course, the concept of natural rights, and its centrality in the thought of the American Founders, has pretty much disappeared from American education, so that even highly educated adults in contemporary America do not generally understand natural rights as well as the average farmer in the era of the American founding.
So, as is so often the case for us homeschoolers, educating our kids necessarily starts with educating ourselves – i.e., if you have not read the sources I listed above, you have a bit of reading to do before you can help your child understand the principles that lie at the foundation of our country.
Is it worth the trouble? Yes – if you want your kids to have a solid grounding in history, economics, and the founding principles of our country.
For that reason, I want to mention a fellow homeschooler’s essays on the natural-rights principles that are the basis of the Declaration of Independence and that were central to the founding of the American republic (see her section titled “The Proper Role of Government, My commentary as I study his article”: the essays are written from an LDS perspective) and also to expand further on her comments.
There is a tendency nowadays to view “natural rights” as simply a fuzzy rhetorical flourish used by the Founders to justify their breaking away from Britain.
The Founders, specifically Jefferson, did not see it that way: they thought they were actually describing some important, central, objective facts about human life and the nature of government.
I think they were right.
I despise fuzzy thinking, and I certainly would not put it past even the Founders (who were, after all, politicians) to engage in political propaganda.
But, the principles of natural rights did not in fact simply advance the interests of the Founders: for example, as Jefferson himself recognized, slavery stands condemned as a horrendous crime from a natural-rights perspective. Jefferson and the other slaveholders among the Founders were faced with that uncomfortable fact when they advocated natural rights.
There is also a tendency nowadays to view “natural rights” as simply an old-fashioned religious concept, inappropriate to our modern secular age.
Again, the Founders disagreed.
Of course, anyone who believes in God will believe that everything from natural rights to quarks and neutron stars are, ultimately, due to God.
But, the Founders came from a wide variety of religious perspectives, ranging from evangelical Christians to deists or agnostics: they did not find that their religious differences impeded their common understanding of the concept of natural rights.
The idea of natural rights is not specific to any particular religious tradition.
The natural-rights perspective is in fact based on a careful, systematic analysis of the nature of human action that combines abstract logic with a keen awareness of the realities of human history.
Most of us homeschoolers are rightly reluctant to get into the typical Republican vs. Democrat, liberal vs. conservative “flame wars.”
But, in various conversations with other homeschoolers, I am seeing an increasing interest in the broader philosophical issue of natural rights. Aside from the essay I linked to above, a homeschooling friend recently recommended to me Bastiat's classic The Law, and I think there is also a growing interest among homeschoolers in understanding the underpinnings of the Founders' thinking.
That interest among homeschoolers is, I think, not only understandable, but vital. I’ll go into this in more detail in future posts, but I’ll mention here some basic sources from which one can learn about the concept of natural rights..
One of the best-known sites on the Web that consistently advocates natural rights is LewRockwell.com. The Mises Institute is the best site both for serious, scholarly work from a natural-rights perspective, as well as for popular introductions, commentary on current events, etc.
The novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand wrote two essays that succinctly summarized the classical natural-rights perspective: “The Nature of Government” and “Man’s Rights.” (I do not entirely agree with Rand’s political perspective, and I disagree strongly with some of her current followers, but these essays do very clearly present the classical limited-government version of the natural-rights perspective.)
My own views on natural rights come largely from an economics perspective (I considered majoring in economics, and actually had an offer to do a post-doc in econ after I got my Ph.D. in physics). The single greatest influence on me was the late economist Murray Rothbard – see, e.g., his books Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays, The Ethics of Liberty, and For a New Liberty.
Thoreau’s Essay on Civil Disobedience is generally remembered for its anti-militarism and its emphasis on the importance of individual conscience, but it is in fact a passionate, humane, and readable defense of the natural-rights philosophy, which emphasizes the danger that any government poses to individual rights. Thoreau’s opening declaration could well serve as the motto for defenders of natural rights:
I HEARTILY ACCEPT the motto, — "That government is best which governs least"; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe, — "That government is best which governs not at all"; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.John Locke’s Second Treatise of Civil Government is the classical formulation of the idea of natural rights (although the basic concept of natural rights originated among the radical Protestants of the English Civil War such as Roger Williams, John Lilburne, and the heroic Anne Hutchinson, and the idea has roots in the Middle Ages and ultimately in Classical civilization).
Locke is difficult reading for those of us educated in the twentieth or twenty-first centuries, but anyone seriously interested in natural rights or the founding of the United States ultimately has to read it.
Most of the sources I have linked to above are available online, though I would recommend getting hard copies of Locke's Second Treatise and Rothbard's The Ethics of Liberty.
Isn't this an awful lot to read?
Well, yes. But spread out over the course of the middle-school and high-school years, it really is not that burdensome.
After all, learning math, from arithmetic through calculus, requires a lot of reading, too. And, any reasonable study of English and American literature requires thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of pages of reading.
Isn't it possible to read just one or two of the essays or books I have linked to above?
Well... yeah, just as it is possible to read one play by Shakespeare and one book by Dickens and declare that you have finished English literature.
But, you're fooling yourself.
Any serious education involves the study of history and of human nature. The idea of natural rights is central to the history of our own country, and, the Founders believed, central to understanding both history in the broader sense and the nature of human beings.
The Founders were, I think, correct.
If the idea of natural rights is central, as the Founders thought it was, to understanding human nature, history, economics, and politics, then it merits serious and sustained study. It is not a topic that one should try to briefly “slip in” to one's schooling, as one might “slip in” origami or basket-weaving if you and your child happen to have some spare time (nothing wrong with either origami or basket-weaving – but neither are essential parts of a serious education).
In all honesty, I think a firm understanding of natural rights does require reading, at the very least, all of the essays and books I have listed above.
Locke and Thoreau are, of course, the most demanding of these, but they are also key historical documents that any educated person must read: unfortunately, they are not likely to be required reading nowadays even at good universities, so it is important to include them in your homeschooling. Rand's essays are quite brief, and Rothbard's books are quite readable.
Am I then suggesting that kids should learn about the idea of natural rights only in middle school or high school?
No. The Founders expected ordinary people to grasp the references to natural rights in the Declaration of Independence. The basic concept is not difficult: natural rights are those rights human beings possess automatically by nature, granted neither by other human beings nor by any rulers or any government.
To give a concrete example, humans can, after birth, normally breathe on their own. Normally, breathing is therefore a natural right. On the other hand, humans are not automatically provided by nature with free health care: therefore, free health care is not a natural right.
The distinction is straightforward and obvious: even a child in early grade school can grasp it.
Why this distinction matters, what it implies about the nature of politics, economics, history, etc. – all of that cannot be fully grasped by a first-grader, of course. But we tell first-graders that the earth moves around the sun, even though they cannot yet grasp Kepler's laws of planetary motion. A similar point applies to teaching the idea of natural rights.
Further along, as a student learns history, economics, etc., the idea of natural rights should be deepened and used to illuminate those other subjects.
In short, reading Locke, Thoreau, etc. when the student is older should be not the first introduction to the idea of natural rights, but rather an opportunity to see how the idea was created and fully developed historically.
Of course, the concept of natural rights, and its centrality in the thought of the American Founders, has pretty much disappeared from American education, so that even highly educated adults in contemporary America do not generally understand natural rights as well as the average farmer in the era of the American founding.
So, as is so often the case for us homeschoolers, educating our kids necessarily starts with educating ourselves – i.e., if you have not read the sources I listed above, you have a bit of reading to do before you can help your child understand the principles that lie at the foundation of our country.
Is it worth the trouble? Yes – if you want your kids to have a solid grounding in history, economics, and the founding principles of our country.
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
The End of American Hegemony?
Bye-Bye, Copenhagen and Obama; Hello, Beijing!
Much of the discussion of the collapse of the Copenhagen Climate Summit has missed the real story: the collapse of the climate conference symbolizes a significant turning point in world history, not simply because of the issue of global warming, but rather because it represents the collapse of American leadership in the world.
I pointed out shortly before the conference began that the Chinese had clearly determined beforehand to reject the proposals of the United States and its allies (“a major offensive on rich nations at the Copenhagen conference on climate change,” to quote the exact words used by The Times of India ) and that the Chinese had put together an international coalition able and willing to advance their goals.
The course of the Conference was indeed controlled by the Chinese: the UK Prime Minister whined that the Western powers were “held to ransom by only a handful of countries” led by China.
And, the President of the United States was treated with contempt.
In a report by NBC News environmental correspondent Anne Thomspon on the final day of the Conference, December 18, 2009, President Obama referred to the Chinese proposal by saying, “That doesn’t make sense. It would be a hollow victory.”
Changhua Wu, China Director for the Climate Group, brusquely dismissed Obama’s statement by sharply declaring, “It’s not only an attack; it’s humiliating to a certain level.”
The full extent of the humiliation suffered by the American President was described by Ms. Thompson:
Thompson summed up the President’s experience by declaring:
What does this have to do with homeschooling?
As I pointed out recently, we Westerners view and teach history as if the ascendancy of the West during the last several centuries was natural and inevitable.
The perspective from much of Asia is rather different: the period of Western ascendancy seems a peculiar but brief historical anomaly that is ending now that Asia is reasserting its natural supremacy.
The real issue here is not partisan politics, Barack Obama’s personal political skills, or even global climate. What we observed in Copenhagen is a reassertion of Asia’s sense of its natural superiority over the West, and the collapse of the United States’ position as the natural, and generally acknowledged, leader of the world.
Twenty years from now, the whole Copenhagen fiasco, possibly the whole issue of “global warming,” will be a distant memory, rather like earlier environmentalist frauds such as the supposedly disastrous “population explosion”: try reading the 1968 best-seller The Population Bomb by Stanford Professor Paul Ehrlich and his wife, and have a laugh over how ludicrously wrong their prophecies turned out to be (I myself actually read Ehrlich’s book a year after it was published at the urge of my high-school history teacher, so I can remember how serious people once took Ehrlich seriously).
However, while the Copenhagen conference may strike our grandchildren as ancient history, the collapse of American preeminence and the rise of Asia will strike our grandchildren as very real. At some level, this is no doubt inevitable: the physical size of Asia and the fact that the majority of the human race lives in Asia means that Asia was always destined to be of key historical importance.
Of course, the foolishly irresponsible financial, educational, political, and environmental decisions pursued by the American political and cultural elite make the American decline even more certain and, potentially, catastrophic.
But, however one views the decline of the United States of America and of the West in general, it is of historic importance, and it is clearly illuminated by the collapse of US influence at Copenhagen.
The news of the last few days makes a very good history lesson for us homeschoolers to discuss with our kids.
I pointed out shortly before the conference began that the Chinese had clearly determined beforehand to reject the proposals of the United States and its allies (“a major offensive on rich nations at the Copenhagen conference on climate change,” to quote the exact words used by The Times of India ) and that the Chinese had put together an international coalition able and willing to advance their goals.
The course of the Conference was indeed controlled by the Chinese: the UK Prime Minister whined that the Western powers were “held to ransom by only a handful of countries” led by China.
And, the President of the United States was treated with contempt.
In a report by NBC News environmental correspondent Anne Thomspon on the final day of the Conference, December 18, 2009, President Obama referred to the Chinese proposal by saying, “That doesn’t make sense. It would be a hollow victory.”
Changhua Wu, China Director for the Climate Group, brusquely dismissed Obama’s statement by sharply declaring, “It’s not only an attack; it’s humiliating to a certain level.”
The full extent of the humiliation suffered by the American President was described by Ms. Thompson:
For thirteen hours, the President went from room to room, meeting with various world leaders, trying to figure out what they could agree on. Frustrations reached a crescendo when, waiting to meet with the Chinese Premier and Brazil’s leader, Obama found out they were already meeting and walked in uninvited.The President of the United States was left waiting by the Chinese because they were meeting with the leadership of Brazil. And he managed to get in to the meeting only by barging in “uninvited.”
Thompson summed up the President’s experience by declaring:
The final agreement, which even the most optimistic environmental groups called insufficient, left the President clearly exhausted and dejected.Exhausted and dejected indeed.
What does this have to do with homeschooling?
As I pointed out recently, we Westerners view and teach history as if the ascendancy of the West during the last several centuries was natural and inevitable.
The perspective from much of Asia is rather different: the period of Western ascendancy seems a peculiar but brief historical anomaly that is ending now that Asia is reasserting its natural supremacy.
The real issue here is not partisan politics, Barack Obama’s personal political skills, or even global climate. What we observed in Copenhagen is a reassertion of Asia’s sense of its natural superiority over the West, and the collapse of the United States’ position as the natural, and generally acknowledged, leader of the world.
Twenty years from now, the whole Copenhagen fiasco, possibly the whole issue of “global warming,” will be a distant memory, rather like earlier environmentalist frauds such as the supposedly disastrous “population explosion”: try reading the 1968 best-seller The Population Bomb by Stanford Professor Paul Ehrlich and his wife, and have a laugh over how ludicrously wrong their prophecies turned out to be (I myself actually read Ehrlich’s book a year after it was published at the urge of my high-school history teacher, so I can remember how serious people once took Ehrlich seriously).
However, while the Copenhagen conference may strike our grandchildren as ancient history, the collapse of American preeminence and the rise of Asia will strike our grandchildren as very real. At some level, this is no doubt inevitable: the physical size of Asia and the fact that the majority of the human race lives in Asia means that Asia was always destined to be of key historical importance.
Of course, the foolishly irresponsible financial, educational, political, and environmental decisions pursued by the American political and cultural elite make the American decline even more certain and, potentially, catastrophic.
But, however one views the decline of the United States of America and of the West in general, it is of historic importance, and it is clearly illuminated by the collapse of US influence at Copenhagen.
The news of the last few days makes a very good history lesson for us homeschoolers to discuss with our kids.
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Slicing Up History When We Homeschool:
Beyond Ancient/Medieval/Modern
The traditional approach to dividing up human history is:
It is natural that we are more interested in what happened in 1700 AD than in what happened in 1700 BC. But to make the Ancient Period seven times as long as the Modern Period risks badly biasing our understanding of the past: surely human life and thought must have changed rather significantly between 3000 BC and 500 AD.
The elapsed time between the building of the Pyramids and the death of Caesar is greater than the time from Caesar to ourselves. To lump Caesar in with the Pyramids as "ancient" is deceptive.
Of course, the origin of this framework goes back to early modern times, and is really simply a division among:
A more balanced division of history is:
When we talk about the “Bronze Age” vs. the “Iron Age,” we are already implicitly recognizing some such division: the Bronze Age world of the Pharaoh Khufu or the Great King Sargon of Akkad was a very different world from the Iron Age world of Qin Shi Huang Di and Julius Caesar, of Confucius, Buddha, Socrates, and Jesus.
The Archaic Period could be described as the period of “temple-states,” where the gods were largely the affair of the rulers and their dependent priests. During the Ancient Period, that system was replaced by wide-ranging thought and speculations about the nature of human life and reality. The Greek philosophers, the competing schools of thought in late Zhou China, the creation of the Upanishads and Buddhism in India, the creation of Judaism and then Christianity in Palestine – none of this has much precedent during the Archaic Period. (Because the central religious and philosophical perspectives that are still widespread today arose during the Ancient Period, the central part of this period has been labeled the “Axial Age” by the German philosopher Karl Jaspers.)
Belief systems during the Archaic Period tended to focus on the relationship between the gods and the entire community as mediated through the rulers and the priests. The transition during the Ancient Period to systems of thought and belief that focused on the individual and his relationship to the gods and to reality is a dramatic shift in human thought.
It's not that all of these revolutionary thinkers – from China to Greece – had similar thoughts. Quite the contrary! It is rather the diversity of thought in the Ancient Period that is so startling. Is the goal of life to be part of a society structured like a family (Confucianism)? Or is the goal of life to escape the cycle of rebirth through extinction of the self (Buddhism)? Or should we strive to live up to our potential as rational beings (Aristotle)? Or must we atone for our innate sinfulness by accepting the ultimate sacrifice made by Christ?
These are incommensurable goals for human life.
Why the “Period of Barbarian Conquests”?
To Westerners, the big news of 500 AD to 10000 AD is the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West, the loss of classical culture, and the Dark Ages.
But, from the perspective of most of the Old World civilizations, the fate of the Western borderlands was of limited interest. The real news of those years was the explosive expansion of Islam due to Arab barbarians who conquered the original heartlands of human civilization in the Near East and beyond.
Similarly, the real news of 1000 AD to 1500 AD was the repeated irruptions of the Turkish and Mongol peoples out of Central Asia, overpowering, at one time or another, almost all of the civilized areas of the Old World, except of course the Western borderlands of Europe.
And, after 1500 AD, the conquest of the rest of the world by the West was, from the perspective of most of the civilized world, simply one more wave of barbarian conquests.
One of the key characteristics of the Period of Barbarian Conquests is the dominance of much of the world by the two religious systems descended from ancient Judaism: the sister religions of Islam and Christianity.
Christians and Muslims may see each other as the ultimate heretics, but from the view of much of the world, and from the perspective of pre-Christian pagan culture, the two monotheistic religions are remarkably similar, not only in their beliefs but also in their relentlessly expansionist, missionary, imperialist activities.
I think the most important aspect of the general perspective I am proposing here is that it sheds some light on where we stand today.
First, is the Age of Barbarian Conquests now at its end, and are China and India re-asserting their position as dominant civilizations?
Second, will Christianity and/or Islam dominate human systems of belief in the future or is a new pattern of belief arising?
Of course, it is not possible to answer those questions with certainty.
But it is clear that the rise of science during the last five hundred years is radically changing the old games of civilization: physics is the same in Beijing as in London; chemistry is the same in New Delhi as in New York. Is it possible that the wild and lush diversity of systems of thought created during the Ancient Period are now being replaced by a single unified system of belief – natural science?
How does all this affect homeschooling?
I know of no textbook that does an adequate job of restructuring the narrative of human history along the lines I am suggesting here. Some high-school and college texts try to present a more balanced view of world cultures that moves beyond the narrow Greece-Rome/feudalism/Modern-West framework, but I know of none that adopt the broader framework I have sketched out here.
But we homeschoolers do not need to use a single textbook. There are a number of excellent books, at an upper-grade-school through high-school level that discuss separate civilizations and cultures. Homeschoolers can selectively use those books to create a broad curriculum that explores the pattern of human history that I have laid out.
Time-Life published two very nice series, The Emergence of Man and Lost Civilizations, that include a number of useful volumes: e.g., we have used The First Farmers and The First Cities in the former series and Early Europe: Mysteries in Stone in the latter series. Lost Civilizations, incidentally, is not about silliness such as Atlantis, but rather focuses on archaeological discoveries relating to ancient humans. Other Time-Life series, such as Time-Frame and The Great Ages of Man are also worth checking out. (All of these are long out of print, but generally available through public libraries and used book sources on-line.) It is important to cover the prehistoric agricultural revolution and the urban revolution: the two books I mentioned from The Emergence of Man series are helpful in doing that.
Lucent Books, in its World History Series, has a number of well-written books at a middle-school level: we have used, for example, Don Nardo's Ancient Mesopotamia.
Dorling-Kindersley's beautifully produced Voyages Through Time series, all written by Peter Ackroyd, is much better written then most DK books, but of course still has the wonderful illustrations that DK is famous for. We have gone through most of the volumes in this series: these books are our kids' favorites among all the history/social-studies books we have used up till now in our homeschooling.
At a beginning grade-school level, I recommend Anne Millard's and Particia Vanags' Usborne History of the World (this is the “white” book, not the “Internet-linked” book), which uses cartoons to give a nice, brief overview of world history up to 1900. The book is admirably neutral – not pro-Christian nor anti-Christian, not “politically correct” nor hiding past atrocities, but just a nice description of the broad course of world history at an early to mid-grade school reading level.
None of these books explicitly lays out the picture of history I have described here. But they do provide detailed and interesting factual narratives that can serve as the basis for a broad view of human history.
It is then the homeschooling parent's job to present the broad picture of history over the last five millennia, and explain how all of these historical details fit into that broad picture.
How we slice up history, how we categorize the past, can of course never tell us why past events occurred as they did, much less predict the future. In the end, one needs not simply a broad framework but also knowledge of detailed historical facts.
But, thinking about the periods of the past more clearly, and fitting all of the details of history into a broader narrative, can help us ask better questions not only about the past but also about the future.
- Ancient 3000 BC - 500 AD (3500 years)
- Medieval 500 AD - 1500 AD (1000 years)
- Modern 1500 AD - 2000 AD (500 years)
It is natural that we are more interested in what happened in 1700 AD than in what happened in 1700 BC. But to make the Ancient Period seven times as long as the Modern Period risks badly biasing our understanding of the past: surely human life and thought must have changed rather significantly between 3000 BC and 500 AD.
The elapsed time between the building of the Pyramids and the death of Caesar is greater than the time from Caesar to ourselves. To lump Caesar in with the Pyramids as "ancient" is deceptive.
Of course, the origin of this framework goes back to early modern times, and is really simply a division among:
- Greeks and Romans
- The Feudal Period
- The Renaissance and Post-Renaissance Age
A more balanced division of history is:
- Archaic Period 3000 BC - 1000 BC (2000 years)
- Ancient Period 1000 BC - 500 AD (1500 years)
- Period of Barbarian Conquests 500 AD - 2000 AD (1500 years)
When we talk about the “Bronze Age” vs. the “Iron Age,” we are already implicitly recognizing some such division: the Bronze Age world of the Pharaoh Khufu or the Great King Sargon of Akkad was a very different world from the Iron Age world of Qin Shi Huang Di and Julius Caesar, of Confucius, Buddha, Socrates, and Jesus.
The Archaic Period could be described as the period of “temple-states,” where the gods were largely the affair of the rulers and their dependent priests. During the Ancient Period, that system was replaced by wide-ranging thought and speculations about the nature of human life and reality. The Greek philosophers, the competing schools of thought in late Zhou China, the creation of the Upanishads and Buddhism in India, the creation of Judaism and then Christianity in Palestine – none of this has much precedent during the Archaic Period. (Because the central religious and philosophical perspectives that are still widespread today arose during the Ancient Period, the central part of this period has been labeled the “Axial Age” by the German philosopher Karl Jaspers.)
Belief systems during the Archaic Period tended to focus on the relationship between the gods and the entire community as mediated through the rulers and the priests. The transition during the Ancient Period to systems of thought and belief that focused on the individual and his relationship to the gods and to reality is a dramatic shift in human thought.
It's not that all of these revolutionary thinkers – from China to Greece – had similar thoughts. Quite the contrary! It is rather the diversity of thought in the Ancient Period that is so startling. Is the goal of life to be part of a society structured like a family (Confucianism)? Or is the goal of life to escape the cycle of rebirth through extinction of the self (Buddhism)? Or should we strive to live up to our potential as rational beings (Aristotle)? Or must we atone for our innate sinfulness by accepting the ultimate sacrifice made by Christ?
These are incommensurable goals for human life.
Why the “Period of Barbarian Conquests”?
To Westerners, the big news of 500 AD to 10000 AD is the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West, the loss of classical culture, and the Dark Ages.
But, from the perspective of most of the Old World civilizations, the fate of the Western borderlands was of limited interest. The real news of those years was the explosive expansion of Islam due to Arab barbarians who conquered the original heartlands of human civilization in the Near East and beyond.
Similarly, the real news of 1000 AD to 1500 AD was the repeated irruptions of the Turkish and Mongol peoples out of Central Asia, overpowering, at one time or another, almost all of the civilized areas of the Old World, except of course the Western borderlands of Europe.
And, after 1500 AD, the conquest of the rest of the world by the West was, from the perspective of most of the civilized world, simply one more wave of barbarian conquests.
One of the key characteristics of the Period of Barbarian Conquests is the dominance of much of the world by the two religious systems descended from ancient Judaism: the sister religions of Islam and Christianity.
Christians and Muslims may see each other as the ultimate heretics, but from the view of much of the world, and from the perspective of pre-Christian pagan culture, the two monotheistic religions are remarkably similar, not only in their beliefs but also in their relentlessly expansionist, missionary, imperialist activities.
I think the most important aspect of the general perspective I am proposing here is that it sheds some light on where we stand today.
First, is the Age of Barbarian Conquests now at its end, and are China and India re-asserting their position as dominant civilizations?
Second, will Christianity and/or Islam dominate human systems of belief in the future or is a new pattern of belief arising?
Of course, it is not possible to answer those questions with certainty.
But it is clear that the rise of science during the last five hundred years is radically changing the old games of civilization: physics is the same in Beijing as in London; chemistry is the same in New Delhi as in New York. Is it possible that the wild and lush diversity of systems of thought created during the Ancient Period are now being replaced by a single unified system of belief – natural science?
How does all this affect homeschooling?
I know of no textbook that does an adequate job of restructuring the narrative of human history along the lines I am suggesting here. Some high-school and college texts try to present a more balanced view of world cultures that moves beyond the narrow Greece-Rome/feudalism/Modern-West framework, but I know of none that adopt the broader framework I have sketched out here.
But we homeschoolers do not need to use a single textbook. There are a number of excellent books, at an upper-grade-school through high-school level that discuss separate civilizations and cultures. Homeschoolers can selectively use those books to create a broad curriculum that explores the pattern of human history that I have laid out.
Time-Life published two very nice series, The Emergence of Man and Lost Civilizations, that include a number of useful volumes: e.g., we have used The First Farmers and The First Cities in the former series and Early Europe: Mysteries in Stone in the latter series. Lost Civilizations, incidentally, is not about silliness such as Atlantis, but rather focuses on archaeological discoveries relating to ancient humans. Other Time-Life series, such as Time-Frame and The Great Ages of Man are also worth checking out. (All of these are long out of print, but generally available through public libraries and used book sources on-line.) It is important to cover the prehistoric agricultural revolution and the urban revolution: the two books I mentioned from The Emergence of Man series are helpful in doing that.
Lucent Books, in its World History Series, has a number of well-written books at a middle-school level: we have used, for example, Don Nardo's Ancient Mesopotamia.
Dorling-Kindersley's beautifully produced Voyages Through Time series, all written by Peter Ackroyd, is much better written then most DK books, but of course still has the wonderful illustrations that DK is famous for. We have gone through most of the volumes in this series: these books are our kids' favorites among all the history/social-studies books we have used up till now in our homeschooling.
At a beginning grade-school level, I recommend Anne Millard's and Particia Vanags' Usborne History of the World (this is the “white” book, not the “Internet-linked” book), which uses cartoons to give a nice, brief overview of world history up to 1900. The book is admirably neutral – not pro-Christian nor anti-Christian, not “politically correct” nor hiding past atrocities, but just a nice description of the broad course of world history at an early to mid-grade school reading level.
None of these books explicitly lays out the picture of history I have described here. But they do provide detailed and interesting factual narratives that can serve as the basis for a broad view of human history.
It is then the homeschooling parent's job to present the broad picture of history over the last five millennia, and explain how all of these historical details fit into that broad picture.
How we slice up history, how we categorize the past, can of course never tell us why past events occurred as they did, much less predict the future. In the end, one needs not simply a broad framework but also knowledge of detailed historical facts.
But, thinking about the periods of the past more clearly, and fitting all of the details of history into a broader narrative, can help us ask better questions not only about the past but also about the future.
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