A Reminder of What We Should Strive to Be

This column originally appeared at Big Jolly Politics:

In my last post I tried to start a discussion about the role of morality in our society and politics, knowing that it is one of the areas of profound misunderstanding and disagreement between the political camps, and has been a constant source of agitation and division within the conservative political camp, since at least the 1960s. I was not going to return to this topic now, but was going to move ahead with a post about our party’s future, and then return to the series on Education—but then the growing story about General Petraeus dovetailed with Veteran’s Day weekend. So, I want to share some additional thoughts with you as this story unfolds. To do so, though, I need to digress for a moment.

A few years ago, while my oldest daughter was still in college, she called me one morning in tears. She had just come from a freshman political science course about U.S. Government. The class discussion had turned to political/social issues, and then to the politics of abortion. The professor apparently ridiculed the conservative position on this issue, and in the process, ridiculed the intelligence of conservatives generally. When my daughter tried to defend conservatives, she was personally ridiculed and laughed at by the professor, and by the students in the class. As she recounted this story, I tried to console her, but in my mind I was saying to myself, “welcome to my world.”

Now, let’s fast forward to just a few weeks ago. I was working one afternoon on a legal brief in my office in my home, when my oldest daughter came into my office and started to chat. After college she had lived and worked for a couple of years in Los Angeles, and then moved back to Houston at the end of 2011. I had thought for a long time that the experience in LA had changed her perspective on a lot of things, but as she started this conversation, some of my worst fears were confirmed. She sat down and said to me, “Dad, did you know that a lot of the people I know think you and your Republican friends are fascists? Are you a fascist?” Of course my first, silent reaction was, “as if I hadn’t heard this unoriginal and superficial accusation before;” but, then I realized that this was coming from my own daughter, and I needed to address it seriously.

I first asked her to define what she understood the word “fascist” to mean, and then to explain to me the reasoning her friends were giving to describe Republicans as being fascists. Then, as I had done as she was growing up, I pulled down a few dictionaries and reference books and explained to her what fascism really was, what Nazism really was, and why that label has no valid application to either political party in the United States. In the end, what her friends’ uneducated criticism boiled down to is that they believe Republicans are hateful for pressing their moral views on others.

I am now going to share with you, in a little more analytical detail and language, what I tried to explain to my daughter in response to this “revelation.”

The primary definition of “society” is the “totality of social relationships among humans.” Based on this definition, you can’t have “society” without having human relationships; and man, being a social being, has never long survived without being a part of a society (remember Donne’s admonition: “No man is an island”?). “Government” is a tool we create and use to protect and preserve the society we have created through human relationships. But without relationships, nothing else is possible.

Some societies arise geographically from relationships that are imposed on people by others through outside institutions—tribes, clans, families, and religions—and that are then fostered and maintained by governments that preserve the institutions, and the ordered relationships such institutions impose. Some of these societies, over time, replace the outside institutions all together with government. In fact, it is this model of imposed relationships, which has formed and maintained most societies throughout human history—and seems to be the model to which we humans continue to default over time.

But, a society of free people, who form relationships freely, and whose society organically grows from such free relationships, is a unique and exceptional model in human history—it is the model our settlers created as they came to North America, and it is the model our Founders tried to preserve and protect when they formed our federal structure of government after the American Revolution. As with any society, though, this model doesn’t work or last without those freely-formed and maintained human relationships.

As I started to explain in my last post, our Founders, and other later men and women like C.S. Lewis, understood that the rules of morality we inherited through our Judeo-Christian heritage provided the directions with which we could build and maintain these human relationships in a free society. American Conservatives believe that if you abandon these rules, the ultimate result will by a default to a society of imposed relationships run by government—like fascism, socialism, communism, Nazism, radical Islam, etc. So, rather than trying to foster and advance fascism, American Conservatives are devoted to averting a process that would lead to a future fascist regime in America.

For instance, when our Founders told us that “it is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love, and charity towards each other,” they were talking about a rule for maintaining those “relations between man and man,” through “fair play and harmony between individuals” that Lewis described as the first “department” of morality.

When Mason, Madison and Henry then told us that “no free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people, but by firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue, and by frequent recurrence to fundamental principles,” they were reminding us of the central importance of individual morality and behavior to the maintenance of the “relations between man and man”—what Lewis said was the second “department” of morality. The importance of individual morality was central to maintaining our free society, because “[y]ou cannot make men good by law: and without good men you cannot have a good society.”

Finally, when these Virginians told us that “the duty which we owe our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and therefore all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience,” they were describing what Lewis would later call the third, and possibly most controversial “department” of morality in our society: “relations between man and the power that made him.”

What liberals or progressives have refused to acknowledge over the last few decades is that the free relationships upon which our society of free people depends, cannot survive without adherence to these rules of morality; that perfect behavior “is a necessary ideal prescribed for all men by the very nature of the human machine,” and this ideal should not be discarded simply because actual perfection is unattainable; and that imposing rules through government to replace these moral rules is antithetical to the foundation of our society. What liberals or progressives most forget is that by seeking to maintain and apply the rules of morality, we conservatives are trying to preserve liberty by preserving the free relationships upon which our society is based; we are not trying to destroy liberty and impose a “fascist” state.

At the same time, we conservatives often forget that these rules of morality are voluntary; that, though these rules of morality have remained pretty constant throughout Western history, their application can, and sometimes must, change as the human condition changes (and understanding the difference between a moral rule and an application of that rule is a continuing source of tension among conservatives, and between conservatives and progressives); and that the promotion of these rules necessarily requires patience to endure the different choices, and the unintended consequences from those choices, that flow from adherence to voluntary rules—because, as C.S. Lewis correctly noted, no rules of morality or calling in life—not even the calling of “an officer and a gentleman”—can make us, or expect us, to be perfect human beings.

And, so this leads me to the sad shame of the growing story of General Petraeus and his wife of 38 years, Ms. Broadwell and her family, Ms. Kelly and her family, a shirtless FBI agent, General Allen, and who knows who else and what else. Some might throw up their hands and say that this story is proof that our society is too prudish, and we need to get over it; others would correctly point out the harm that may have been done to national security from the such conduct and impose punishments on those involved and new laws to try to stop such conduct in the future.

But an American Conservative knows that no matter what happened here, imperfect people made choices to not follow the rules of morality that are needed to maintain a society of free people, and there are always consequences—most never intended—that flow from such choices. Usually, those consequences are more isolated with smaller ripple effects into the larger community than is the case with this story; but, there are always consequences. It is that second department of morality—the morality inside each of us—that failed here. And it is the morality inside each of us that needs to be continually rekindled in order to maintain a free society.

No more appropriate words have been spoken in the English language over the last half century about what it takes to rekindle such inner morality, than those spoken by General MacArthur at West Point in 1962. Because those words are so relevant to the story that is unfolding in the news, I’ll leave you with that passage to think about:

Duty-Honor-Country. 

Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be. They are your rallying points; to build courage when courage seems to fail; to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith; to create hope when hope becomes forlorn. … 

They build your basic character; they mold you for your future roles as custodians of the nation’s defense; they make you strong enough to know when you are weak, and brace enough to face yourself when you are afraid. They teach you to be proud and unbending in honest failure, but humble and gentle in success, not to substitute words for action, not to seek the path of comfort, but to face the stress and spur of difficulty and challenge; to learn to stand up in the storm but to have compassion on those who fail; to master yourself before you seek to master others; to have a heart that is clean, a goal that is high; to learn to laugh yet never forget how to weep; to reach into the future yet never neglect the past; to be serious yet never take yourself too seriously; to be modest so that you will remember the simplicity of true greatness, the open mind of true wisdom, the meekness of true strength. 

They give you a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions, a freshness of the deep springs of life, a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity, and appetite for adventure and a love of ease. They create in your heart the sense of wonder, the unfailing hope of what next, and the joy and inspiration of life. 

They teach you in this way to be an officer and a gentleman.

In a society of free people, can we maintain the free relationships we need if we don’t each strive to be “an officer and a gentleman”?

Interview on The Mark McCaig Show 11-11-12

This past Sunday I was interviewed on The Mark McCaig Show. You can listen to the interview here, and I'm interested in your feedback.

Individualism v. Community: The false debate at the core of this election.

This column originally appeared at Big Jolly Politics:

I’ll return to my series on Texas Education soon, but I want to share some thoughts after digesting the rhetoric from both national political conventions.

My first and over-riding thought was how baffled Adam Smith and William Jennings Bryan would be if they had somehow been able to return to this world for the last two weeks and had attended these conventions.  Neither would understand the split that has occurred in American politics over issues they studied and championed, and both would be shocked at how misunderstood and misapplied their ideas have become.  

Smith, the Scottish professor of Moral Philosophy, built his ideas about economics and government in his Wealth of Nations on the foundation of his description of the inherent moral nature of man in The Theory of Moral Sentiments.  For the last 250 years, both proponents and opponents of the system of capitalism and free markets that evolved from Smith’s writings based their viewpoints on an analysis of economic behavior that was independent of the morality so central to Smith’s theories.  Smith would not have understood either Marx or Rand.  To him, the individual pursuing his or her self-interest did so within a context of morality and responsibility.  Smith’s total view, in turn, was consistent with the type of system that developed during the 18^th and 19^th Centuries in the United States—the one de Tocqueville observed and explained in his Democracy In America.

But today, we are more the children of Marx and Rand, than of Smith.  So, we see the answers to our problems solely through the lens of rugged individualism, or social-justice collectivism, when both individualism and community are needed for a society of free people to thrive using capitalism and free markets.  In essence, our misreading of Smith has set up a false choice between individualism and community that de Tocqueville believed we had avoided. 

As a self-proclaimed answer to this false choice, William Jennings Bryan emerged as a political force of nature in the 1890s.  Arguably, as one of the early proponents of a form of Progressivism, he was the most influential politician from the 1890s to the 1920s who never became President—though he tried four times.  He set out to impose community on rugged individualists through his “applied Christianity,” which was derisively called “Bryanism.”   Bryanism called for the federal government to become the source of social justice through interventionist and redistributionist economic policies, and by enforcing a common standard for public and private moral behavior.  Between the 1930s and the 1960s, the Democratic Party abandoned the social conservatism of Bryanism, while fully embracing the economic portion of his social justice views.   

Meanwhile, in the late 1970s, the social-conservative heirs to the morality of Bryanism turned to the Republican Party to promote their agenda, and they joined economic conservatives to support Ronald Reagan’s “New Republican Party” plan to re-establish a modern society upon the Smith/de Tocqueville model of society.  In fact, what Reagan understood was that the real choice for sustaining and improving our free society is not between individualism and community, but between the role of individual morality and responsibility and government regulations and programs in creating and maintaining community among free people.  The Smith/de Tocqueville model that Reagan tried to reinvigorate provided the right answer for that real choice. 

But instead of disappearing into history, the remnants of Bryanism are alive and well.  They are divided into two warring camps still trying to resolve the false choice between individualism and community with wrong or incomplete answers that depend on the exercise of federal government action, and that create strange fissures within both Progressivism and Conservatism in this country.

President Obama’s acceptance speech doubled-down on the economic social-justice model of Bryanism.  He recognized that our society is built on both the freedom of the individual and the interdependence of communities, but he embraced the false choice between the two.  Then, he sought to answer the false choice by providing community artificially through more government interventions, while rejecting any role for private, individual, moral character and responsibility in shaping and preserving a community.  Such an approach provides a wrong answer to the false choice, which will worsen all of the social pathologies that have arisen over the last century, and further isolate neighbors as autonomous wards of one or more federal government programs. 

Where are the Republicans in this debate?  Unfortunately, we are still arguing between the social conservatism of Bryanism and the economic conservatism of traditional and libertarian Republicans, when Smith, de Tocqueville and Reagan would have told us the choice we are arguing about is false, too.  Both are needed for our model of government to work, and we need to stop fighting among ourselves over this fundamental point. 

Instead, we need to come together and seize the opportunity we’ve been given to change the debate in this election.  By shaping the debate around “community” and the social-justice model, Obama has handed us a rare opportunity to break out of the old paradigms and to reveal the false choice between individualism and community that we have been given over the last century.  As we reveal the false choice, we must argue for our Smith/de Tocqueville/Reagan model of a free society and government—an argument we have not made coherently for at least a generation because of our own internal arguments.  We need to take the “You did build that” theme, and expand on it with our ageless ideas of creating and maintaining “community” through individual, private, and local action; by showing that the individualism of moral people creates community among neighbors, and that such communities are protected and promoted by local private and public entities, rather than by a federal bureaucracy.

All of the groups we need to persuade to vote for our ticket need to hear the falsity of the choice and answer the Democrats have long promoted, and hear the real argument for the Smith/de Tocqueville/Reagan model that made us exceptional:  Latinos and other new immigrant groups who have come to this country to build a better life; African-Americans who have been abandoned to under-education, under-employment and over-incarceration; and women and young people, whose prosperity depends on the economic growth and support that strong neighborhoods provide.   

Unless some whiz kid around Romney and Ryan figures out how to make this argument effectively, Obama’s argument will win by default because the false choice has become engrained in our national thinking, and the mood of the country is looking for answers.  They’ll embrace even wrong answers to false choices if we don’t show them the choice is false and the answer is wrong, and what is really the right path.  We won’t just win this election by doubling-down on social conservatism or rugged individualism, nor do I now think we can limp into the election just focusing on jobs, the budget and government reform.  Instead, we need to show why our answers to jobs, the budget and government reform will improve the condition of this country, and to do that we need to address the interrelationship between basic morality, individualism, and strong communities for the success of our model of society and economic growth—an interrelationship that our founders, Smith and de Tocqueville understood and promoted.  Then, we need to challenge our neighbors to rebuild this model of society with us.  

If Romney articulates the Smith/de Tocqueville/Reagan model effectively, shows why it is relevant to the problems we face, shows how it can work, shows how it will improve lives in the 21^st Century, and challenges us to embrace it, he’ll win in a landslide.  If not, the public may decide to let their money ride on the wrong bet they made four years ago.

The Election Choice—Can Romney make it simple? Can Romney be Romney?

This column originally appeared at Big Jolly Politics:

Watching all of the pundits say that Romney has to make himself likable is beginning to drive me crazy. Of course no one wants to embrace a dour person (though Richard Nixon was on 4 of 5 winning national tickets, just proving that there are exceptions to every rule), but Romney is not dour, and the times require a serious, steady, positive message. I am going to say something I never thought I would say a few months ago—let’s let Romney be Romney.

What would that mean? It would mean that we should allow Romney to make the case to the American people about the choices we face, and how he is the best man at this time to help us make those choices because he has lived those choices all his life.

Romney knows the correct answer to the fundamental question of this election: Who builds this economy and this country, the federal government or private businesses and the individuals they employee?

And the answer is: private business and the individuals they employ. If you don’t understand that fundamental answer, you do not deserve the public’s trust to hold an office in our government. Period.

It is private business that generates the jobs that provide for families and that build neighborhoods. We spend more time every day with our co-workers than with our families, and the positive bonds formed through this activity ripple out in every direction. Employing people affects the lives of both the employer and the employee, from which both grow. The products or services generated by a business affect customers, and spur innovation by others through competition. But, most importantly, every paycheck signed sets aside a retirement fund, pays for health care, provides for the sustenance of a family, pays for a mortgage and a college education, pays for the charity from a church or non-profit organization, and creates the tax base for the infrastructure and protection of a community.

Government is nothing more than a service that we pay for with the taxes from our paychecks and profits. It is a service through which we have chosen to hire some of our neighbors to provide education to our children, create and maintain a physical infrastructure, provide for our defense and protection our communities and nation, and preserve a safety net for those unable through no fault of their own to help themselves (or find private charitable help), while we work and build the foundation of wealth and happiness for our families, our communities, and our country. In essence, government works for us, at our direction, and to the extent we feel we need it—we do not work for government. To increase government’s role in our society beyond providing these services effectively and efficiently, is to threaten the delicate balance among free people that this system has long maintained—and that makes our experiment in self-government so unique and exceptional.

President Obama and the modern Democratic Party do not believe in this delicate balance. Instead, they want to transform it so that Government indeed becomes the source of all wealth and happiness in our society—and as they do so, they are putting our delicate balance in mortal jeopardy. The Democrats have long wanted to change the fundamental relationships in our private sector, and between the private sector and government, by inserting government more and more into the private relationships that a private-sector paycheck has always supported. This process has reached a tipping point now.

Because no one knows which way our system will tip—how much further the federal government will interfere in the private market and private relationships, and how much taxes will be seized to pay for the massive public spending and debt incurred to fund that interference—a cloud of uncertainty now hangs over our country (and, by extension, over the world economy). And that uncertainty keeps business from hiring people, and that cuts the paychecks that support families and communities. That uncertainty, if allowed to continue, will tip the balance toward a new pervasive government and the nation the Democrats have long tried to create.

We must bring an end to this transformation that disguises itself as “hope and change,” and “moving forward.” This transformation does not promise progress, but, instead, a benign peonage for future generations. Is that what prior generations fought for?

Through his work in the private sector, in his church, and through the charities he has supported, Romney understands, and indeed embodies the best of the balanced system I have just described. He understands the challenge and threat the Democrats’ vision has created for the delicate balance of our unique society. He just needs to be honest with us; and then challenge us to help him stop this transformation, to make the necessary reforms to remove the uncertainty, and to restore the historic balance between the private sector and government, so that private business will write those paychecks again.

It’s that simple. Great speeches by Ann Romney, Chris Christie, Condi Rice, Susana Martinez, and Paul Ryan have all paved the way for him. Now, let’s hope Romney will be Romney.

Texas Education IV: A Case Study in the Failure of a Method-Based Curriculum

This column originally appeared at Big Jolly Politics:

I want to thank “Izzy,” who is a frequent commentator on the posts here on Big Jolly Politics, for his very creative comment to my last post, because it helped crystalize for me how I need to start this discussion about reforming our curriculum and our classrooms—very carefully.

You see, one reason reform efforts over the last generation have been so ineffective is that the classroom has become the “third rail” in the debate over education, which we mere mortals dare not discuss—especially if we are conservatives. When we “fools” have rushed in, we have been castigated by the “professionals” for not understanding the realities of teaching and the modern classroom, and our proposals have been dismissed as unenlightened attempts to find the answer to every issue in some bygone, Reaganesque “Golden Age” that never existed. Unfortunately, we conservatives sometimes play into this narrative by the rhetoric we use and the battles we choose to fight.

So, at the outset of this portion of our discussion, let me clarify a few things.

First, I believe teaching is one of the hardest jobs to do well in our society, and I have the utmost admiration for those who pursue teaching as a career. From the moment a teacher walks inside a school each morning to the moment he (or she) leaves at night, he is teaching—content, character, methods, and values—directly in the classroom and indirectly by observation and example. And, this process continues every day of each school year for decades. The reality is that the challenges teachers face have become more difficult over the last few decades as our student bodies have become larger and more culturally and intellectually diverse, as the mission of our public schools has become more opaque, and as the public’s willingness to underwrite the present system has been strained to the breaking point. A primary objective for starting this discussion is to establish a more intelligible system that will help teachers meet their challenges more effectively, and that will gain the public’s confidence and support.

Second, I enter this discussion with a little more than a pedestrian interest. I grew up in a family deeply devoted to education, in which my father served as member of a public school board, and worked on local education issues for many years. In college, I served on the Faculty Curriculum Committee that revised our college’s core curriculum and graduation requirements, and on the college’s Long-Range Planning Committee. Recently, I finished a four-year term as a member, officer, and Chair of the Board of Trustees of a local private school. These experiences, together with my own study over the years, have provided me with insights into the challenges faced by educators, the different missions of public and private schools, the proper boundaries between management of a school as an entity and administration of the operations and classrooms of the school, and the ongoing process of strategic planning for a school.

Third, because public schools are by their nature “public,” there is a political component to the strategic planning for our school system. Therefore, citizens, including old fools like me, have a responsibility to participate in that planning process. Given the state of our public education, and the demands on our public budgets, this strategic planning process is long overdue in Texas.

Finally, I do believe that the first step of any strategic planning process is to define the mission of the entity, and only then to determine how to fulfill that mission. My previous posts focused on offering a clarified mission, and with this post we will start to discuss how to fulfill it. I am sure that some people fear that my stated mission, and the proposals to implement it, will “turn the clock back” on education. To show that this view fundamentally misreads what I have said so far, I’ll briefly recap what I’ve said so far:

• I agree with John Stuart Mill, who defined “education” in his Inaugural Address Delivered to the University of St. Andrews in 1867, as “the culture which each generation purposely gives to those who are to be its successors, in order to qualify them for at least keeping up, and if possible for raising the level of improvement which has been attained…;”
• I agree with educators, such as John B. Conant and Allan Bloom, who argued that to provide the education that Mill described, there must be a unity of purpose underlying the curriculum of the school system;
• I believe the unity of purpose for the public school system is provided in Article 7, Section 1, of the Texas Constitutions, which states: “A general diffusion of knowledge being essential to the preservation of the liberties and rights of the people, it shall be the duty of the Legislature of the State to establish and make suitable provision for the support and maintenance of an efficient system of public free schools…;”
• I have proposed a modern mission for our public school system that applies “the constitutional purpose of Texas education to the 21^st Century challenges that will face our children and grandchildren.as a mission”: “the incremental foundation of truths, facts, and principles they will need as adults to function as effective American citizens in a global economy, together with the experiences and tools to use such knowledge effectively and wisely;” and
• The federal government should have little or no role in implementing this new mission, because the history of its involvement over the last few decades has been one of increased bureaucracy and inefficiency without any perceptible improvement in outcomes.

I am not trying to return to an age that never existed, but I am challenging the status quo of accepted practices within the current system that fails to prepare our children for the society they are entering.

Now, with these clarifications behind us, let us “fools” proceed to discuss the curriculum and the classrooms we will need to carry-out a unified mission in the 21^st Century.

To do so, let’s start with the fictional classroom that Izzy described in his comment to my last post. I am going to quote it at length (though I’ve done my best to fix the punctuation and paragraphs to enhance its readability) and then use it to discuss the problems illustrated by this story, which underlie the need for curricular reform. I will then use these problems as discussion points for my next posts.

In Izzy’s story, we are shown a class of diverse students—probably a science class of unknown grade level—to whom the teacher is trying to teach the “scientific method”:

… The room darkened. I picked up the remote control and pushed ‘play’. The overhead projector screen glowed blue then white, as the steps of the Scientific Method, listed in black letters became readable. Some students began writing in their journals. I walked back around my desk and stood before the darkened class and slightly shifted my expression.

“Ask a question,” I said, then paused.”

The first step in the Scientific method is….write this down young scientists,” then paused again. “Ask a question.”

The students wrote down step one of the Scientific Method.

“Let’s say that Antinio, has to go from his first period class All THE WAY to Biology without getting caught in ‘tardy sweep’.” I emphasized the words ALL THE WAY, because the students knew that English classes were just downstairs from our Biology classroom. I was being sarcastic. If students were tardy more than nine times, they would have to serve one day of in school suspension. Fifteen times and they would be suspended from school for a day. SWEEP was the term used by the administrators for rounding up tardy students between classes, from the halls and sending them to a common area with other tardy boys and girls.

“Ezweep ez boolcheet,” Antinio said out loud, in heavily Spanish accented english.

Christian, a Hispanic boy sitting on the other side of the classroom on the first row, half-laughed. “Hah,” he blurted out coyly, then, looked around the room for approval.

Raymond noisily wadded up a piece of paper and acted like he might try for a long shot at the garbage can. Carolina and Jasmina baited him, “chood eet, chood eet.”

“Raymond, don’t do that,” I said with a mocking pseudo plead. The projector screen glowed white with the steps of the scientific method. I stared at Raymond for one-half of a second then looked at Antonio and said, “Antinio, please don’t cuss.” Antonio stared at me and didn’t say anything. Juanito sat up and pulled the earbuds out of his ears.

I paused, just for a second, and looked above the class at a National Geographic poster of ‘A Wetland Ecosystem’ on the back wall, and said, “Ask a question.” The class was silent.

“How do I geet frong inglich tu Biologia widhow gettin’ caught by the ‘Meegra?” Antonio asked. Christian, Raymond, Desmond and several other students howled with laughter.

I paused and looked at Antonio. “RIGHT, ANTONIO,” I shouted! I said to the class, “How does Antinio get from English class to Biology without getting caught by the ‘Meegra?” The class laughed.

“Iz lak ezweep por our daddys?” Juanito asked, sincerely, yet softly.

“VERY GOOD YOUNG SCIENTIST,” I said loudly! That’s step one of the scientific method. “Let’s give THAT ‘young scientist’ two claps!” I, and most of the students clapped twice, clap, clap….

My guess is that many teachers face this same type of challenging situation many, many times a day in our public schools, and they each try to use a creative approach like the one this fictional teacher used to establish the point they are trying to teach. But, with all due respect to our fictional teacher, the point she thought she had made was probably lost on these students, regardless of their momentary applause—and that is the problem with teaching with a method-based curriculum.

I want to put my critique in context, so let’s start with a few of the relevant findings from A Nation at Risk, which I referenced in my last post:

• “Some 23 million American adults are functionally illiterate by the simplest tests of everyday reading, writing, and comprehension.”
• “About 13 percent of all 17-year-olds in the United States can be considered functionally illiterate. Functional illiteracy among the minority youth may run as high as 40 percent.”
• “Many 17-year-olds do not do not possess the ‘higher order’ intellectual skill we should expect of them. Nearly 40 percent cannot draw inferences from written material; only one-fifth can write a persuasive essay; and only one-third can solve a mathematics problem requiring several steps.”
• “The teacher preparation curriculum is weighted heavily with courses in ‘educational methods’ at the expense of courses in subjects to be taught. A survey of 1,350 institutions training teachers indicated that 41 percent of the time of elementary school teacher candidates is spent in education courses, which reduces the amount of time available for subject matter courses.”

Based on these findings, here are some of the problems with this episode:

Both the purpose of the lesson—teaching the Scientific Method—and the result—application of the first step to an unrelated, non-scientific scenario, is a waste of educational resources.

Cognitive scientists tell us that teaching a method of thinking without reference to the basic knowledge to which the methodology is to be applied, is a waste of time. However, since A Nation at Risk was issued, much of the educational establishment in this country has re-doubled their efforts to teach such methodology with the hope that it would lead to an expansion of “‘higher order’ intellectual skill” among our children.

In 2007, in the journal American Educator, Donald T. Willingham presented an analysis of the relevant cognitive science studies in “Critical Thinking: Why Is It So Hard to Teach?”. The upshot of the research that Willingham summarizes is that if critical thinking is taught as a methodology, e.g., the scientific method, the historical method, etc., without reference to the subject matter to which it applies and without repetition, it is not retained for future use by students. E.D. Hirsch, Jr., expands on and addresses similar findings in his recent book, The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools.

So, though our fictional teacher was justifiably gratified that there had been a momentary break-thru with the students, the break-thru promises to be just that—momentary. It is unlikely that anything of value from the lesson will be retained by our fictional students for future application.

The language used by the students shows their functional illiteracy, and their lack of readiness for the lesson that is being presented.

These fictional students show virtually no functional grasp of the English language; certainly not enough of a grasp of English to understand the meaning of either “scientific” or “method,” let alone to understand, retain or use anything else related to the teacher’s lesson. These students have not learned either of the necessary reading and listening skills: decoding; and comprehending. Without these skills, the long-term meaning of this lesson was lost on the students described in Izzy’s story.

The functional illiteracy displayed by these students displays a failure of the system to assimilate these students into the America they will inherit.

Why are our fictional students functionally illiterate in the language of our culture? Because our curriculum fails to require instruction in the basic knowledge these children need in order to assimilate into our society, or as Mill described in 1867: to become members of “the culture which each generation purposely gives to those who are to be its successors, in order to qualify them for at least keeping up, and if possible for raising the level of improvement which has been attained….”

Hirsch makes this point persuasively in The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools:

… [E]ffective communication and intellectual competence require shared knowledge over a wide range of topics. … they connect with something less tangible: a sense of belonging to a wider community and a feeling of solidarity with other Americans. When we become full members of the American speech community, we belong to a wider group toward which we feel a sense of loyalty. …

Since language itself depends on shared knowledge and values as well as shared conventions, the aim of bringing children into the public speech community is a more than linguistic aim. All children need to be taught the general knowledge that is silently assumed in that language community. Our schools need to assimilate into the public sphere not just new immigrants but all of our children, regardless of family background. That is the fundamental aim of schooling in a democracy and one that we are not serving very effectively today.

Studies show that most parents want schools to assimilate our children (A lot to be thankful for), and the Texas Constitution requires us to provide them with the knowledge needed to assimilate.

Depending on the age of our fictional students, changing their current life trajectory will take a lot of remedial effort as we transition from the present system to a new knowledge-based curriculum, but we can’t afford to see the students in this class five or ten years from now caught in the same situation. So, in our next post, we’ll pick-up Izzy’s fictional class and discuss how to change these dynamics for future students.

Texas Education III: National Policy is not the Answer to the Problem in our Classrooms

This column originally appeared at Big Jolly Politics:

During the Carter Administration, Congress created the Department of Education. Many conservatives denounced this move as federal usurpation of a power left to state and local governments, and Ronald Reagan advocated abolishing the agency. His position of antipathy toward federal involvement in public education has been, more or less, the Republican Party’s official position ever since.

It is at least a little ironic, then, that much of the debate today over the proper curriculum to use in our public schools arose during the Reagan Administration as a result of A Nation at Risk, a 1983 report about the state of public education in our country, which was commissioned by Reagan’s Secretary of Education. Indeed, the reaction to that report spawned three decades of ever-growing federal involvement in education under both Republican and Democratic administrations without any real improvement in the nation’s education.

Arguably, the most important findings in that report were

• “Some 23 million American adults are functionally illiterate by the simplest tests of everyday reading, writing, and comprehension.”
• “About 13 percent of all 17-year-olds in the United States can be considered functionally illiterate. Functional illiteracy among the minority youth may run as high as 40 percent.”
• “Many 17-year-olds do not do not possess the ‘higher order’ intellectual skill we should expect of them. Nearly 40 percent cannot draw inferences from written material; only one-fifth can write a persuasive essay; and only one-third can solve a mathematics problem requiring several steps.”
• “For the first time in the history of our country, the educational skills of one generation will not surpass, will not equal, will not even approach, those of their parents.”
• “…the average citizen today is better educated and more knowledgeable than the average citizen of a generation ago—more literate, and exposed to more mathematics, literature, and science. … Nevertheless, the average graduate of our schools and colleges today is not as well-educated as the average graduate of 25 to 35 years ago, when a much smaller proportion of our population completed high school and college.”
• “The teacher preparation curriculum is weighted heavily with courses in ‘educational methods’ at the expense of courses in subjects to be taught. A survey of 1,350 institutions training teachers indicated that 41 percent of the time of elementary school teacher candidates is spent in education courses, which reduces the amount of time available for subject matter courses.”

These findings alarmed the nation. The report also listed two interesting “Tools at Hand” for addressing these findings:

• “our better understanding of learning and teaching and the implications of this knowledge for school practice, and the numerous examples of local success as a result of superior effort and effective dissemination;” and
• “the equally sound tradition, from the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 until today, that the Federal Government should supplement State, local, and other resources to foster national educational goals; ….”

The responses to this report flooded bookstores and public debate. Among the many books and studies that would be published were two landmark works published in 1987. That year Professor Allan Bloom of the University of Chicago wrote a significant critique of modern college education in The Closing of the American Mind; and E.D Hirsch published what became the foundation of the movement for a “core-knowledge” curriculum, Cultural Literacy. Education departments of many universities doubled-down on method-based curricula in an effort to address the lack of “‘higher order’ intellectual skill” among high school graduates, while research of cognitive scientists began to support Hirsch’s theory about “core knowledge”. In Texas, Ross Perot spearheaded reforms through the legislature with the backing of Governor Clements, and George W. Bush later championed reforms that focused on testing and standards. Various states and localities tried to inject competition and diversity into the system with vouchers, magnet schools, charter schools, and home schools. Nationally, George H. W. Bush ran for President in 1988 to be our first “Education President,” and George W. Bush pushed for national standards and action through his “No Child Left Behind” legislative initiative. Meanwhile, for the last 25 years Bill Bennett, E.D. Hirsch and others have tried to educate the nation on what we need to learn and how we need to learn it.

But any fair-minded person, looking at the results of all of this action over the last 29 years would have to concede that as we’ve tried to mount a national battle for better education little has improved, and in some places (like Detroit, where it recently was estimated that its school system suffers from a 75% drop-out rate before the 12th grade) it has gotten worse. I believe it has gotten worse because we refused to start the reform where it was needed—in the local classroom with the curriculum teachers use to teach our children, and with the tools and facilities they use for teaching. This is a predicament shared by communities throughout the country, but it is primarily a State and local problem to solve.

Over the course of the next few posts, I am going to address each of the findings listed above from A Nation at Risk in the context of the constitutional purpose of public education in Texas and the refinement of that purpose I have proposed in the first two posts of this series, to come up with the contours of a proposed curriculum we will need in our schools, and for the tools and facilities we will need to teach that curriculum. I am going to present my arguments for a “core-knowledge” curriculum, rather than a “method-based” curriculum, discuss how such a curriculum could advance the purpose I have proposed, and outline how such a curriculum should be implemented.

But as I was writing the first post on those topics, I realized that we should pause for a moment and discuss an “800-pound gorilla” in the room—the history of federal involvement in public education in this country, and why federal regulation and money should not be used to “supplement State, local, and other resources” needed to address the classroom reforms I am proposing. In fact, I believe that it is precisely because of our pre-occupation with trying to find a national “silver bullet” to slay our educational problems that we have compounded the problems we face today.

Remember, my first post on this subject in which I quoted the reference in the Texas Declaration of Independence to Mexico’s failure to provide public education in the territory? Well, that concern for public education didn’t occur to Texans out of thin air in 1836. In fact, the drafters of A Nation at Risk were right that there has been a continental civic commitment to public education since the 1630s, when the first public school, Boston Latin School, opened in Massachusetts. In turn, there has been a commitment of national resources since the inception of our national government to establish or supplement an educational infrastructure within the states.

For instance, under the regime of the Articles of Confederation, the national government started establishing an educational infrastructure for each territory prior to statehood. In the Land Ordinance of 1785, Congress stated: “There shall be reserved the lot No. 16, of every township, for the maintenance of public schools within the township….” Then, in Article 3 of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, Congress stated: “Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall be forever encouraged.” These laws were among the few from the period of the Articles of Confederation, which were continued by the new Congress under the new Constitution.

This commitment to education at the time of our founding is exemplified by the actions of Thomas Jefferson. He was the driving force behind the creation of three, distinct universities: the United States Military Academy at West Point; the University of Michigan; and the University of Virginia. Each of these schools was established with a distinct purpose: West Point would focus on the military sciences to create a trained officer corps for the defense of the country, and a network of gentlemen to lead our communities after leaving the service; Michigan would provide a practical education in the applied physical and industrial sciences, including agriculture and engineering; and Virginia would provide a liberal arts education, and training in the primary professions of medicine, law and the clergy. Together, these institutions would provide society with models for the type of schools that would provide a full range of educational opportunities needed for the functioning of a free society.

For example, the “University of Michigania” (which Jefferson helped found in 1817, and which later became the University of Michigan) became the model for our land-grant colleges. During the Civil War, our first Republican President proposed, and the Republican Congress enacted, the Morrill Act, that set aside land in each state for the “endowment, support, and maintenance of at least one college where the leading object shall be, without excluding other scientific and classical studies, and including military tactics, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and mechanic arts,…in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions of life.” The purpose of the Morrill Act had been a basic plank in the platforms of both the Whig and Republican parties since the 1830s.

In other words, for a century after the American Revolution, our founders, and the national government they created, implemented a national policy that provided states with the tools to create an educational infrastructure, from the township through college, which would provide citizens with the diffusion of knowledge and professions necessary for the functioning of a free government and economy. When, by the 1870s, every state had adopted, either by constitution or statute, a system of public education, the federal role in education began to recede and education became almost solely a state and local issue.

However, the fact that there were now public school systems in every state did not mean that everyone sought, or was given an education—far from it; for not every community used the township model and built schools right away, and state laws did not make attendance mandatory throughout the whole country until much later. Moreover, it took decades before the network of land-grant colleges was built and functioning, and, to this day, far less than half the children in this country attend any college or university.

In fact, given the demographics of the nation and the continuous influx and migration of people into and across the country, most children did not regularly attend high school until the Great Depression. Then, as a result of the economic disaster, children were encouraged to stay in school and graduate from high school in order to reserve job opportunities for the adults in the community. The public education system we know today is really a phenomenon of the post-World War II era of general prosperity and economic stability.

It is during this post-war period, as a national-defense response to Sputnik (and a civil-rights response to Brown v. the Board of Education), that the national government re-emerged as a player in educational policy. This time, however, it inserted itself beyond its historic role of providing or supplementing educational infrastructure for the states (and beyond what was necessary to end segregation), and began dictating operations and curriculum. In essence it inserted itself in an area where it lacked constitutional and institutional competence, and it imposed bureaucracies and inefficiencies on our schools, which never addressed the core problem—how our local schools should effectively educate the continuing influx of students of varying backgrounds and talents. That continues to be a peculiarly local problem to solve.

I believe it is the attempt to absorb and educate the vast and ever-changing influx of students of varying backgrounds and talents since the Great Depression that is the cause of the paradox that the drafters of A Nation at Risk observed:

…the average citizen today is better educated and more knowledgeable than the average citizen of a generation ago—more literate, and exposed to more mathematics, literature, and science. … Nevertheless, the average graduate of our schools and colleges today is not as well-educated as the average graduate of 25 to 35 years ago, when a much smaller proportion of our population completed high school and college.

This phenomena also explains why educational outcomes and drop-out rates vary so widely between localities and among the states—because the influx of diverse students has been so unevenly distributed across the country over the decades. The challenges faced by schools in Los Angeles, Detroit and Houston differ substantially from each other, and from suburban and rural schools.

Any meaningful educational reform must start with the core-knowledge to be taught in local classrooms, while addressing the reality that a significant percentage of children of diverse backgrounds and talents will never complete primary and secondary levels of education, let alone attend and graduate from college. While we try to retain these students in our schools as long as possible, and continue to raise their level of literacy, we must begin to focus their training on the “cultural literacy” they will need to be successful adults. Therefore, we must tailor the public school curriculum at each grade level to expose as many of these children as possible to the rudiments of American citizenship and the global economy. In the meantime, we must provide a more demanding curriculum at each higher grade level of school based on a strong foundation of “cultural literacy” in order to improve the quality of the knowledge of those who stay in school and graduate from high school. Each local and state must have the flexibility to tailor this curriculum to the type of diverse student they must educate.

National standards and tests, or even state standardized tests with teachers “teaching to the tests,” may continue to measure our problems as they get worse, but they will not solve these problems. Only local and state reforms will solve the problems our classrooms face.

I’ll start to look at how we address the specifics of a new curriculum in the next post.

Texas Education II: Knowledge needed to be “an effective American Citizen in a global economy”

This column originally appeared at Big Jolly Politics:

During the initial installment of this conversation about the future of Texas public education, I focused on the “general diffusion of knowledge” that is the constitutional purpose of our “system of public free schools,” under Article 7, Section 1 of the Texas Constitution. Consistent with that constitutional purpose, I proposed a 21st Century mission for our public schools to provide Texas students with:

… the incremental foundation of truths, facts, and principles they will need as adults to function as effective American citizens in a global economy, together with the experiences and tools to use such knowledge effectively and wisely.

In this second post I want to delve into the meaning of this proposed mission in more depth before we try to take the step next in our discussion—a conversation about the curriculum that will be needed to pursue this mission.

It is fair to admit that none of us mortals know what the future will be. The sky could actually fall—a Meteor could hit the Earth, the climate could change one way or the other in some drastic way, our world could be attacked by aliens from outer space, or the worst of our fears of an Armageddon could unfold—causing life to end on this planet as we have come to know it. But most humans have learned from experience not to plan their lives based on the worst of their fears, or even the best of their dreams, but from the foundation of their experiences. Applying this time-tested approach, I am looking toward the future from the vantage point of being a “young” member of the Baby Boom Generation in mid-2012. From this perspective, I believe that the experiences of the past few decades point to some specific challenges that the next two or three generations of Americans will face during this century. Our educational system should provide these next generations with the knowledge and tools they will need to meet these challenges.

The first of these challenges is of our own making—the rebuilding of society in America. From its beginnings, America has been an experiment based on ideas and ideals forged by a Western Civilization whose defining moment occurred on a hill called Calvary almost 2,000 years ago. This experiment has evolved since the early 1600s through trials and errors and triumphs, but the ideas and ideals always guided the experiment, and created the basis for a society of free people to exist and flourish. However, over the last half-century, my generation has not only continued to test this system, but has so fundamentally altered the experiment that we have separated and isolated each other in ways that actually threaten the continuation of the experiment and the society it created.

If our children are to inherit the American experiment that we were taught was so exceptional, we must give them the knowledge of the ideas and ideals that formed it, and the tools with which to rebuild a 21st Century society based on the foundation of those ideas and ideals. The re-construction must still allow for the spirit of innovation that has been a hallmark of our experiment, but our children must be given the knowledge to discern between innovations that strengthen and expand the original experiment, and change that destroys the experiment. They must realize that as we prize the gift of liberty we have learned through the ages that “no man is an island,” and citizens can not thrive without a home, a neighborhood, and a country to call their own.

This first challenge is related to the second challenge, because a new, and as yet undefined, global economic “civilization” is emerging in the likeness of the American experiment, and if we don’t understand the foundation of our own society, we will miss opportunities in this new economy. To say that there is a new economic civilization emerging is not to say that there will be “One World” of which we will pledge fidelity as new citizens. Instead, what is emerging is a culture based on economic interaction among diverse people, which will co-exist with older regional political and cultural civilizations, and with nations and societies that comprise those older civilizations.

The second challenge the next few generations will face is how to work and thrive within this new economic civilization, and how to shape its formation for the better, while retaining an allegiance to family, neighborhood and country. To meet this challenge our children and grandchildren will need knowledge of the American experiment and its Western Civilizational roots, of how our experiment impacted the emergence and shape of this new civilization, and of the foundations of the other civilizations, nations and societies whose members are participating in this new civilization. In addition to this philosophical, historical, and spiritual knowledge (and to the exposure to the social science disciplines that inform such knowledge), they must be provided with the knowledge of math and science sufficient to understand what comprises our physical world, and how the physical world works, and how the physical can be harnessed and manipulated to improve the human condition without destroying its essence. They also will need to master more than one language in order to effectively communicate in, and understand the world in which they live. Then, they will need the tools to effectively and respectfully use this knowledge as they engage in the new emerging civilization.

This second challenge is intertwined with the third and final challenge our posterity will face over the next 9 decades: avoiding an Armageddon of our own making. Avoiding war has never been an easy task. History teaches us that, regardless of our best intentions, the more we interact with people of different cultures, the more these interactions will inevitably lead to frictions—and frictions lead to political, economic and cultural conflicts. The challenge to the future is not just to keep these conflicts from leading to war, but from keeping conflicts and wars from leading to human destruction. This challenge requires knowledge of those disciplines that used to be called, the “Liberal Arts”—the study of man and man’s nature—and the tools necessary to use those arts to effectively keep frictions from becoming catastrophic conflicts.

Now, will most of our children need all of the knowledge needed to address every challenge I have listed? The answer to that question is clearly, “no”. It will probably be true for our great-grandchildren as it is for us, that most of them will still spend their entire lives quietly raising families in local communities. To the extent they ever become engaged directly in the wider world it will be through broader communications and entertainments, local interactions with people from different parts of the world, or the trips they will take outside of the United States. But they all will share their citizenship as free people in a country that will remain crucial to the future of mankind—they will live the American experiment and be part of the foundation of the global economic civilization: they will raise the children of the future; they will make the American products, provide the American services, or do the American research that will be traded within the global economic civilization; they will maintain the neighborhoods that keep this country prosperous and free, and they will choose the leaders who will make decisions and use the powers delegated to them to affect the future. Therefore, regardless of their stations in life as adults, our posterity will need a foundational knowledge in how to be an American citizen, and how and why the global economic civilization is emerging and working.

The new mission I have been describing in these first two posts will require what is sometimes referred to as a “knowledge-based education,” rather than a “method-based education,” for its effective implementation. The ongoing debate between a “knowledge-based education” and a “method-based education” is at the heart of the next topic we will discuss: the proper curriculum needed to pursue a new, focused mission for public education. But I want to end this post with a brief comment about a recent controversy related to this debate.

The Republican Party of Texas was criticized recently for its adoption of a platform plank entitled “Knowledge-based Education” during the June, 2012 State Convention. The plank included the words “critical thinking” in a context that was interpreted by some critics as meaning that Republicans in Texas don’t want to people to think critically. Although I would have worded the plank differently, this whole argument is beside the point—everyone wants an educational system that produces individuals who are able to critically think about the world in which they live; “critical thinking” is one of those tools our children will need as adults in order to use the knowledge they are taught effectively and wisely. The real question for us to answer is, what is the best approach to education that will create effective critical thinkers?

As we will discuss in the next post, the consensus of cognitive scientists is that the attribute of “critical thinking” is difficult (if not impossible) to teach as a skill separate and apart from the core knowledge of a subject to which the critical thought is to be applied. What such scientists are telling us is that we need a “knowledge-based” curriculum in order to develop critical thinkers. Ironically, cognitive scientists are acknowledging what the drafters of the Texas Constitution originally advocated (and what the Texas Republican Platform is really advocating)—an education focused on a “general diffusion of knowledge.” How we can apply cognitive science to effectuate the requirement of Texas Constitution, as well as the modern mission I’ve proposed, is what I will address next.

Texas Education: Revisiting our Foundation

This column originally appeared at Big Jolly Politics:

Back in mid-June after the RPT convention in Fort Worth, I wrote a post in which I stated that one of my long-term plans was to help

… find a comprehensive answer to the structural and financial problems facing our educational system in our communities and across this state.

I want to start this discussion now, because this issue affects virtually every aspect of state and local government in Texas, and its resolution will determine the future prosperity and happiness of the citizens of our state.

The modern Republican Party believes in the principles of federalism and limited government, which commits us to govern only to the extent necessary to preserve liberty and order, and to do so as locally as possible. There is only one local institution in American life that has involved, at some time and in some way, every individual, every family, and every neighborhood: school. And the ripple effects of a school—both good and bad—have consequences for individuals, families and communities, which last a lifetime. We have to commit as a party to get this policy issue right.

To get it right, we first must realize that the problem with our public education system actually consists of a complex web of issues that impact about 50% of our state government’s budget on top of the property taxes and bond debt incurred at the local level. Lurking beneath the economics of our school system is a labyrinth of issues that must be addressed before we can get control of the economic issues effectively. In essence, we must start from the foundation and work our way up to fix this edifice. We have to start in the classroom and determine what education our children need to become effective citizens in the 21st Century, and how to provide that education to them. Then, we need to figure out the facilities, teachers, and parental/community involvement we will need to provide that education while working to minimize the drop-out rate. After we have a plan for education at the school and community level, we next will need to determine the optimal organizational structure for districts across the state to implement that plan, which should include a discussion of whether and how to inject competition into the system. Finally, we can then budget the cost of transitioning to, and implementing, that plan and re-organization, and determine how to effectively raise the revenue needed to fund the budget with the lowest and fairest tax burden possible—and with no income tax.

Yes, I am talking about a complete review and re-organization of the present system, because I think the past 30 years of public debate and stalemate has shown that without such a comprehensive approach, no marginal change or testing process will create the educated citizenry that we need. And we each need to be part of the discussion in order to give our legislators and school boards guidance as to how we want them to address and implement the changes that are needed.

So, I want to start this conversation with this post, and to start it at the foundation of the problem—understanding the purpose of our public education system and state government’s duty to fulfill that purpose. As with most fundamental public issues, the foundation starts with our constitution. Article 7, Section 1 of the Texas Constitution provides both the purpose and the duty:

Support and Maintenance of System of Public Free Schools. A general diffusion of knowledge being essential to the preservation of the liberties and rights of the people, it shall be the duty of the Legislature of the State to establish and make suitable provision for the support and maintenance of an efficient system of public free schools.

This current constitutional provision pertaining to education was adopted in 1876, but by that time Texans had long committed themselves to providing for public education. The Texas Declaration of Independence of 1836 listed the failure of the Mexican government “to establish any public system of education…” as one of the reasons for declaring independence from Mexico. Then, the first public school law in the Republic of Texas was enacted in 1840, which provided for setting aside over 17,000 acres of land in each county to support public education. Later upon statehood, the Texas Constitution of 1845 provided that 10% of the annual state tax revenue be set aside as a perpetual fund to support free public schools. This early commitment to public education needs to be remembered as we try to understand the language of the current constitution.

And, as we continue our discussion about public education over several posts, we will come back to Article 7, Section 1 often. But for this post I want to focus just on the purpose of the “system of public free schools” expressed in this provision. Notice that the framers of the Texas Constitution very specifically identified the purpose of the public school system as “a general diffusion of knowledge being essential to the preservation of the liberties and rights of the people”. Before we can reform how the State meets its duty to provide “an efficient system of public free schools,” we must better understand the express constitutional purpose for that system.

What did the framers mean by “a general diffusion of knowledge,” and specifically, what did they mean by “knowledge”? If you separate the descriptions of the process of obtaining knowledge from the various dictionary definitions of the term “knowledge,” the picture becomes clearer. For example, the Oxford English Dictionary includes this definition of “knowledge”: “[i]n general sense: … acquaintance with ascertained truths, facts, or principles;” while the American Heritage dictionary includes this definition: “… [t]he sum or range of what has been perceived, discovered, or learned.” Distilling these two definitions and placing it in the context of the words of the Texas Constitution, I believe the framers meant that the purpose of the public school system was to provide “a general diffusion of the truth, facts, or principles that have been perceived, discovered or learned’ by man, which have been found over the course of human history to be “essential to the preservation of the liberties and rights of the people.”

This reading of the constitutional purpose is consistent with the once-dominant view of the purpose of American education. From the 1930s through the 1950s a great debate raged within academia over whether there should be a unifying purpose and idea underlying curriculum in this country. At the forefront of the argument that there should be such unity, was the President of Harvard University, John B. Conant, who outlined his principles in 1945 in General Education in a Free Society. In that book, Conant described the predicament of the then current state of, and debate over education, and what he believed should be its focus:

A supreme need of American education is for a unifying purpose and idea. As recently as a century ago, no doubt existed about such a purpose: it was to train the Christian citizen. Nor was there doubt how this training was to be accomplished. The student’s logical powers were to be formed by mathematics, his taste by Greek and Latin classics, his speech by rhetoric, and his ideals by Christian ethics…this enviable certainty both of goals and means has largely disappeared…. For some decades the mere excitement of enlarging the curriculum and making place for new subjects, new methods, and masses of new students seems quite pardonable to have absorbed the energies of schools and colleges…. In recent times, however, the question of unity has become insistent. We are faced with a diversity of education which, if it has many virtues, nevertheless works against the good of society by helping to destroy the common ground of training and outlook on which any society depends. 

…there are truths which none can be free to ignore, if one is to have that wisdom through which life can become useful. These are the truths concerning the structure of the good life and concerning the factual conditions by which it may be achieved, truths comprising the goals of the free society.

As Conant states, there was a time when Americans knew what was meant by “truth, facts, or principles” that comprised “knowledge”. But we haven’t followed Conants’ approach over the last half century, and so our “system of public free schools” in Texas (and across the country) has lost focus, has tried to do too much with less and less efficiency, and, in the process, has accomplished far less than we hoped.

We must change this dynamic, and all of its complex consequences on our State and communities, by first addressing the core problem—we must conform the constitutional purpose of Texas education to the 21^st Century challenges that will face our children and grandchildren. To do that, we need to refocus the activity in our classrooms from pre-Kindergarten through 12^th grade toward providing Texas students with the incremental foundation of truths, facts, and principles they will need as adults to function as effective American citizens in a global economy, together with the experiences and tools to use such knowledge effectively and wisely. This means that our classrooms need to produce an educated citizenry, each of whom is capable of functioning at some appropriate level in our American society regardless of when they leave school, e.g., 9th grade, 12th grade, or later; and each of whom has the foundational tools with which they can engage with people from other societies and nations respectfully and productively throughout their lives.

What I just stated may appear to be self-evident—but it isn’t. Attend any graduation ceremony today and you’ll hear speaker after speaker glorify the purpose of education as creating critical and creative people who will be ready to be citizens of the world. This is lunacy. First, to become critical and creative thinkers, you first must absorb core knowledge with which you can learn to be critical and creative—critical or creative thinking alone is nothing more than educated idiocy. Second, there is not now, nor will there be in the lifetimes of anyone now living, a “world” to be a citizen of. We will remain citizens of a nation or state, who will be engaged in the wider world comprised of other nations and states. We need to know, appreciate and pledge allegiance to our own society and culture before we can ever truly understand and respect the diversity that exists among all societies and cultures. Without being grounded in a society and culture, we will create intellectual and economic nomads, rather than an educated citizenry capable of succeeding in the world our children and grandchildren will inherit.

As part of this refocus toward the constitutional purpose of our educational system, the curriculum throughout all the departments of our public schools, during each grade level, should be tailored to meet this purpose. Any other information or process that does not contribute to diffusing this foundational knowledge should be re-directed at age-appropriate levels to vocational schools, community and junior colleges, and our system of private and public colleges and universities—and to parents and churches.

If we don’t re-start the discussion over the future of education from some foundation like the one I have just proposed, we will never fix the myriad of associated problems, including

• facilities,
• staffing,
• budgets,
• taxes,
• textbooks,
• testing,
• student and teacher performance,
• tenure and pensions,
• educating the children of illegal immigrants and children with special needs,
• drop-out rates, and
• organizational inefficiencies,

which plague the affordable delivery of effective education in this State, because we will not have a frame of reference from which to address these other issues.

I know what I have said here, though basic, is a lot to digest, and some of what I have written will be controversial. So, before I build on these ideas, I’ll stop here for now and give you some time to digest and reflect.

Over the next few months, we will use Big Jolly Politics as a forum for presenting a continuing conversation about the future of education in this state from a conservative perspective, and we will invite other Republicans from our area with experience with these issues to participate as guest writers and participants in video forums to be posted on this blog. We hope this conversation will be lively and lead to effective change.

What can we learn from the Aurora, Colorado tragedy?

This post originally appeared at Big Jolly Politics:

About a year and a half ago, I wrote a year-end post about Baseball, in which I discussed the passing of a wonderful former star for the Chicago Cubs during my youth—Ron Santo.  I would like to spend this mid-summer post gloating about his recent induction into the Hall of Fame (and I will touch on that briefly at the end of this post), but life got in the way.  Unfortunately, like so many Americans this past weekend, I was reminded of the arbitrariness of life and of the randomness with which violence can destroy lives.

Yes, I am talking about the shootings in Aurora, Colorado—and yes, I know, everybody and their cousin’s uncle has commented on this tragedy.  But, for a moment, I want to focus on the relevance to this tragedy of some things I’ve been writing about for a long time.

While so many people at times like this wring their hands about the easy availability of guns, or the lack of long-term care available for the mentally ill, and try to urge quick legislative fixes to the these senseless tragedies—they simply assuage their own guilt while missing the point completely.  Those factors are nothing more than enablers of what is going on—neither causes, nor even symptoms, of what is wrong.  I think what is wrong is deeper than either of those issues, and is larger than anything petty politics or simple legislation can address—the core of this problem really goes to the soul of a generation in this country (my generation, the “Baby Boomers”).  To let me explain, please indulge me for a moment with a few digressions.  But, before I digress, I want you to keep in mind the first definition of society in the American Heritage Dictionary:  “the totality of social relationships among humans.” [emphasis added]

Probably the greatest speech Ronald Reagan ever gave was made during the fall of his first year as Governor of California.  In September, 1967, Reagan returned to his alma mater, Eureka College, to give an address to dedicate the opening of a new  library on campus (The Value of Understanding the Past). During that speech Reagan made the following prophetic statements on the eve of all the turmoil that would rock this country during 1968:

We have to re-examine our individual goals and aims.  What do we want for ourselves and our children? Is it enough to have material things? Aren’t liberty and morality and integrity and high principles and a sense of responsibility more important?  The world’s truly great thinkers have not pointed us toward materialism; they have dealt with the great truths and with the high questions of right and wrong, of morality and of integrity.  They have dealt with the question of man, not the acquisition of things. And when civilizations have disregarded their findings, when they have turned to the things of the flesh, they have disappeared….

… But we must learn from yesterday to have a better tomorrow.  We are beset by problems in a complex world; we are confused by those who tell us only new and untried ways offer hope. The answers to all the problems of mankind will be found in this building by those who have the desire to find them and perception enough to recognize them….One of mankind’s problems is that we keep repeating the same errors. For every generation some place, two plus two has added up to three, or in another place, five – four seems to elude some of us. This has happened in my generation and I predict, without smugness, it will happen to yours….

A few of those dusty books with those “answers to all the problems of mankind,” still sit in a library somewhere.  They include, but are not limited to, the New Testament, the poetry of the 17th Century Anglican priest, John Donne, the Virginia Declaration of Rights, and President Washington’s Farewell Address, which state (in order):

Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us….  … For you, brethren, have been called to liberty; only do not use liberty as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another.  For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this:  ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’  But if you bite and devour one another, beware lest you be consumed by one another! (St. Paul (Saul of Tarsus), The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Galatians, around 54 or 55 A.D. (the New King James Version).

…all mankind is of one author and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language…God’s hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another….  No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main….  Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” (John Donne, Devotions, Meditation XVII:  Now this bell tolling softly for another, says to me, Thou must die (1624)).

…no free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people, but by firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue, and by frequent recurrence to fundamental principles…;…and that it is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love, and charity towards each other. (Virginia Declaration of Rights, paragraphs 15 and 16, June, 1776).

Cultivate peace and harmony with all.  Religion and morality enjoin this conduct. … It will be worthy of a free, enlightened, and at no distant period a great nation to give to mankind the magnanimous and too novel example of a people always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence.  (President Washington’s Farewell Address, September 17, 1796).

All of these old quotes point to a lesson and a challenge—yes, we’ve been given freedom, but we’ve also been challenged to use that freedom to create relationships with our neighbors, and to care for those neighbors to build communities and a society, and, in the end, to protect our freedom.  In essence, that liberty we were given may have provided us with independence from governments or dictators or Pharisees; but to sustain that gift, we were challenged to develop an enduring interdependence of family and neighborhood—a fundamental interdependence to sustain relationships of free people, and, therefore, to sustain a society designed to preserve and protect the gifts of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”  It was an interdependence based on the commitment to each other of “our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.”  It was that challenge that our Settlers and Founders accepted, and it was that challenge that prompted us to improve ourselves throughout our history.

Somewhere, though, in all the turmoil and search for “truth” that engulfed the Baby Boom generation as we came of age during the 1960s and 1970s, we began to abandon the quest for interdependence and to substitute it with the embrace of autonomy—and then we called this new autonomy “liberty” and passed this fundamental misunderstanding of our society to our children.  We coveted our freedom to come, go and do as we pleased, while we came to abhor our neighborhoods as “Peyton Place.”  Privacy became the watchword, and fences became our shield from participating in something larger than ourselves.

As the decades have come and gone, and our hair has thinned and grayed, this new approach to freedom has allowed many of us who were raised with strong self-esteem to prosper alone—as islands onto ourselves.  But, as the Wall Street Journal noted almost two decades ago, this approach left many of our neighbors without the relationships and guardrails they needed to succeed in life (No Guardrails: August 1968 and the death of self-restraint).

And the loss of these guardrails has had deadly consequences for society.  We’ve left people alone over the decades who needed friendship and neighbors.  In the process, we’ve gotten people whose torments and troubles become magnified in their loneliness and autonomy, and who then lash out in violence—at a doctor in Florida, at fellow students in Colorado and Virginia, at citizens meeting with their Congresswoman in Tucson, in a movie theater in Colorado, and on and on.  What has happened is the antithesis of what is supposed to happen in the context of a caring, neighborly love; of what is supposed to happen in the context of an interdependence that our forefathers believed was essential to maintain a society of free people.  That interdependence can not be substituted by a government program or bureaucrat.  It is an individual responsibility—neighbor to neighbor.  Without it, people fester alone in their own indulgences—and when coupled with an absence of self-discipline, the consequences are often violent and destructive.

In the meantime, have those of us who “prospered alone” really succeeded?  Look at the headlines of the weeks preceding the shootings in Colorado, and you’ll see breaches of trust by those who supposedly were the success stories:  the CEO of a commodities trading firm who misused his clients’ accounts for 20 years in order to avoid personal failure; an entire city council of a town in California that caused the town to declare bankruptcy, in part, because those leaders improperly accounted for public funds for more than a decade; and a revered football coach and officers of a public university who cared more about their image than the safety of children in their community.

What the editors of the Wall Street Journal tried to articulate almost two decades ago is still true.  In every age and in every society, people erected “guardrails”, or traditions or customs to live by.  The best of those customs tend to discipline–or teach–members of the society about right and wrong behavior and keep such behavior within an accepted civil norm so that society can function.  A society that recognizes no norms for civility, and no difference between right and wrong behaviors, quickly devolves into chaos.  Moreover, a society that won’t instill those customs and traditions through caring interaction between neighbors soon becomes dysfunctional.  Just as you can’t remodel a house merely by tearing the walls to the studs without replacing them, you can’t simply change the traditions and customs for a society by erasing or ignoring them–you need to replace them with traditions or customs that fit the framework of the original structure, and then work to instill those customs and traditions, or you loosen the bonds of civility and society.

Those traditions and customs must be grounded on principles and virtues consistent with maintaining an interdependent society of free people:  traditions and customs that promote “justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue, and … forbearance, love, and charity towards each other.”  This can’t be done by delegating our obligations as free people to someone else or government—government doesn’t love your neighbor, people do.  Nor can it be accomplished by adopting new “first principles” that are foreign to our civilization, our beliefs, and our history.  Maybe, if we rekindle these “first principles” hiding in all those dusty old books with proper customs and traditions, we will reduce the future risk of events like the Colorado shootings, and we will re-establish the commitment to honor and self-discipline that keeps us from giving in to avarice.  Isn’t it worth a try?

All of this gets me back to Ron Santo.  Santo was a “hero” from my youth.  He arguably was the best third-baseman in the National League during the 1960s and early 1970s.  He played on the great Cub infield of the late 1960s, which, in 1969, placed all four infielders (Ernie Banks, Glen Beckert, Don Kessinger, and Santo), and the catcher (Randy Hundley), on the National League All-Star squad, with Santo starting at Third.  He was an All-Star 9 of his 14 National League Seasons.  For a generation of kids who grew up in the Chicago area, he was the heart-and-soul of a team that included Hall of Famers Ernie Banks, Billy Williams, Ferguson Jenkins, and Leo Durocher.

But, most importantly, he continued to give to the community for the remainder of his life.  Santo stayed in Chicago after retirement and became the radio voice for the Cubs for two decades before his death.  While he fought the ravages of diabetes and lost both legs to the disease, he kept his charm and his sense of humor, and he worked with young boys in the community to teach them to be men.  He didn’t wallow in his troubles and lash out at society; nor did he prey on the young boys who worked with him.  Instead, he became an inspiration to a whole new generation of young boys—as a well as a continued inspiration to us older boys.

What we need in order to avoid the isolation that creates events like the Colorado shootings—and all of the avarice that pervades the halls of private and public power—is not more laws.  We need a lot more Ron Santos—in our families, our neighborhoods, and our private and public institutions.  And we need to do the hard work of rebuilding traditions and customs that produce and sustain the Ron Santos among us.

It’s just that simple—and that hard.

But, again … isn’t it worth a try?