We Can Do Something About This

Sometimes, real life is so ironic.

There is probably no issue more discussed–in Indianapolis and elsewhere–than education. All kinds of grand reforms are being proposed, all manner of expensive “fixes” and pet theories advanced. And meanwhile, we are failing to support proven programs and experiences for the kids who most need those experiences.

Yesterday, our daughter forwarded an email to me from a social studies teacher at Arsenal Technical High School. After 16 years of sponsoring Model UN participation, Tech no longer has the funding to cover transportation and other costs to participate in Chicago in February, and the school board is refusing to authorize the field trip until the teacher can prove he has the cash in hand.

Anyone who has ever taught high school–and that includes me, back in the day–can confirm the importance of programs like Model UN, We the People, Boys and Girls State and the like. Anyone whose children have participated in one of these experiences knows how educationally valuable they are, especially for kids who come from families that don’t have the means to provide travel and similar “extracurricular” enrichment.

Part of the problem facing Tech is evidently that the state has not yet released Title One funds–something that should have happened months ago. These kids will lose a valuable learning opportunity through no fault of their own, because our public “servants” aren’t performing competently.

The teacher, Troy Hammon, feels so strongly about the merits of Model UN that he is offering to use two personal days to pay for his substitute teacher, and covering his own meals and bus ticket. (Shades of those greedy public sector workers people keep complaining about…)

The per student cost of participation is 450. for each of the eight students going. That covers registration, hotel, bus and meals for four days. Extra dollars would pay for a meeting room for research and preparation, and would reimburse the teacher. The kids–honor students with limited time to work– have been asking their parents and grandparents for help. They can get by with 1500 (with the teacher’s contribution), but ideally would have 4,500.

We’re sending $100, and I’m doing something I’ve never done on this blog–I’m asking those of you who can do so to chip in a few bucks so these kids who’ve been working their hearts out to prepare can go to an event with demonstrable educational benefit.

If you are willing to help, contact Troy Hammon. His email is HammonT@ips.k12.in.us. I believe he is setting up a website through which contributions can be made, or you can just send a check to Model UN, 1500 E. Michigan Street, Indianapolis, 46201. [Update: make check payable to Arsenal Technical High School and put Model UN on the memo line]

Grandiose reform efforts are well and good–and needed, obviously–but shame on us if these kids are denied a valuable experience now because we’re all too busy pontificating about policy to do the job that is currently at hand.

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Because Freedom. Or Something.

Yesterday, Emmis Communication joined Freedom Indiana, the growing coalition opposed to HJR 6, the proposal to constitutionalize Indiana’s ban on same sex marriage and civil unions.

Also yesterday,  a northern Indiana Tea Party group joined the homophobes agitating for passage of that constitutional amendment. Because Tea Party folks are all about limited government.

Right.

Listen up, Tea Party people: limited government means limited. Not just low-tax, not just no pesky government interference when your business dumps toxic waste into the local river. Limited. As in “government doesn’t belong in my boardroom or my bedroom.” As in, “government doesn’t get to decide who or how I love, how many children I have, whether I use contraceptives, or even whether I carry a pregnancy to term. Government doesn’t get to dictate my religious beliefs or observances, doesn’t get to tell me what political positions to endorse, doesn’t get to prescribe my reading materials, and doesn’t get to choose the people with whom I associate.”

As George Bush Senior might say, read my lips: you are either genuinely for limited government or you aren’t. If you are truly a limited government advocate, you’re required to be at least moderately consistent. At the very least, you have to refrain from demanding that government impose your religious beliefs on your fellow citizens.

If you just want to “limit” government’s ability to tax you, you aren’t an advocate of limited government. You just don’t want to pay for the services government delivers.

You’re just one of those assholes who doesn’t want to pay his dues.

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A Possible Parallel?

It’s always dangerous to draw parallels between past phenomenons and current ones–contrary to the old saying, the past really doesn’t repeat itself.

But still.

I was intrigued by an article examining the rise and demise of the Know Nothing Party in the most recent issue of “Religion and Politics,” a political science journal. The Know Nothing Party (KNP) was launched in 1851, and it was dead by 1862. It was rooted in the Nativist movement, and was profoundly anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic and xenophobic.

The authors propose three theories for the sudden rise of the KNP: moral panic (a collective response to social change–a spontaneous “panic” propelled by social stress);  a conflictual cultural cycle (persistent cultural patterns that emerge periodically in response to the sudden visibility of ‘out groups’); and something with which I was previously unfamiliar–Revitalization Theory (religiously motivated movements of discontented persons who want to change the culture.)

The authors concluded that there were elements of all three at work. They noted that–as with all such movements–the KNP looked to a (fantasized) pristine past that they wanted to restore.

Shades of “I want my country back.”

About those parallels….a recent Bloomberg poll found that Tea Party Republicans are “more likely to be male, less financially secure, more pessimistic about the direction of the country and much more antagonistic to President Obama.” The poll notes “anger and alienation” by the GOP rank-and-file, based in part on considerable amounts of misinformation. (Thanks, Faux News…) For example

Two thirds of regular Republicans believe the federal deficit has grown this year, and 93 percent of Tea Party Republicans agree. Both are wrong: the budget deficit is projected to fall this year from 1.1 trillion to 642 billion.

To the extent that we can draw parallels between the KNP and the GOP fringe today, the more pertinent question addressed by the article is: what happened? Why did the KNP have such a short life span?

The article pointed to several factors: internal dissension, newly recruited political figures who were inexperienced and incompetent, rowdyism and sporadic violence by some of the “fringe of the fringe” and ultimately, a recognition that their objectives were simply unachievable.

Food for thought. And hope….

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Zinn 1, Daniels 0

Yesterday, university  campuses around the state held Howard Zinn “Read Ins”  at which numerous faculty–including yours truly– participated. The events were prompted by then-Governor Daniels’ efforts to banish Zinn’s work from Indiana classrooms.

As I said yesterday, Daniels wanted to use the power of state government to protect unsuspecting students from “wrong” ideas—defined as ideas with which he disagreed. There is no principle more basic to both the academy and the American constitutional system than the one that forbids him from doing so.

The Founders did not minimize the danger of bad ideas; they believed, however, that empowering government to suppress “dangerous” or “offensive” ideas would be far more dangerous than the free expression of those ideas—that once we hand over to the state the authority to decide which ideas have value, no ideas are safe.

In these United States, We the People get to decide for ourselves what books we read, what websites we visit, what videos we watch, what ideas we entertain, free of government interference. Your mother can censor you, and in certain situations your employer can censor you–but your Mayor or Governor or President cannot.

Furthermore, free intellectual inquiry is an absolutely essential ingredient of a genuine education. Education requires the freedom to examine any and all ideas, to determine which are good and which not so good. It also requires that we protect scholars who come to unpopular conclusions or hold unpopular views.

Some citizens will make poor choices of reading materials or ideologies. Some Professors will embrace perspectives that disturb or offend students and Governors. Just as putting up with Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and their clones is the price liberals pay for free speech, putting up with Howard Zinn–or with Robert Reich, or with me—is the price conservatives pay for their own freedom.

The search for truth requires that we examine contending ideas. That is not the same thing as requiring some sort of artificial “balance” that ignores scholarly integrity in order to teach discredited positions like creationism rather than science, or holocaust denial rather than accurate history.  As a statement from the AAU put it some years back,

Self-appointed political critics of the academy have presented equal representation for conservative and progressive points of views as the key to quality. But the college classroom is not a talk show.  Rather, it is a dedicated context in which students and teachers seriously engage difficult and contested questions with the goal of reaching beyond differing viewpoints to a critical evaluation of the relative claims of different positions. Central to the educational aims and spirit of academic freedom, diversity of perspectives is a means to an end in higher education, not an end in itself.

Howard Zinn was a reputable, albeit controversial, historian. Much of what he wrote was a valuable corrective to the histories of his era; some was oversimplified or otherwise problematic. But opinions about the value of his–or any–books are beside the point.  The question is “who decides what books are used in the classroom,” and the answer is not ”the governor”.

The real irony of these sorts of efforts at censorship is that they almost always backfire by shining a brighter light on the object of the censorship. I wonder how many of the people attending the IUPUI read-in and the others around the state had ever heard of Howard Zinn prior to Daniels’ ill-advised effort to suppress his work.

Funny how often it works that way.

One of my sons was a student at the University of Cincinnati when the local prosecutor tried to close down an “obscene” exhibit of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs. Students and residents who ordinarily wouldn’t have gone across the street to attend an art exhibit couldn’t wait to see this one. The line stretched for blocks.

This happens so often, censorship has become a marketing tool. According to film histories I’ve read, at times when movie attendance has been dwindling, filmmakers have responded by producing more explicit films in hopes that the howls from the “usual sources” would increase attendance.

You’d think the busybodies would learn: If there’s material you don’t want people to see or hear or read, your best bet is just to ignore it. As Governor Daniels demonstrated, however, the moral scolds and PC enforcers have trouble learning that lesson.

Howard Zinn says “thanks, Mitch.”

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Logical Consequences

For the past quarter-century, Americans have been bashing government–not just this or that administration or political party or elected official, but the enterprise of governing.

Want a laugh? Say “I’m from the government and I’m here to help you.” Want to indulge a conspiracy theory? The government’s giving the Alamo to the UN! Obama plans to impose Sharia law!..  Got a grudge against your state lawmakers? Push for your area’s counties to secede. Hate the feds? Put on a tricorn hat, misspell a placard and hold a rally.

The problem is, there are consequences to this constant and indiscriminate hostility to government authority, and those consequences aren’t pretty.

Example: Yesterday, to its credit and my surprise, The Indianapolis Star ran two actual news stories: one about legislative conflicts of interest and corrupt behavior, and another about inadequate regulation of child care providers.  Stories about the inept rollout of the Affordable Care Act, and other tales of poor management, are everywhere.

Guess what? When we devalue government, we shouldn’t be surprised when government isn’t done very well. When we spend our time and energy arguing whether major elements of government infrastructure should even exist, we don’t have much time or energy left over to insure that all parts of government are operating properly–that public servants are competently performing those tasks that most reasonable people believe government should do.

I will be the first to acknowledge that we have public officials who deserve our scorn, policies that are–at best–counterproductive and need to be changed, and antiquated or corrupted structures that need to be revisited. The difference is, those are criticisms of how well our government is doing–not attacks on the legitimacy of government itself.

Are some regulations unnecessary? Undoubtedly. But supervising people who care for defenseless infants and children certainly seems an appropriate function of government. Most Americans would also agree that we need laws sanctioning officials who abuse their positions for personal gain.

Americans’ attitudes toward government are a lot like their attitudes toward Congress: we famously despise Congress, but approve of our own Representative. We hate government, but not the programs that benefit us, or veterans, or grandma.

Much as we may not want to admit it, we live in a complex modern world where there are   tasks that only government can effectively perform–from FAA supervision of air travel, to FDA oversight of food and drug safety, to regulations preventing banks from ripping off unwary customers…..on and on. When the agencies charged with these tasks fail to do their jobs properly, real people get hurt–planes crash, people get sick and die, and–as we’ve seen– economies fall into recession or worse.

We need to stop bashing government’s legitimacy, and instead turn our attention to how government is doing its job. We need to put down the ax and pick up the scalpel–to stop characterizing government as some sort of enemy,  and begin focusing on making it better.

When we insist that “public service” is an oxymoron, we shouldn’t be surprised when we don’t get decent public service.

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