Tag Archives: failure

The Value of Pontificating

I’ve been scanning the local news I missed during the past month, and duly noted coverage of a recent speech by Melina Kennedy on education. Kennedy (no relation–honest!) has focused her mayoral campaign on public safety, education and economic development, and has been delivering substantive proposals on those and related issues.

In her education speech, she criticized Greg Ballard for a lack of leadership in education, pointing out that he has done little other than continue the charter school initiative begun by Mayor Peterson. Asked for his response to the criticism, Ballard said that just because he hadn’t been “pontificating” about the subject didn’t mean he hadn’t been engaged.

Wrong.

The biggest problem faced by educators today isn’t whether a school is public or private. It isn’t whether reading instruction is via phonics or “whole word” methodology. It isn’t even discipline. The biggest problem is cultural: Americans today do not value education. If we do not change the culture, nothing else we do is going to work. And let me be VERY clear: I am not talking about the regrettable tendency of some inner-city black students to label peers getting good grades as “acting white.” I am talking about the broader American disdain for expertise of any sort–the widespread attitude that intellectuals are “elitists” to be scorned.

There is a long history of anti-intellectualism in this country, and it has clearly been on the ascendance for the past decade or more. The mere fact that anyone takes political figures like Sarah Palin or Michelle Bachmann or Mike Pence seriously ought to be evidence enough that the American electorate prioritizes celebrity and pandering over substance. A terrifying percentage of the American public rejects science–whether the subject is global climate change or even something as basic and settled as evolution. Stephen Colbert has captured our current culture brilliantly in his riffs explaining why he elevates his “gut” over the exercise of reason.

This is the culture we need to change, and we cannot and will not change it unless those we elect make it their business to “pontificate” about the importance of education. Real leadership requires political figures who are willing to elevate the value of knowledge and expertise–who are willing to remind citizens that this country was a product of the Enlightenment, a philosophy that prioritized reason, evidence and intellect.

A Mayor who fails to use the bully pulpit on behalf of those values is not “pontificating.” S/he is leading.

When Will They Ever Learn?

One of the problems with highly ideological politics of the sort we have these days is that there is no Republican or Democratic way to pave streets and pick up garbage. At the local level, very few voters care whether the Mayor is pro-life or pro-choice; they are much more likely to rate their political leaders on such decidedly non-partisan and practical matters as police protection and snow removal. 

Here in Indianapolis, that homely truth is apparently unknown to Mayor Ballard. Snow removal last year was abysmal; you would think that our Mayor might have used the summer to correct the problems preventing acceptable snow removal. Evidently not.

At 8:00 a.m. this morning, I approached the interection of 15th and College. Now, living downtown, I’m used to MY streets, at least, being plowed and/or salted. Since traffic coming into the regional center is a given, past administrations have taken care of the major streets in the mile square no matter how well or poorly they did elsewhere. This morning, however, with a mere 2″ of snow, traffic was crawling down College on a sheet of ice. I saw no city trucks anywhere during my (admittedly short) commute. I also saw no evidence that there had ever been trucks–not on College, not on Central (!!), not on Michigan. It wasn’t until I reached the IUPUI campus that I saw signs of snow removal–courtesy of IUPUI’s buildings and grounds folks.

This is unacceptable. It’s bad enough when the Mayor bills his junkets as “Economic Development” even though he takes his wife and NOT his Deputy Mayor for economic development. It’s bad enough that he has taken all sides in the debate over broadening the smoking ordinance. The LEAST he could do is see to the nuts and bolts of municipal governance–the basic tasks we expect any Mayor to discharge.