The rotting foundation can’t wait

Peter David has a post up in defense of Caitlin Upton, Miss South Carolina Teen. While I doubt his guess that she may’ve had a sort of mini-stroke, I agree that her response to the question (about why 20% of Americans can’t locate the United States on a world map^[a]) isn’t something for which we should be making fun of her. My guess is that she was up in front of a lot of people, got nervous, and started fumbling about for something to say. That’s completely understandable, though probably not the sort of thing that wins her a lot of points in a pageant of this sort.

Peter then gives his own response to the question, which includes the obligatory Bush bashing (which, other than this mention, I’m ignoring entirely). Part of the response is this:

Our educational system needs to be overhauled beyond the test-centric mandates of No Child Left Behind. If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day; teach him how to fish and he will feed himself for ever. Students need to be taught HOW to think, not WHAT to think. More money needs to be spent on programs for kids who are already gifted so that those gifts can be fully realized and brought to fruition. We need to remember that the arts enrich a civilization; that science and scientific thinking is not the enemy; that it is more important to care for poor people over here than blow up poor people in other countries.

The fact that one fifth of Americans can’t find the country on the map pales beside the likelihood that one fifth of Americans probably couldn’t find their own asses with both hands and a flashlight. And that stupidity is going to continue to be a hallmark of our country until we work together to remedy the situation from the top down.

Many of the comments seem to agree with Peter’s assessment of the “test-centric” mandates of No Child Left Behind, and how they’ve caused a lot of teachers to “teach to the test.” While NCLB may not have fixed that particular problem, it didn’t cause it, either. I was out of high school for five years before it was implemented, and there was plenty of “teaching to the test” going on when I was there.

Still, I agree with some of what Peter’s saying in that first paragraph. We need to encourage gifted students to embrace and fully realize their gifts. I realize this is anathema to some people; they will think that it encourages inequality to have some students leave public school with a working knowledge of calculus while others leave with only basic math skills. To paraphrase a scene from The Incredibles^[b], “No Child Left Behind” is just another way of saying “No Child Gets Ahead.” The fact is that we are all equal but not all the same. Some students will enjoy and excel at mathematics. Others may be gifted with art projects. Still others may find that their gifts lie in their empathy for others, or their knack for repairing machinery. Some students will fall behind in all of these areas, unless we want to make our gifted students emulate Harrison Bergeron.

We need parents to take more of an active role in their children’s education (and, indeed, in their children’s lives). We need teachers who have the insight and initiative to recognize a student’s natural interests and aptitudes and help them to figure out ways to develop those into employable skillsets (and to use those natural interests to encourage students to learn the fundamentals). We need to raise our children to understand that intelligence not a stigma. These things are as much (if not more) cultural than anything else, and a top-down solution will not change the culture. What we need is not a top down solution, but a bottom up solution.

Unfortunately, government (especially at a national level) isn’t really equipped to effect a bottom-up solution efficiently. The best that they can do, in my opinion, is encourage parental involvement by giving parents choices (read: vouchers). I believe that part of the reason that all-too-many parents aren’t involved in their children’s education is because they feel powerless. “Your kid’s school doesn’t do anything to inspire his talent, but you don’t have enough money to drive him to another district or get him into the private school down the street? Well, that’s rough, but your kid’s got to stay at the crappy local school, because the teachers’ union gets pretty freaked out when we try to introduce the idea of competition into the mix.” No, vouchers won’t help everyone. Students who live in an area where their choices are limited, or students whose parents are uninvolved despite the extra choices are going to get the short stick, but no more so than they already do.

What else can we do? Pay good teachers more (again, you’ll likely hear the union crying out against this — it’s my understanding that unions tend to push the idea that raises should be based solely on time served, not on merit), and interfering school administrators less. The ability to be a great, truly inspiring teacher isn’t something that can be mandated (and possibly not something that can be taught); all increased government interference does is stifle the good teachers, frustrating them (and, often, burning them out quickly to leave only bad teachers). Bad teachers are the ones who thrive the most under stifling interference, and that is all you will ever get from increased “top down” measures intended to fix the system^[c].

1. I’m sorry, but is it wrong that I’m having a hard time figuring out why this matters? Sure, it’s kind of a depressing figure on first blush, but unless you’re attempting to get to Canada or Mexico and need to know whether to drive north or south, what good does it do you to locate the United States on a world map anyway? I’m not one of the 20%, but I don’t know how that benefits me in the least. Being able to find a place on a map has nothing to do with being able to interact with the people or understand the political situation (well, except in that knowing the neighbors may help understand the players, but that’s less and less true now, with technology being what it is). Supposing that I completely lost my ability to locate the United States (or Israel, or the Vatican, or Afghanistan, or Iraq, or Luxembourg, or…) on the world map tomorrow, how would that adversely [Fixed - I originally typed "inversely" accidentally.] affect my life? Maps on that scale are effectively abstract, with little-to-no practical application (for most of us) anyway. There will be those that say that his is indicative of Americans’ lack of regard for the rest of the world, but knowing the general shape and location of the country from a perspective that more than 99% of us will never have the opportunity to see doesn’t really seem like an incredibly necessary skill to me. What seems more damning, to me, is that there are high school (and even college) graduates in this country who can’t read a road map. [↩]
2. Helen (Mrs. Incredible/Elasti-girl): Everyone’s special, Dash.
   Dash: Which is another way of saying no one is. [↩]
3. That isn’t to say there aren’t still good teachers out there, despite the amount of government (and administrative) interference that they have to put up with; However, I believe that, without that interference, there would be a lot more such teachers, and a lot less of those who teach blindly (and monotonously) from the book, even when the book is demonstrably wrong. [↩]

My one word review of BioShock: awesome.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go harvest rescue some Little Sisters.

The next time that you hear a hoplophobe say that it’s too dangerous to have guns in the hands of civilians, remember that having a badge doesn’t make a person any better:

NOBLE, Okla. — A stray bullet fired by a police officer trying to shoot a snake hit and killed a 5-year-old boy fishing at a nearby pond, officials said.

…

A Noble police officer who had responded to a report of a snake in a tree apparently fired the deadly shot while trying to kill the snake, according to City Manager Bob Wade.

When Robert Heinlein died, he left an outline for Variable Star. Spider Robinson, who’d been a friend of Heinlein’s, was chosen to take the outline and flesh it out into a full novel. The story revolves around the life of Joel Johnston, a young man who has just learned that the woman he loves isn’t quite what she seems to be.

After a discussion in which Joel admits that he wants to marry Jinny, but not while they’re both broke, Jinny reveals a secret — she’s actually the granddaughter of the world’s richest and most powerful man. Still in shock, Joel meets her father and grandfather, who both seem to approve of the idea of the two getting married. However, by marrying Jinny, Joel would be signing up for more than marriage — he would also have to agree to give up his current plans for his life (he’s a musician and composer) to become a businessman, something he has no particular desire to do. Finding this unacceptable, Joel panics, and as a result of a drunken bender, ends up on a colony ship heading for a planet many light years away.

I got this as an audio book from Audible.com, and honestly enjoyed it quite a bit. Since I’ve read a number of Heinlein’s books and don’t remember the puns that popped up almost incessantly in this book, I’m guessing they’re a staple of Robinson’s. As a fan of Peter David’s, I’ve developed something of an appreciation for puns, and will be trying out some of Robinson’s other work shortly.

I only had two real complaints about this book.

First (and more minor) approximately two hours from the end, one of the ship’s “Relativists” (the people who make near-lightspeed travel possible) is attempting to calm several members of the crew after an almost unthinkable tragedy. In the course of his speech, he gives an extremely simplistic overview of the War on Terror (as seen from a liberal extremists perspective). Reviews I’d read had criticized other aspects of the book for their liberal bias (Joel’s running away to avoid becoming one of the world’s richest and most powerful men, for example), but this was the first one that really stood out to me, possibly because it had, at its core, some pretty major factual errors. Granted, this is a work of fiction, so it didn’t bother me much, but it was still a bit jarring.

Secondly, the end solution to the ship’s problems seemed very much like a deus ex machina. It wasn’t quite as bad as I feared when the solution first made itself obvious — it doesn’t play out quite as simply as one might think — but it’s still pretty jarring and sudden. Based on the afterword, I’m guessing that both the final crisis and its solution were not based on Heinlein’s initial outline (which ended in the middle), but on Robinson’s own plans to end the book (based on a couple of quotes from Heinlein, but not attached to this particular story).

When the final crisis occurred, I suddenly realized that I wasn’t going to get the Heinlein book that I had hoped this would be. I’d really hoped to see Joel get to his destination and actually get a feel for the sort of politics involved in establishing a new colony. That’s the sort of thing I always loved best about Heinlein’s work, and I was really disappointed not to get it here. The ending as it was wasn’t bad, but it didn’t seem to fit the beginning of the book as well as I would’ve liked.

All in all, this isn’t a bad book, and it’s encouraged me to look for more by Robinson, but I wish these two minor issues had been fixed.

Is it too late to prosecute Andres Serrano?*

Take a book that doesn’t belong to you and toss it in the toilet, and you’ve just committed vandalism (and possibly theft). Unless, of course, the book in question is the Koran:

NEW YORK (AP) _ A 23-year-old man was arrested Friday on hate-crime charges after he threw a Quran in a toilet at Pace University on two separate occasions, police said.

It’s my understanding that the book didn’t belong to Stanislav Shmulevich, and neither did the toilet. He destroyed Pace University property (the book) and no doubt caused a minor headache for whatever janitor later had to retrieve the book. With that in mind, he’s committed vandalism and should be punished for it. Does it really matter why he tossed the book in the toilet, or that the book happens to be considered sacred by some individuals at the school?

Imagine that this same situation had played out the same way, except that the criminal was a Muslim who had tossed a Bible in the toilet or a Christian who flushed a Torah. Would the University have turned the matter over to the police? Would it have been treated as a “hate crime”? Hate crime laws say to citizens that not everyone is equal — attacking someone who happens to be a member of a “protected class” is worse than attacking someone who is not.

The police officers and prosecutors who decided that this case was something more serious than simple vandalism, as well as the Pace University officials who felt the need to push for this to be considered more than it is, should be ashamed of themselves. Vandalism is a crime, and should be treated as such, but the issue shouldn’t be blown out of proportion simply because the vandalism happened to be offensive.

—–

* That’s a joke, incidentally. I think Serrano’s work is disgusting and insulting, but I accept that this country has a freedom of expression that allows such things. I’m not so keen on the idea of his work being subsidized by the federal government, though.