Education Conversation

Some friends and I have been thinking a lot about education lately. It is a two-month theme for our local Tea Party meetings. I spoke, and wrote about that, a few weeks ago. (Someone recorded it, and it’s actually available for viewing here. If you go to the website of the person who recorded it, the other speaker and the Q&A are available there as well.)

We’re having another meeting this Saturday, hearing from two members of the State Board of Education.

The entire public education system is something of a mess, and not succeeding in what we want it to do. There are many approaches to solving that. But key is getting the decision making more local. 

Toward that end, a friend shared with me, and I’m going to pass along to you, some things from a tele-townhall in which Hugh Hewitt interviewed Dr. Larry Arnn, President of Hillsdale College, and Dr. Kathleen O’Toole, the provost for K-12 education for Hillsdale, which covers their Barney Charter School Initiative.

Hugh Hewitt (left), Dr. Larry Arnn, and Dr. Kathleen O'Toole
at tele-townhall for the Barney Charter School Initiative

A conversation between Hugh Hewitt and Larry Arnn is always fun to listen in on. They typically talk once a week for an hour on radio, called the Hillsdale Dialogue. Dr. O’Toole happens to be Dr. Arnn’s daughter, and she is a good addition to the discussion, particularly on the issue of education.

This discussion was meant to provide information about their charter schools, and to give people an opportunity to donate—because they try to give away as much education as they can, which they can only do when there are enough donations.

Anyway, I’d like to share parts of their discussion, just because I think it helps us see the gap between what we know works to educate students and what our schools typically do—often at no fault of the teachers.

The Barney Charter Schools are about classical education. That’s another name for liberal education—but not what liberal means in the political sphere. It means open-minded and clear thinking. It implies studying the classics, and the good. That’s probably going to include Aristotle and Plato, who pointed out that there’s evidence of the divine everywhere. Wherever you rate one thing as being better than another, you imply there is an ultimate good. That is God; and God is the arbiter of what is good.

These schools will talk about the role of ethics and religion. They’re public schools, but they can still talk about what a religion believes, what it is, and the role of the three major monotheistic religions in Western thought.

Dr. Arnn often speaks about defining what is good. He references C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man, which comes up in this discussion as well. In that book, Lewis talks about the problem you have when you strip out conscience from a person. Humans are the only creatures with a conscience. Without that, all you have left is appetite; you lose what makes you human. You need to build character, which is the condition you build in yourself, foregoing pleasure, enduring pain, so that you can become educated and just.

Dr. Katherine O'Toole
at the tele-townhall for Barney Charter School Initiative

Schools are going to teach what the adults in the school believe to be virtue, that that might as well be intentional. Dr. O’Toole says,

If you send your child to any school, you are sending your child to a group of people who are giving examples to your child of what adults and bigger kids are like. That’s what school is.… Every school is teaching kids about right and wrong, good and bad, who you should be and who you shouldn’t be. That’s just what school is, in part. If you send your kid to one of these classical schools, you will send them to a group of people who are thinking about that question explicitly, and talking about it explicitly. They’re talking about virtue. We recognize that kids are going to be learning about right and wrong by being around us, so we might as well make a point of doing it right.

Dr. O’Toole points out that education is an activity performed by the student. You cannot educate someone against his or her will. She says,

The teachers are there to guide them, set up framework, hold them accountable, introduce them to the ideas. But students are the ones doing it. If a class is run well, they are the ones asking questions. They are being asked questions. They are interested in what is going on. They are connecting what they’re learning in one subject to what they learned in another subject in the previous period. They’re talking about what they’ve been learning all day every day with each other. It’s part of who they are. It’s not some other thing that they do besides their real life. It is their lives.

There’s a key, she says, to an excellent school. It’s “involved parents, excellent teaching, and a sound and solid and robust curriculum.”

And what does it take to have an excellent teacher? Teacher have to have learned and studied the content. Dr. Arnn suggests getting rid of the teaching of teaching. It’s a waste for teachers to spend time studying methods for teaching the subject matter—which takes away time from actually studying the subject matter.

I used to notice this in college, as an English major. Many people in my major headed toward education. But I didn’t like taking the time out from what I wanted to study and spending that in classroom preparation classes. In addition, let me note that, many English majors going into teaching (in my experience) struggled with grammar—where we diagrammed sentences, among other things. It was their worst subject, typically a C, D, or Fail class for them. If you’d taken a foreign language, it came much easier, which I had. But future teachers took English because they loved reading stories. Maybe, if they were good, they could help lead a discussion for students on what they’d read. But they were typically subpar in grammar and writing. They needed more time learning those skills, rather than taking that time to learn how to write out a lesson plan.

Dr. Arnn talked about the rights and responsibilities of parents, which I think is an essential part of any discussion on education, and why the control has to be local.

The school, should absorb this. You have a right, as a parent to raise your children—the duty and the right. And the natural love that parents have for children is the strongest force on earth. Human babies take longer to raise than any other kind. And they would die, for years, if they were not tended. So that love that you have should be influential in the school.

Now, the second thing is teachers. Teachers are smart people. And they could do a lot of things with their lives, and this is not the highest paying profession. So, they’re people who are devoted. And they and the parents and the administration of the school—which shouldn’t be very many people—they are the right ones to run the school. And that is the way education worked in America.

Charter schools, he says, are a step back toward self-government, toward management by the people who know and love the kids. Also, he points out, as I would expect, that education is not among the things enumerated for the federal government to do.

There is some discussion about learning phonics, rather than whole language. And getting young children to memorize important writing, such as the Preamble to the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address (both of which we memorized in our homeschool), or maybe Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, which is only seven minutes long. Kids memorize, and then they understand the words and the concepts.

There’s discussion about learning math facts, so when you get to more complicated equations, you’re not taking time to work out 6 time 7 on your fingers; there’s no time for that. In our homeschool, we memorized through 12X12 for multiplication, but we have a book that recommended memorizing up through 25X25, which would be handy.

They discussed connecting subject matter, rather than keeping each subject disconnected.

There’s more, but I’ll leave it to you to listen to the whole thing, if you want to know more specifics about their charter schools. But, here’s something to think about. They started in 2010, and opened their first school in 2012. They now have 22 schools in 11 states. Dr. Arnn’s goal is to have 50 schools. They can be smaller, but the one Dr. O’Toole headed in Leander, Texas, had about 650 students K-12.

When you look at the total number of students who would like this kind of education instead of what they’re getting, it seems like just a drop in the bucket. We've talked about the difficulty of getting in here and here.

The hope is that getting started, and doing even this small number, will have an effect on society as a whole.

If you’re interested in taking a look at their curriculum for free, email them at charterschoola@hillsdale.edu and they’ll quickly get back to you and provide it—no charge. There was also a fair amount of information at the link to this tele-townhall, here.

If you’re interested in donating, call 800-437-2268, or click the link at the bottom of the page below the tele-townhall.

Dr. Larry Arnn
at the tele-townhall for Barney Charter School Initiative

Dr. Arnn ended with a thought I’d like to repeat here, while we’re in the midst of this conversation on education:

Nothing is more important than to become an informed citizen, because we’re losing the whole constitutional fabric of the nation, and the principles that gave rise to it. That [loss] started in education, and it’s proceeding through it now. We have to interrupt that. So, first of all, inform yourself. Anything you don’t know, always learn more. And then, talk to your neighbors…. If you’ve got opinions and influence, use it. And we will help you; we will give you things to know. It’s very possible to save the country by saving the education system.

People who know how to learn, and how to teach, and how that all connects to raising people to become great souls—we can find a way together to make that happen. We have to.

Declaration Authority

Can we just say this: The Declaration of Independence, which we celebrate tomorrow, is brilliant and beautiful—and was the first to do what it set out to do: separate from a royal sovereign to become a self-governed sovereign nation.

These past few months I’ve been doing some studying about the Declaration of Independence. Not entirely purposeful, but because things have come my way that started to connect.

Dr. Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, has a lot to do with this. He has created a new free online course, Introduction to the Constitution, about the philosophies behind our founding. He also does a weekly hour with Hugh Hewitt, called the Hillsdale Dialogues. Lately these have covered the founding documents: The Declaration of Independence, The Articles of Confederation, and The Constitution.

The Hillsdale Dialogues are archived in a couple of places: among Hillsdale’s online courses, and in Hugh Hewitt’s archived shows (subscription required).

The Declaration covered four weeks, the fourth of which was not Larry Arnn, but Matthew Spalding, head of Hillsdale’s Kirby Center in Washington, DC. [May 6, 2017, around 24 minutes]. He points out an interesting thing about the mentions of God in the Declaration:

They begin by appealing to the “Supreme Judge of the World.” This paragraph includes two more references to God: “Supreme Judge of the World” at the beginning of the paragraph, and He’s “Divine Providence” at the end. Right? This document has references to God as the three forms of government. You recall, He’s “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God”; He’s the lawmaker. He’s the “Creator”—endows us with rights; He’s the executive. And now He’s the “Supreme Judge.” So He’s all three branches of the government—and He’s “Divine Providence.”

screen shot from Lecture 2

In lecture 2 of the Introduction to the Constitution course, Larry Arnn also refers to these references to God identifying the three branches of government. And then he points out that the king:

has interfered with the legislature and the judges. He’s suspended the legislature. He has removed judges. He has interfered with the trial by jury. The king is trying to be all three branches. But the person who can be trusted to be all three branches is actually named in the document. Only God….

He [Jefferson] might need an authority like that, if he’s declaring a rebellion, because the source of the law up till that moment had been the king and parliament. And they’re saying, “No more.” So king and parliament have not passed a law that says you can cut off from us whenever you want to. If they had, they could have used their authority. But they were saying, “No.” So they needed some higher authority: Laws of Nature.

The revolutionaries weren’t lawless anarchists. The Declaration of Independence isn’t a rebellion against laws; it is a rebellion against lawlessness, and a movement toward laws.

In his book The Founder’s Key, Larry Arnn  chapter 3, "Divorce The Declaration and the Constitution Estranged?" Dr. Arnn notes that others have claimed that the declaration is a rebellion against laws—and that’s opposite to the Constitution. But Dr. Arnn says they aren’t actually opposites, except in purpose:

Notice it says that this is a right of “the People,” the group entitled in nature to a certain standing. This group may indeed throw off the government if it pleases. What then is it to do? Jefferson continues that the next step is to “institute new Government.” The institution of new government is parallel in grammar, in meaning, and in priority to the right to throw off government. If it is natural for a people to rebel against a bad government, it is also natural for a people to establish a new one that is good.

As important as The Declaration is in the history of the world, the actual severing of ties was put before the Continental Congress on June 7, 1776, nearly a month earlier.

Neither Thomas Jefferson nor John Adams were the ones to bring the question of independence into the open—beyond tavern conversations. Richard Henry Lee, of Virginia, was the one to do that. He made the proposal on June 7, 1776. But there weren’t the votes to accomplish passing the proposal at that point. So John Adams got to work persuading people toward that.

Lee’s proposal to dissolve allegiance with Great Britain was, for him and all those participating, high treason. The men who acted on the proposal risked execution. But that list of grievances was mounting—and there was a war already underway in which the British crown was firing upon its citizens, rather than protecting them.

Being such a serious proposal, the delegates were given three weeks to consult with and get directions from home, and, according to David J. Shestokas in Creating the Declaration of Independence, time for “a committee to draft a declaration to be issued in the event the independence resolution were adopted.

Among Adams’ efforts was recruiting Thomas Jefferson to do the writing. It was partly that he wanted a more junior legislator to do it, so he could keep doing other things. And partly he wanted someone from the southern colonies to make the proposal—so that it wasn’t seen as a Massachusetts problem, where most of the fighting was taking place. And it was partly because Jefferson really was the best man to do the writing.

Jefferson had written an essay two years earlier called “A Summary View of the Rights of British North America.” Lee used ideas from that. He was a better speaker; Jefferson was a better writer.

The Declaration was without precedent. Some of the concepts had come up before. Jefferson considered them all, one after another, as he went about writing The Declaration. There were patterns he found among the historical documents. The others did include lists of grievances. And Jefferson would use that. As Shestokas describes it,

It was clear that for the world audience to understand, Jefferson would need to list the king’s crimes and how by those crimes the king no longer had the right to rule.

Matthew Spalding, in the Hillsdale Dialogue, talks about the structure of the Declaration, in a lawyer’s terms:

You’re a lawyer so you’ll appreciate this. Think of it as the common law doctrine. There’s a preamble. There’s a statement of principle. Indictment. And now they’re driving towards a conclusion. Every stage of this, “we’ve been humble in our terms. We’ve been answered only by repeated injury.” There was an olive branch petition right before this. And the king has put out a royal proclamation of rebellion, treating them like traitors, wanting to bring them to justice. The break has been made. This is their conclusion.

So The Declaration builds a case for legitimacy among the world’s nations. As Hugh Hewitt puts it, “a recipe for how to go about establishing legitimacy in revolution.” That long list of grievances has a particular purpose.

Larry Arnn, in The Founder’s Key, says this about the “long middle section, which is generally ignored today”:

It was not ignored at the time, however, because this section contains the charges against the king and Parliament that give specific justification for the act of revolution. This part puts the responsibility directly on the British government. It builds a case against that government, specifically, in one of the monumental controversies in all history. At stake is the loyalty of a whole people to the king. And at stake is the vast land upon which they live, at that time still unknown in extent, but the prize possession of one of the greatest empires in the entire human story....

The charges against the king name the specific practical ground upon which all this is to be taken from him.

Jefferson brings this point forward when, after the list, he says,

“A Prince, whose Character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the Ruler of a free People.”

The ruler has been a tyrant. A free people must act to end the oppression. America is the particular example of the general principle.

The vote on Lee’s proposal actually took place on July 2^nd, and some predicted that would be the celebrated day of independence. But the signing actually took place on July 4^th, so that’s what now gets our attention.

And it deserves our attention, 241 years later. Any freedom that exists in the world today owes its thanks to those daring enough to sign The Declaration. That’s worth celebrating.

As a bonus, here are some musical friends of mine singing "The Star-Spangled Banner": 

Resourceful

Here at the Spherical Model, the world’s smallest think tank, we don’t do a lot of primary research.

What I hope to do is educate, so that more people are equipped with the ideas and principles that lead us to political freedom, economic free market prosperity, and thriving civilization—as alternatives to the historically more common tyranny, poverty, and savagery.

The Spherical Model framework is original, and the opinions are mainly mine. But there are many others interested in freedom, prosperity, and civilization and how we get there.

I thought it might be useful today to share some of the many resources I frequent, in no particular order.

Books

My list keeps growing. There are many that add good information on specific issues or areas of interest. But these few are essential for economics, as well as for understanding the interrelationships of the political, economic, and social spheres:

·         The Road to Serfdom—Friedrich Hayek

·         Basic Economics—Thomas Sowell

·         Economics in One Lesson—Henry Hazlitt

·         Liberal Fascism—Jonah Goldberg

·         The 5000-Year Leap—W. Cleon Skousen

Organizations and Education

These are some of the regular places I turn to, or tune in to:

·         Hillsdale College online courses—These are free, and equivalent to the courses provided to students on campus, if you do the reading and work with it. Or you can just enjoy the lectures and take the quizzes (or not). They just redid their original Constitution class, and I’m looking forward to that. Others include Western Heritage, American Heritage, Economics, Great Books, The Presidency and the Constitution, The Federalist Papers, Winston Churchill, C. S. Lewis, Athens and Sparta, Public Policy, US Supreme Court, and Theology. Each course has 8-10 or so lectures.

·        The Heritage Foundation—This organization has been reliably conservative for decades, some recent leadership changes notwithstanding. They offer news sources, such as the Daily Signal, There’s an activist group called the Sentinels, with a weekly phonecall about current legislative action and online and local support. And they do research and policy work.

·         Hoover Institution—The organization has been around a long time, related to Stanford University, in favor of free market economic policies and prosperity, and other geopolitical issues. Their Uncommon Knowledge, an interview program with authors and experts, is a favorite source. I don’t agree with every interviewee, but it’s a good way to get clarity about their viewpoints.

·         The Witherspoon Institute—This organization does research and education related to the “moral foundations of free and democratic societies.” They’ve come to my attention because of Ryan T. Anderson, their public discourse editor, who is the William E. Simon Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, and is one of the clearest voices writing today in defense of marriage. This is scholarly information, and often aimed at advanced college students or professors. But they attempt to write in a way that is accessible, reasonable, and moral.

·         The Ludwig von Mises Institute—This is an organization based on the Austrian school of economics, emphasizing free market policies.

·         Wallbuilders—David Barton is the force behind this organization. They teach history, mainly American history, with the perspective that looks at the necessity of a moral people in maintaining our Constitution. This organization is especially helpful for homeschoolers, which is how I became familiar with it.

·         Texas Home School Coalition—Speaking of homeschooling, THSC is a good resource on education and parental rights issues. While I’m not still homeschooling, I still get their newsletters and rely on them heavily for information during the Texas legislative session.

·         Prager University—A collection of 5-minute videos on a wide array of topics, mainly explaining the conservative (classical liberal) viewpoint. They’re free, and easy to share. And you can login and take a short quiz to test your understanding.

News and Commentary Voices

I don’t spend much time going to main stream media sources. I prefer an admitted bias from someone seeking truth, rather than a claim of unbiased news from sources that are clearly skewed. Still, it’s a good idea to get a variety of views. Often when I use a MSM news source, it is to get more information about an issue I hear about on radio top-of-the-hour news headlines, or stories linked by friends or various sources. This list isn’t exhaustive, or even always views I endorse. And this list changes from time to time. Some I turn to daily or weekly, others only occasionally.

·         Townhall—a daily collection of mostly conservative columnists

·         The Blaze—and various Glenn Beck shows and resources (some parts require subscription fee)

·         The Daily Signal—Heritage Foundation’s daily news source

·         Fox News (if I must go to a traditional source on television) 

·         Hugh Hewitt radio—(archive requires subscription fee)

·         Ben Shapiro and The Daily Wire—the website includes pieces by various writers, but I mainly tune in for Ben Shapiro’s commentary and podcast

·         Thomas Sowell—economist; he has retired from his regular column, but he still writes books and does occasional pieces or interviews

·         Walter Williams—economist; I usually get his columns at Townhall

·         PJ Media—I used to watch their videos, but funding for those ended a year or so ago. I still appreciate, when I find them, Andrew Klavan, Victor Davis Hanson, and others.

·         Matt Walsh—culture blog, found on The Blaze these days

·         Tom Woods—economic and libertarian blog, and good on education issues as well

·         Dennis Prager radio—in addition to the PragerU videos

·         Volokh Conspiracy—legal blog, written by Eugen Volokh and other law professors

·         Greg Mankiw—economic blog by Harvard economics professor

Changing Minds and Hearts

On Glenn Beck Radio this morning, he was talking to ex-KGB agent Jack Barsky (author of Deep Undercover), who had been deep cover as a spy in the US back in the 80s. He defected shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall, remaining in the US because of his daughter.

image from Amazon.com

In telling his story he mentioned that, when you’re indoctrinated with certain ideas, or ways of thinking, it’s very hard to let go of those ideas as an adult.

“Ideology as it’s fed to you from childhood on is a very very strong foundation.”

In their further conversation, they mentioned that Islamists, and North Koreans, who have been trained since childhood to believe we are the enemy, the Great Satan, and worthy of death for existing and not being “them,” can’t be expected to change just because we offer them freedom, prosperity, and civilization. Many former East Germans now support Putin, for example. In reference to North Korea, Barsky said,

“You cannot think that, once you free them from that dictator, that the country is going to change.”

A little later in the day I heard radio host Dennis Prager say that one of the purposes of his PragerU videos is to educate the young people who have been missing a lot of truth in their education. He believes that, if you can bring them facts, and show them truth in a logical way, you can get through to them.

This afternoon I read an email from Hillsdale College, advertising their free online American Heritage course, which I have taken. They mention some troubling statistics:

According to the National Assessment of Education, only 18% of American high schoolers are proficient in U.S. history. So it’s no surprise that, according to the Pew Research Center, only 32% of Millennials think America is the greatest country in the world.

They say this happened on purpose:

Progressives who opposed the ideas of limited government and individual rights began a concerted effort over a century ago to take over America’s schools and universities. Since the late 1960s, to the extent young Americans have learned anything about our country’s history, it is more likely than not to be about its faults.

Meanwhile, I’ve just finished a section in my Book of Mormon reading about the conversion of a rather large group of people who had previously been taught to hate the other people, to see them as thieves and liars that they had a right to murder and subjugate. The change was dramatic. They were so determined to keep their new promises to God and their fellow human beings, that they buried their swords as a sign of their promise never to kill again (Alma 24:16-18). For them that even included in self-defense, which caused some issues later, but that’s another part of the story.

Anti-Nephi-Lehies, burying their weapons
image from LDS.org

These people did remain faithful. The change was not only dramatic; it was permanent.

And the former spy, Jack Barsky—his change has been permanent as well. In the cases where these people changed permanently, there are a couple of similarities: they were taught about Christ in a way that changed their hearts, and they felt love for those who taught them and for those around them.

If we’re looking for a way to change the world—to change a generation from hating freedom and the rules that lead to civilization into a free and prosperous people—how do we do it? There’s a simple but not easy answer: teach truth while loving them as they are.

I’m hoping that Dennis Prager is right. I hope that teaching millennials (and all of us) with clear, short videos that explain the truths will contribute to some conversions.

Add in the free online courses by Hillsdale College—on American Heritage, the US Constitution, the classics, and more—and clear truths are made accessible. This may mean more conversions.

I’m adding my small efforts here, at the Spherical Model, to try to lay out truth, as logically as I can, as a path to freedom, prosperity, and civilization.

I’m hoping for enough conversions here in America and among freedom-loving people around the globe, that the next generation won’t be trapped by the regressive teachings of the progressives. If we can preserve and recover freedom here in America, there’s hope for the rest of the world, or at least much of it.

But we’re up against a lot. And calmly teaching truth is the easy part. The other part, the letting them feel loved by us, so the change of heart comes—that’s always going to be a challenge.

But this week we celebrate the impossible: Christ overcoming death and the fall. With the help of the One who made the ultimate sacrifice for us, we can be made capable enough to help in change-of-heart miracles.

Nonequivalents

Some things have been spun as equivalent that are not. Here are a few:

·        Defunding NPR ≠ killing Big Bird, or closing down that communications company; it simply means funding would need to come from someplace other than taxpayer money.

·        Medical insurance ≠ medical care. In fact, medical insurance—especially once mandated as an employee benefit, interfered with the market and raised prices so that medical care became harder for the patient to pay for.

·        Repealing Obamacare ≠ eliminating health care. It means that we would eliminate the expensive mandates and other coercions that have made it harder for people to pay for the insurance they want or the care they need.

·        Being against illegal immigration ≠ racism; it is not even equivalent to being anti-immigration. It is likely equivalent to favoring law-abiding immigrants.

·        Being against a higher minimum wage ≠ keeping families in poverty. It is, rather, being in favor of a free market in which entry-level workers get opportunities to earn entry-level wages while gaining valuable experience that will help them become more valuable employees in the future. Conversely favoring a higher minimum wage = outlawing jobs for many entry-level workers.

This list could do on. But I’ll add one more, that I’d like to spend time on today:

·        Favoring school choice ≠ being against educating all children. Just the opposite, in fact. And I’ll add, eliminating the US Department of Education ≠ eliminating public schools. After all my entire public education happened before that political entity was established, so I know it can be done.

In the December issue of Imprimis, Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn speaks about “A More American Conservatism.” The overall piece looks at the question of whether the new president can be identified as a conservative (answer: we’ll see what he does, but there are some reasons to be hopeful). But a large section talks about education, which is a specialty of his, as president of an influential liberal arts college. And I’d like to share some of that.

Dr. Arnn mentions that he approves of the appointment of Betsy DeVos. He says, “Trump has nominated the splendid Betsy DeVos to be secretary of the Department, and she is a fighter for every kind of school choice.” These words are comforting. She has now been sworn in, after a tie-breaking vote from Vice-President Pence.

Dr. Arnn says this about the Department of Education:

The federal government spends seven or eight percent of its money on education, and its method is typical of the federal intrusion into local matters: it gives money from the federal treasury to state and localities on condition. The conditions are myriad, confusing, and usually ugly when they can be understood. Title IV of the Higher Education Act governs federal student aid, and it numbers around 500 pages. A lawyer for our college told me once that I would be unable to read it, because he himself cannot read it, for which reason his firm keeps a specialist who is the only person he knows who understands what it says. For this reason alone, it would be a grand thing to get rid of the Department of Education.

Someone quipped that, if you really hate DeVos in charge of the Department of Education, support the bill to eliminate that department—and she’s gone.

Here’s another nonequivalence:

·       The Department of Education ≠ better education outcomes for students. In fact, there have been no appreciable increases in education outcomes since this bureaucracy was established, but costs per student have skyrocketed.

Dr. Arnn shares a basic principle about education:

The first thing to understand is that human beings are made to learn, and they desire to do it naturally. This means the job of teachers, like the job of parents, is to help children learn, not to make them or cause them to learn. Good schools are built around this fact.

One of the arguments for a national bureaucracy over education is that every student, in every state, ought to have the opportunity for education as some minimum standard, and so national standards and testing are necessary. But testing ≠ meeting a standard. In fact, setting a minimum standard ≠ better education outcomes.

Dr. Arnn talks about a kind of standard that would be useful:

The chairman of our education program at Hillsdale College has written a series of standards that states might adopt for K-12 education. For each grade, they take up about half a page. But if a child can do the things on that half a page, the child has earned a lot. Here is a way for higher levels of government to be sure that any money they give to lower levels is well spent in education. It involves hardly any management of details. That is the constitution model, the model that comes from our Founding.

To follow this practice would liberalize the system. It would mean that there would be plenty of bad charter schools, just as there are plenty of bad schools now. But it would also mean that there would be a proliferation of good ones.

Charter schools are just one type of school choice. At this point there are not enough of them. 

Here are some of the numbers in Texas. There are 5.2 million K-12 students (10% of all kids in US). Of that 5.2 million, 250,000 attend private schools, 300,000 are homeschooled, and 250,000 attend charter school. There’s a wait list of an additional 130,000 for charter schools. That’s why there must be lotteries to settle who attends a charter school (which is a public-school-funded entity that operates on different principles with different, often innovative practices).

Of those 87% attending public schools, 900,000 (20% of public-schooled students) are stuck in 1,032 failing schools—schools that have failed to show progress for three years in a row. There are considerably more students stuck in hopelessly failing schools than there are students being taught by parents, private schools, and charter schools added together.

That is what bureaucracy has wrought. To want that status quo = not caring about the education of the next generation. There ought to be a better choice for every family with a student they care about.

Dr. Arnn talks about what the 16 successful charter schools Hillsdale College operates look like:

Everybody wears a uniform and signs an honor code. Everybody studies mathematics at least through pre-calculus. Everybody learns Latin, history, literature, philosophy, physics, biology, and chemistry. Everybody is admitted by a lottery system. For the inner-city schools, care is take to advertise only in the immediate area, to make the opportunity available to the children who live in poor areas. The students in these schools make on the average excellent scores on the ubiquitous state standardized tests, and they do this without class time or curriculum set aside to pare for those tests. They do very well even in relation to the legions of public schools that now take months to cram only for those tests.

While these schools work well, he does not recommend making every school like this. It is the choice that makes the difference. Standards are high. Everyone is there voluntarily. The same is true at Hillsdale College. He says,

At Hillsdale College the curriculum is rigorous and the standards of behavior are high. But they are not imperative. The ultimate penalty is simply this question: are you sure you want to be here, when there are so many other options, options generally not quite so difficult or strict? The student who responds yes to that question is self-governing, which is the aim. That is why we at Hillsdale would not support a national law that everyone had to do what we do. We know too much about human beings to think that would work.

Knowing about individual human beings is something distant bureaucracies are particularly not good at.

Dr. Arnn ends his education portion with these hopeful words about a reformed Department of Education:

[I]t would be teaching the governments below not to give people orders all the time. It would be teaching them that parents do after all love their children in the great majority of cases, and that the strongest institutions are built on love. It would be teaching them that schools can do better without a national engineering project to take over their work, to set their tests, to prescribe their behavior.

He admits that such reforms would indeed “lay the ground for the Department’s abolition.” But, again, that ≠ less education; it actually can mean better education at lower costs—which are outcomes that market choices among good, free people, almost always bring.

To Read or Not to Read--Shakespeare

I’ve begun yet another free online course by Hillsdale College, this one about Shakespeare’s Hamlet and The Tempest.

As you’re probably familiar, Hamlet asks,

To be, or not to be: that is the question:

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them? (Act III, Scene 1)

That’s what happens in Shakespeare; people take a look at what can be done, and what ought to be done—what is right to do when faced with whatever life throws at us.

The Globe Theater in London
from our trip last May

Professor Stephen Smith will be the main teacher. In lecture 2, his introduction to Hamlet, he says,

I really think all of Shakespearean drama broods over a key question: what habits does the human being need to lead a free, prosperous, truthful, and great life?

Here at the Spherical Model, we ask these questions too. Less artfully than Shakespeare, but we want to know, what is the way to freedom, prosperity, and civilization—rather than the alternatives of tyranny, poverty, and savagery?

Dr. Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, gives introductory lecture 1, about why we read Shakespeare—what we get out of it. One reason is to see what happens when a person makes certain choices. We can see the situation, the thought process going into the decision, and then the results—all complete.

He gives an example of something Winston Churchill advocated for that, at the time, looked like it might not move toward peace. In fact, the war lasted another five years. But it eventually did appear that Churchill was right about the choice, although some consequences are probably still playing out even now.

Actions that we take seldom are really complete. But in a play, they can be complete. In three hours you can see some dramatic things done by people, in Shakespeare in beautiful language, to explain why they’re doing it. And a world, a whole world, can be described in a few words, that is rich and beautiful, and compelling, and evocative.

In Hamlet, Dr. Arnn says,

we can find out what happened to him. We can find out his choices in detail. We can feel the pressures that he feels. We can weigh the competing goods to which he is loyal, and then we can see how it comes out in the end.

Both Churchill and Lincoln were avid readers of Shakespeare—enough that they could mouth the words when they attended performances. Why?

To conclude, what did Lincoln and Churchill find in Shakespeare? Why did they love him? Well, they were people who made extremely consequential decisions all the time. And what they could do is practice those decisions by watching those plays. To see how one thing happens and another follows—and this is this, and this is that. Also see how even the highest intentions sometimes go wrong. But nonetheless the intentions are high and worthy, even if they don’t succeed.

Both those men—I think the greatest statesmen of democratic history, along with George Washington—both those men had Shakespeare for a teacher. And if he was helpful to them, think how helpful he can be to us in our daily lives and how we carry on.

Back before our homeschooling years, our boys attended a gifted magnet school. One year they studied Shakespeare. They had a “reduced” version of Hamlet. That is, a version that uses mainly the original language, but simplifies the plot and some of the lines, so it can be more easily understood and performed by children. The teachers had originally planned to just read it together. But the kids said, “Why don’t we put it on?”

In a gifted school, if you have kids who want to do something, you probably go with it. Two weeks later they put on a performance for family. Not all the lines were memorized, and costumes and sets were very simple. But they did it. Son Economic Sphere was in fourth grade that year; Political Sphere had already moved on to middle school. Economic Sphere went around the house quoting Shakespeare at appropriate moments (seeking out such moments), which delighted me, but his brother thought he was showing off. The next year they did A comedy of Errors.

When we started homeschooling, I looked up the same reduced versions and we started putting them on. All of my kids got their chance, along with dozens of their friends. I directed for six years. Then a friend took over for longer than that. Then others stepped in. They’re still happening in our homeschool community. (In fact, auditions coincidentally are tomorrow for Twelfth Night.)

One thing our young actors learned was that Shakespeare is understandable. And he’s funny. And his plays make more sense when you see them acted out. Plus, they learned a few basics about acting, and projecting, and doing things for an audience. Mainly, they learned to think through what a character was thinking—why he was doing what he was doing—and finding a way to let the audience see that motivation. Sometimes—or nearly always—the character was not like them. That was probably valuable in itself.

So I hope we passed along a love for Shakespeare. I think we did.

During our trip to London last spring, a highlight for me was touring the Globe Theater, which is approximately where the original stood some centuries ago, and is built very much like the construction of the original, although this one is only a few decades old. They still perform there, in the open air. They mostly did that in the original, because they didn’t have many ways of lighting the stage at night. So they were open to the elements.

During our tour of the Globe Theater, they were prepping
a stand-in to take over the role of Kate
in The Taming of the Shrew

Our tour guide told a story about how that open air can affect what’s going on. Once, some years ago, a famous actor (I don’t remember who, but it was an actor whose name I have heard in my lifetime) was performing Hamlet in The Globe, and a pidgeon flew in and landed near him on the stage. This was at the point in the story when Hamlet was standing over Ophelia’s grave. Without missing a moment, the actor continued his lines while following the bird as it wandered around the stage. At last it hopped in on top of the startled, live actress playing the dead Ophelia. Hamlet hopped in after it—which he does at nearly that point in the script, and scooped it up, continuing his lines. And then, at the appropriate moment lets the bird fly free. I’ve looked for the line, not sure which it is. Possibly as Hamlet faces her brother Laertes, who blames him for her death, says,

I pr’ythee, take thy fingers from my throat;

For, though I am not splenetive and rash,

Yet have I in me something dangerous,

Which let thy wiseness fear: away thy hand. (Act V, Scene 1)

That memorable dramatic moment is something that can happen only in a live performance, and only in an outdoor theater. It’s like watching life.

Watching life is why we still love Shakespeare. It is something other species do not do—act out and observe various possibilities to try to determine a better course for a similar future life choice. And this is because humans rightly ask such questions as, “What habits does the human being need to lead a free, prosperous, truthful, and great life?”

Tyranny and Terror

I’ve been going through the online course offered by Hillsdale College called Public Policy from a Constitutional Viewpoint. Last week was week six. The lecture, given by Will Morrisey, professor emeritus of politics at Hillsdale, was on “Terrorism and Foreign Policy.”

Professor Will Morrisey
screen shot

What caught my attention was how he defined terrorism, using the concepts of tyranny and civilization. There are three interrelated ideas: political freedom versus tyranny, economic freedom versus coerced or controlled economy, and civilization versus savagery. That sounds like we’re describing the Spherical Model. 

The half-hour lecture is coherent, so it’s hard to pull out quotes without missing some of the flow of the argument (which is why I spent the day transcribing the whole thing, as a starting point, just to make sure I didn’t miss anything). So I recommend the entirety. [It may require signing up for the class in order to view, but there is no fee.] 

Here’s a key: as it says in the Declaration of Independence, “all men are created equal,” and “they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights”: “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Morrisey uses the word regime to mean, “the most authoritative form of ruling in a political community.” He calls the type of regime we have in America a democratic republic—democratic because it is not based on any right by birth to rule, but all citizens are equal; republic because, rather than directly ruling ourselves, we elect representatives. He also calls us a commercial republic, a term I hadn’t heard before:

In addition to being a Democratic Republic, we’re also a Commercial Republic. And on the same natural rights foundation. Commerce, or trade, is the practice of self-government in the realm of economic life. Commerce and trade operate by persuasion, not command and coercion. In both our political life and our political economy, Americans rule themselves by consent.

Consent isn’t mere assent, or acquiescence. Consent means reasoned assent. Whether it comes to selecting a congressman or buying a house, either way we’re comparing and contrasting; we’re thinking about the choice we’re about to make.

A regime consisting of a tyrant or of an oligarchy, commanding a military and a secret police, enforcing edicts on who is to rule us and on what we buy and sell, with most of the profits going to the tyrant or the oligarchs, would leave a people with very different habits of mind and heart than a people that had established a democratic and commercial Republic.

To live in a tyranny or an oligarchy is to have a different mental and moral environment. And the founders of tyrannical and oligarchical regimes know that.

Both political and economic freedom require consent, as opposed to coercion. This is background to the “what is terrorism” question. Here’s the simple definition:

Terrorism is savagery deployed as a technique by rulers or would-be rulers.

He adds more detail later, in describing the definition that has been with us since the Declaration of Independence.

Terrorism, a form of warfare and of ruling that refuses to distinguish ages, sexes, and conditions, aims at ruling not by reason, but by fear. Terrorists attack civilians. This is true of terrorist organizations that don’t control territory—the old Irish Republican Army, Al-Qaeda, for example—and those that do control territory, and indeed control sovereign states—the Nazis in Germany, the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, the Maoists in China. 

But more than that, terrorism is anti-civilian in a much deeper sense; terrorism attacks civility itself, the habits of self-government by reasons persuasion. It seeks command with no backtalk. And it does so because, whether it’s deployed against civilians and against civility, by the Nazis and Communists of yesterday, or the jihadis of today, it denies the principle of the American founding that “all men are created equal.”

Alternatively, it may deny that all those we call men are really men, really human at all.

His definition is broader than I would have used. I would have called the Nazi and Soviet regimes unjust wars, but their attempt at gaining territory was mostly military. However, where they purposely targeted civilians, including people living in their own countries, Morrisey and I agree on definition.

So, terrorism, committed by either a state or a group, is a war crime; it attacks all ages, sexes, and conditions. It is savage, not civilized. It intends to rule, not according to the will of the people, but by coercion. It intends to impose and enforce tyranny, both political and economic tyranny.

He notes that those who claim “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” are usually Americans—and they are Americans who fail to remember what their regime is: a way of protecting life, liberty, and property. More than that, terrorists who claim to be freedom fighters or soldiers of God are nevertheless terrorists if they fail to value life—and fail, even to view all humans as human.

He tells this story from shortly after 9/11.

An Arab television station aired a film in which a three-year-old girl was asked, “What are the Jews?” “The Jews,” she answered dutifully, “are apes and pigs.”

Such a catechism of contempt flows from the rejection of natural right. It forms habits of mind and heart consistent with the regime of tyranny. Tyranny enshrines not the natural rights to life, but the right to kill.

The Islamic version of terrorism is new, but tyranny—and its refusal to value all lives as equally human—has been around all along.

Either you value all lives equally, or you don’t. In America we do. One example Morrisey shares is about the natives of the continent:

When fighting the American Indian nations during and after the Revolutionary War, George Washington and the other founders distinguished between what they understood as the savage nations and the civilized ones. For example, they referred to the Cherokee Nation, the Chickasaws, the Choctaws, the Creek, and Seminole Nations as the five civilized tribes. Civilized Indian nations that were not allied with the British Empire against us were not the enemy. Some of them even fought on our side.

The early Americans settled land for these civilized tribes, gave them farming implements, and intended to live peaceably together. Morrisey acknowledged, later in the lecture, that there were unfortunately times the nation failed to follow its own policies, as in the Trail of Tears. It isn’t, of course, a matter of race the determines who is savage, but the behavior.

Early on, during Thomas Jefferson’s presidency, he faced, not terrorism, but piracy, sponsored by the Muslim states of Morroco, Algiers, and Tripoli. Jefferson was no isolationist when it came to keeping our trade lanes clear.

But Jefferson fought, not all Muslims, but those whose savage behavior was intended to ruin the democratic and commercial republic that was the fledgling United States of America.

While there were very few Muslims in America early on, we can see how the founders treated various religions in general.

There were few if any Muslims in the United States in the 1790s when he was president. But we do know the way Washington thought about religious congregations generally. Among his first acts as president were his letters to the major American religious congregations, his own Episcopalians, but also Presbyterians, Methodists, Catholics, Quakers, and perhaps most importantly Jewish congregations in Newport, Rhode Island.

Although European regimes had reestablished one or several types of Christianity as politically privileged, Washington’s America was having none of that. The government of the United States, he told all of them, “welcomes members of any religious confession insofar as they conduct themselves as good citizens of the United States.” [from “Letter to the Hebrew Congregation,” August 18, 1790]

Although many American protestants had looked with asperity at Catholics, and peoples around the world had persecuted Jews, Washington and the other founders cared only that citizens act like citizens, obeying the laws respecting the civil and natural rights of their fellow citizens. “No set of religious practices consistent with American constitutional law will be grounds for denial of civil rights by the American federal government.”

The simple way was the best way—don’t judge the religious people on their beliefs, but look at whether they live as good citizens. They need to support our laws, and value and respect the natural rights of their fellow citizens.

The lecture was, on the whole, about developing policy, so it ends with this:

Any American foreign policy must first understand what America is, what we stand for. Confusion on that basic point can only yield confused policy.

After clarifying who we are, the next priority for American citizens who think about our foreign policy must be to identify the primary enemies of our regime and rank them in order of danger…. In dealing with the terrorists we must take care not to exhaust ourselves, leaving our country vulnerable to more formidable powers.

The third and last priority is the strategic one. Setting a strategy, choosing allies, calibrating diplomatic, economic, and military actions to weaken and eventually defeat the terrorists. No simple rule can guide us in that strategy, because it’s a matter of practical judgment on the spot.

In such judgments we should take care to guard our sovereignty, our self-government, by recurring to the principles of the Declaration of Independence, which can and should both animate our actions and restrain.

So, to summarize, we need to have confidence in who we are: the people who believe in freedom, free enterprise, and civilization—because we have God-given rights to life, liberty, and property. We live in peace with those who believe those same things. Those who want to impose some other regime on us must be resisted to the fullest extent.