Arthur D. Hlavaty

Cop shit in our schools [HackEducation]

Thanx to Metafilter

40 years ago I was where our new Secretary of Education is now: wanting to smash the public school system. I felt that way because I thought it existed to serve the social order.

OK, that’s a smart-ass oversimplification, but one of the minor disastrous results of Nehemiah Scudder’s tie-breaking vote was to dig up John Green’s dim-witted post that begins with an endorsement of totalitarianism and ends not knowing the difference between stupid and ignorant.

I believed the libertarian oversimplification that the State gives everyone what the dictator or the majority wants but the Market has requisite variety. I seemed to be an example. Public school, where the dull normals set the pace, exacerbated my attention and anger issues, making me (and often my classmates) miserable. Then, an intellectually rigorous prep school kept me interested enough in learning that I was merely as unhappy as teenagers usually are, brought my oppositional defiant disorder down to challenging the dress rules, and enabled me to suck up huge wads of math, science, and literature.

I gave up my support for the voucher system when I realized it would turn the schools over to the kind of people who run insurance companies. That was typical of my abandonment of libertarianism. I still agree with Tim Leary that politics is so animalistic it should be done on all fours, but business is every bit as quadrupedal.

And education, like public health, is a public good that, alas, has to be centrally coordinated by an organization to which we give the monopoly of legitimized force. It is a public good because giving everyone a chance to develop their abilities (even if they’re dark-skinned or their families are poor or they start out not speaking English) will make things better for everyone.

As Uncle Sigmund said, the paranoid is never entirely mistaken. There are many people who really do want the schools to serve the social order. They want to protect the tender minds of the young from Godless heliocentrism or make them have lots of unwanted pregnancies (excuse me, I mean they want to indoctrinate them with the fantasy of Abstinence Only, which always winds up that way). Or they want the schools to make everyone equal instead of developing everyone to their fullest; some even believe that both can be done simultaneously, which is at least as feasible as lining up alphabetically by height. There are those who want the school draft to have no exemptions: Those with intellectual or financial resources must send their children into the system so that (in theory) they cannot be educated without educating everyone. The word I would use for that is “hostages.”

coding is not like school.

Thanx to andrewducker

Illinois schools are requiring students to hand over their Facebook passwords. Needless to say, this is purely intended to protect victims and is not in any way a totalitarian power grab. As they explain,

The main driver behind the new cyberbullying law is to minimize destructive behavior associated with it, including “antisocial behavior, such as vandalism, shoplifting, skipping [classes] and dropping out of school, fighting, using drugs and alcohol, sexual harassment, and sexual violence,”

And of course failure to respect the principal's authoritye

Law school should teach people to be lawyers.

Thanx to Chronicle

My public elementary school made me believe in vouchers, until I realized that would turn the schools over to the kind of people who run insurance companies. Diane Ravitch has been on a similar journey.

Thanx to Charles P. Pierce.

An honor student in Texas was jailed for missing too much school.

"But the judge said Tran's case was bigger than the individual situation of one student.

"'If you let one run loose, what are you gonna' do with the rest of 'em?,' said Judge Lanny Moriarty. 'Let them go too?'"

Maybe the Texas schools need a work-release program.

Jon Carroll tries to think of something good about No Child Left Behind. Fails.

ETA: And any conservative who supports it should be required to send his kids to public school.