Thomas Sowell: Inside American Education.

Yes, it's about american education, but it does touch on matters that we have experienced in europe and the United Kingdom. Moreover, it's by Thomas Sowell, so it has to be read, appreciated and praised for it's forthright, brilliant analysis, direct prose and unsparing conclusions, in any case.

All of the idols of modern education are assaulted, toppled and ground to dust: decline in educational standards, political correctness, the ideology that drives sex education, myths about race and achievement, inculcation of attitudes rather than training of minds, and much more.

The decline in standards is obvious and it is surprising that anyone disputes it.

"McGuffey's First Reader, for example, included diacritical marks to indicate the pronunciation of vowels and emphasis of syllables. McGuffey's Third Reader contained such words as "health", and "benighted" and asked such questions as "What is this species of composition called?" and "Relate the facts of this dialogue." McGuffey's Fourth Reader included section sof LOngfellow and Hawthorne, and the Fifth Reader from Shakespeare." (p. 7).

Moroever, these readers were those used in schools everywhere and for teaching all classes of students.

Next, academic achievement and training in thinking properly has been replaced by a set of dogmas and agendas: self-esteem, role models, and diversity. World-saving crusades are shamelessly promoted, uncritically and passionately. In the UK environmental issues are to be taught as fact, without any critical interaction with other views. Children are to be taught what to think, not how to think.

Next, there is sensitivity and "values". The West is t be loaded with guilt, all of the evils of the past are laid at the feet of Britain or any white nation. Sowell writes, "When racially and culturally heterogeneous groups are lumped together - whether as "Asians" in the United States, "blacks" in Britain or "visible minorities" in Canada - the ideological point is to depict them all as victims of whites, and their economic, educational, or other problems as being due to that victimization."(p. 83)

Blame the past, blame history, blame society, blame the West, blame the U.S., but do not take responsibility for your own life and strive to make a difference. This paralyses young men and women, aids them in assuming the posture of the victim, it removes them from the world of work, responsibility, family and a life of some kind of achievement.

Pyscho-babble: relevance, whole person, role models, self-esteem. Anything but the rigors of academic and intrellectual analysis and debate. Indoctrination replaces disciplined thinking, and psychological categories invade from all angles. Thus there is the rise of non-academic subjects, general studies, home economics and the like.

Sowell's concluding point is that all of the tools, the experience and the record of achievement are there for us in our history. There is something there to be retreived, amended, updated and pressed into service once again.

Virginia Postrel: The Future & Its Enemies (Free Press)


There are, according to Postral, two basic kinds of cultures, two incompatible outlooks: the dynamist and the stasist.

The stasist model is that of the technocrat, striving to manage the future, plan and ordain where technological developments may lead and predict and control outcomes. This is wedded to legislation and government "evaluation" of new ideas and developments and their regulation.

The dynamist model is more relaxed. The world is full of millions of inventive peoples, with just as many potential opportunities, new ideas and creative impulses. The dynamist wants to let them get on with it.

The Stasist wants to be able to plan, to determine direction, to lead and govern into the future. He or she wants a simple, clear future, not the messiness of uncontrolled development. The stasist is risk-averse and thinks in terms of legislation as the means to their end. Fundamentally it is an issue of knowledge. Can we know the outcome of our actions and impulses and those of millions of people? Well, not completely, so the stasist wants to deal with that risk. But more basic than that, the stasist vision is static - theirs is a plateau that one can attain to and maintain.

The dynamist is all of the opposite: organic, fosters growth and diversity, moves forward by trial and error and is dynamic and variable. Dynamists look for unintended consequences and adapt to them and then reap further benefits from them. It can cope with change and eagerly embraces it; it delights in unintended consequences and is basically adaptive. Dynamists allow individuals and groups to act on their own knowledge and to "play" with possibilities. Curiosity is the stuff of the dynamist, unbridled and free. The dynamist is not afraid of the unknown but moves into the future, with the hope of sorting out problems and issues as they come along.

Adam was a dynamist - he had to be. He was sent out into an undeveloped world with a task and that's all. The garden was his basic starting point and development was his task. Adam had to be a dynamist to survive.

God has placed in man an unquenchable desire to create and to invent and to change. The enemies of the future seek to stifle that, through their tendency towards risk-aversion, safety-first and a planned future. Environmentalism is one of the drivers of modern stasis thinking. The earth must be managed and saved. Outcomes must be assured.

Ultimately the plan is with God, and therefore we do not need a beaucratic class to plan outcomes for us. Governed by His word we can embrace a basically dynamist view of our calling and enjoy the richness and opportunity it affords us.

Jacques Barzun - 100th Birthday (30th November 2007)
The great french-american historian and polymath is 100 years old this month. But after 70 years teaching at the Columbia University, New York and dozens of books, his daily routine is still rigorous. The New Yorker in a good piece (here) tells us,

"Barzun is usually out of bed by 6 A.M. He brews coffee, reads the San Antonio Express-News, exercises for forty minutes, and heads down the hall to his study. After lunch, he dips into the manuscripts and books that people send him, answers letters, and takes calls from family members and friends. In the afternoon, he likes to read in the sunroom, whose white brick walls and black-and-white tiled floor accommodate without protest a mélange of armchairs and end tables of no particular style. But then all the furnishings in the house—including the art: Piranesi fortifications, Daumier scenes of Parisian life, Expressionist studies by Cleve Gray, and bright watercolors of flowers and plants by Marguerite—have an aesthetic compatibility that seems to issue more from accident than from design. Cocktails are at six-thirty (Barzun favors Manhattans); a light dinner follows, then a session with the New York Times. Barzun doesn’t watch TV and is usually in bed by nine-thirty."

Also see this piece in The New Criterion in praise of this great defender of western civilization and culture - HERE.

Read his "From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present" (2000)

Bjorn Lomborg: Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming.

* Polar bearings are not dying out - the population has grown form 5,000 in 1960s to 25,000 today (p. 3).

* Global Warming: there is no such thing as a world temperature.

* Global Warming: the cold places get hotter, more than the warm places.

* As heat deaths will increase, deaths from cold spells decrease. As more die of the latter than the former, there is a net benefit - a factor of sevenfold actually. p18

*The cost of carbon reduction (a la Kyoto) is vastly more than making reasonable adjustments to our cities - lighter colour roads, white buildings which reflect heat rather than absorb it.

* The Al Gore crowd are motivated by an evangelistic zeal to save the world.

* CO2 and Temperature seem to go hand in hand, but past records show that temperature change proceeds CO2 level changes!

* The "little ice age" during the last millenium mean that eskimos landed their kayaks in Scotland, so fra south did the ice come.

* Kilimanjaro is losing its ice cap - but not due to Global Warming - rather due to a drier climate.

* Artic melting will not drastically affect sea levels because ice already displaces the water.

* Al Gore has vastly over exaggerated the sea level impact by a factor of 20 . The standard scientific levels are less than 1 ft. As this will not all happen in an afternoon, we have a few decades to prepare. In fact we have until 2100.

* Antartica is not melting. The focus has been upon one peninsula area, where some melting has occured. But the rest, by far the largest area, is actually cooling.

* Penguin populations are just fine.

* Any land impact of rising sea levels, are all managaeble through careful planning. The cost of preparation should this happen is much less than the costs of Kyoto.

* Extreme weather. There is little correlation with GW claims.

* Economic tornado loss in the US has been declining since 1950.

* The key is to bring wealth and, with it, health to the poor parts of the world - Kyoto will hamper progress towards this goal.

* Since 1961 world population has doubled, but food production has tripled.

* In 1950 50% of the world's population was starving, today it is 17%, and the prospect is just

2.9% by 2050.

* Water: there is availble 5,300l per person per day. The average EU citizen uses 566l/day and the average american 1,442l/day. This increased usage has vastly improved human welfare.

* Kyoto- driven government schemes will reward those who follow the current "doctrine", not the innovators.

* IPCC approaches want us to move away from consumption, but this will work against the betterment of the world.

This is a balanced and measured book that calmly and cautiously dismantles the Gore-Kyoto myth, which one day we will all look back upon and wonder how we were taken in...