The Global Education Mess

We think that we have an education mess here in the United States with our education “blob”
spending five percent of GDP every year in return for what? Rising mediocrity. In Britain,
things are even worse because their public school system is a completely centralized, national
government system, whereas in the United States the government education system is rather more
decentralized with most of the money raised and spent at the state and local level.

Britain’s Prime Minister Blair is

launching
an education white paper to announce the government’s
policy to abandon the gold standard of left-wing education policy, the “comprehensive” secondary schools
set up in the 1960s to eliminate selection and streaming in secondary schools. The idea was to liquidate
the dual system of college-prep “grammar” schools and vocational “secondary modern” schools.
His government will introduce legislation to build a system of “self-governing independent state schools.”

It’s about time. As Alice Thomson observes, a funny thing has happened to Britain’s
elite since the introduction of “comprehensive” schools a generation ago. It used to be that the political,
cultural, and business elite had a lot of “grammar” school graduates. The grammar school was understood
to be the way for a bright youngster to climb out of poverty.
Margaret Thatcher, herself a grammar school graduate, “presided over a cabinet of grammar school boys.”

But now the British elites are dominated by graduates of private education. The Blair “Cabinet is full of them,
though ministers don’t brag about it.
Most forget to mention their schools in Who’s Who.”
Somehow, the comprehensive
school does not deliver children of modest means into the elite as the grammar schools used to do.
Perhaps that is why Blair’s political aide Alistair Campbell called them “bog-standard.” (A “bog” is
British schoolboy slang for the school toilets.)

Of course, facts means nothing. The British left believes in uniform one-size-fits-all education
like a sacrament. Nobody should be allowed to escape the government education system. So if
Tony Blair is really serious he could be in for a big battle — with his own party.

Now, what about doing something here in the United States about our disfunctional education system?

Black and White Shame on Race

There are two sides to the original sin of the United States of America: Negro slavery. There is the shame of white guilt for the centuries of oppression and slavery. But there is also, writes Shelby Steele, the shame of black inferiority. The great achievement of the civil rights revolution of the 1960s was for whites to own up to their guilt, and admit their fault. Ever since, blacks have provided an ever-present witness to the fact of white guilt. Steele writes that

in the ’60s whites finally took open responsibility for their racism despite the shame this exposed them to. And they knew that ever-present black witness would impose on them an exacting accountability (Bill Bennett, Vicente Fox, Trent Lott) for diffusing this evil. But, in fact, racism has receded in American life because whites, at long last, took greater responsibility for making it recede despite the shame they endured. And wasn’t it the certainty of shame, as much as anything else, that had kept them rationalizing their racism for so long, looking to the supposed inferiority of blacks to justify an evil?

But there is the other side to the question. Black inferiority. That is not something that can be eradicated by grandiose white plans and programs—wars on poverty and the miasma of diversity and inclusion. Black inferiority, once institutionalized in slavery can only be eradicated by black responsibility. For the black Shelby Steele, the helplessness of the black victims of Hurricane Katrina evokes the shame of inferiority, that after 40 years blacks are still indeed inferior, even if that inferiority was caused by the centuries of oppression.

Oppression or not, the way out of inferiority is the path of responsibility. But to admit responsibility means to give whites the power of witness over black shame.

[Our] open acknowledgment of our underdevelopment will clearly give whites a power of witness over us. It will mean that whites can hold us accountable for overcoming inferiority as we hold them to accountable for overcoming racism. They will be able to openly shame us when we are not fully at war with our underdevelopment, just as Bill Bennett was shamed for no more than giving a false impression of racism. If this prospect feels terrifying to many blacks, we have to remember that whites witness and judge us anyway, just as we have witnessed and judged their shame for so long. Mutual witness will go on no matter what balances of power we strike. It is best to be open, and allow the "other’s" witness to inspire rather than shame.

It is a peculiar fact of life that the way to strength is the way of surrender, the giving up of power. That is why all religions, transcendent or secular, are drenched in the blood of sacrifice, penitence, confession, and atonement. They represent mankind’s endless attempt to touch the hand of God.

Name-calling Lefties

We are all so well trained that we often forget just how much we are not
allowed to say. And that is odd, because our national educated and cultural
elite believes in free speech and abhors censorship.

Radio host Dennis Prager lists what happens to you when you
cross the line on free speech. You are called anti-education, or anti-woman, or
homophobic. It’s great if you are a lefty.

One of the more appealing aspects about being on the
Left is that you do not necessarily have to engage your opponents in
debates over the truth or falsehood of their positions.
You can simply dismiss your opponent as "anti."

You are anti-worker if you criticize unions, anti-education if you criticize
teachers, and so on.

Basically, if you disagree with the left, they have a way of shaming you with
some epithet that makes you sound like a neanderthal.

There’s a problem with this for the left, of course.

Because they have come to rely so heavily on one-word
dismissals of
their opponents, they have few arguments.

And for conservatives there is a payoff. It forces us
to really think through what we believe
and what we say before we write it and speak it.

The Fight for Economic Competence

It’s been well said that, if the parties of the right stand for anything, they stand for
economic competence in national affairs. Not for them the easy road of compassion and spending
other people’s money on vaguely defined “needs.” When you stand for compassion and sensitivity
you always have the excuse when things go south that you meant well. When you stand for
common sense and balanced budgets and good management, then you have to deliver. If you can’t
deliver, who needs you?

In this season of discontent the Bush administration had better make sure that its economic
policy delivers, as Larry Kudlow warns.
That means spending restraint and keeping tax rates low. American conservatives know all about the
importance of low marginal tax rates. But government spending restraint delivers big dividends too.

Four nations have undertaken a policy of spending
restraint in recent years, Chile, Ireland, Canada, and New Zealand. In three
of the four cases, the spending
restraint focused mainly not on spending cuts but just keeping year-on-year increases under control.
But any way it was done, the result was a vibrant, growing economy that suprised everyone.

If you really want a big payoff, then real spending cuts are the way to go. That’s what Ireland
did in the late 1980s, reducing government spending from 53.2 percent of GDP in 1987 to 40.6 percent
in 1990, according to William W. Lewis in The Power of Productivity.
The Irish economy, once a basket case, is now the toast of Europe (er, make that the envy of Europe). Irish GDP per head
in 2004 was $26,890, well ahead of the United Kingdom at $23,920. The surge has all taken place
in the last 15 years since the Irish cut government spending and lowered tax rates.

Battle of Trafalgar

Today, October 21, is a day that will live... in glory. It was this day two hundred years ago
that the British Royal Navy squadron under the command of Admiral Lord Nelson defeated the combined
fleets of France and Spain off Cape Trafalgar.

The victory was a great military triumph in operational terms, for it was a bold attempt to
suprise and confuse the French with unexpected and unorthodox tactics. As
Brett M. Decker writes:

Nelson aimed his ships strait at the middle of the enemy line to break the force
in two. It was a very risky strategy because the massive cannons were positioned on the sides
of their great ships. Heading straight ahead into the enemy line meant Nelson’s side-mounted
guns were useless and exposed Nelson’s fleet to pounding from the broadsides of his targets,
which were
stretched in a long line with their gun ports facing Nelson’s advance.

This tactic of suprise is today the basic modus operandi of all armies: to suprise and disorient
the enemy and keep moving faster than he is able to react.

But the battle had another consequence. It meant that Napoleon could not deploy the invasion
force he had assembled across the English Channel from Britain. Instead of becoming “French-occupied
Britain” the British entered upon a century of global dominance in which they exported their politics,
their culture, and their industry to the world.

One of the things that Napoleon would have done would have been to sweep away Britain’s common
law and replace it with the Code Napoleacute;on, writes
Tom Utley.

The trouble with Britain’s common law is that it is an organic growth, based not on
first principles, but on human nature and accumulated experience.

Tidy-minded continental rationalists have never liked that sort of thing.

But now, two hundred years after its victory against mindless
continental rationalism, Britain is succumbing to the embrace of the universal European superstate,
the centralized, one-size-fits-all European Union.

Was all that brilliance and all that glory two
hundred years ago for nothing?

Out of the Mouths of Babes

What really happened to those WMDs? And what really was the relationship between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein?
Oh, and how is Syria involved in the Iraqi insurgency?

Using publicly available intelligence and his home computer, 19-year-old Ryan Mauro, analyst for
“Tactical Defense Concepts and Northeast Intelligence Network,” has
dug out all the answers to these vexing questions. And he’s got a book out:
Death to America: The Unreported Battle of Iraq.

In an interview with Frontpagemag.com
he tells all the stuff that the MSM and the Democrats don’t want you to know. That there was long-standing
relationships between Iraq and Al Qaeda. That there was a long-standing arrangement between Iraq and Syria to
allow Saddam to shuttle his WMD into Syria when needed to escape inspection. That Syria is behind
most of the Baathist-led insurgency.

One of the problems with the CIA, he says, is that the intelligence community is addicted to classified
intelligence. When he gave a CIA contact some intelligence, the contact refused it.
“The CIA contact refused to pass the information along, saying that he’d
then be expected from then on to provide such high-quality information.”

Course, this kid’s only 19. What does he know?

Democrats Still Don't Get It

Democrats are working hard on making a comeback in 2006 and 2008. But it is not clear that
they really have something new to excite the voters.

As Jonah Goldberg writes, there may be a lot for Republicans to be gloomy about
right now, what with scandals as far as the eye can see, high gas prices, and a bulge in inflation.
But Democrats really haven’t come up with anything new. With the encouragement of the progressive
George Lakoff, they have gotten the idea that their problem is that they have been stuck
with the wrong metaphors. “Trial lawyers” should really be called “public protection attorneys.”
Good try, George. Your Philosophy in the Flesh was a great introduction to your day job, as a
professor of cognitive science at Berkeley. But the metaphor game in politics needs to start after
you have come up with some good ideas, not before.

It is Third Way analysts Bill Galston and Elaine Kamarck that have a better take on the Democratic problem. They argue in
The Politics of Polarization
(pdf here)
that the Democrat problem is too much metaphoric polarization and not enough
thoughtful analysis of the needs of the American people. They identify four myths that have stymied
the Democrats.

• The myth of mobilization is the belief that the key to Democratic victory is to energize the base and bring them to the polls in record numbers.
  
  
• The myth of demography is the view that long-term, ongoing changes in the U.S. population - such as an increase in the number of Hispanic voters and female professionals - will secure a Democratic majority for decades to come.
  
  
• The myth of language holds that the problem with the Democratic Party is not what it advocates, but rather how it speaks.
  
  
• The myth of prescription drugs is shorthand for the theory that the Party can win national elections by avoiding cultural issues, downplaying national security, and changing the subject to domestic issues such as health care, education, and job security in the post-9/11 world.
  

In other words, they are in a whole heap of trouble.