Creative Writing, and Complaints about the National Curriculum in Britain

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A recent post in The Guardian* reports that a lot of British authors plan to write a letter to the Ministry of Education, complaining about how kids are taught to write.  The essence of the complaint (see here) is that children (of roughly middle-school age, or a little younger) are encouraged to use more colorful words instead of the basic words they would normally use.  One of the authors who is planning to protest is Cecilia Busby.

[She] said her concerns about the teaching of creative writing were sparked a few years ago, when she was reading out a description of her character Sir Bertram Pendragon from her novel Frogspell to a year six class at a Devon primary school. “He is a gruff, burly knight with a deep voice and a large moustache who also happens to enjoy whacking his enemies with his big sword,” she told the class, only to be stopped by the teacher, who told her that “the word ‘big’ is one of the banned words in our classroom”.

This article got me really frustrated; the problem seems to be that modern demands of excellence on the part of teachers at all levels pushes them toward mechanical ways of increasing the 'excellence' of their students' performance.  Using bigger, more excellent words is one of these.  Remember you heard it here folks: the length of a word is not a measure of its value in the spot where you've put it.  It must be exactly the right word, in your opinion, for the meaning you want to convey.  After you have written for a while (ideally a year or two,) you develop your own idiom.  It's absolutely no use writing with words someone else would choose, because it becomes no longer your own voice.

To go back to how teachers respond to pressure to improve their teaching: this seems definitely a contrast from how my own teachers responded to pressure to improve exam results.  We practiced more, we wrote more, we read more interesting books, we showed up on weekends to do additional classwork.  But these days, there is a cadre of "improvementators" who tell teachers how to get better results.  There are improvementators for everything:

• How to get more people to look at your BLOG!!!'
• How to get more traffic to your website!!!
• How to expose your product to more people, using your FACEBOOK PAGE!!!
• How to sell more cars at your used car business by pestering people on their cellphones!
• How to get tenure at a small private college by brown-nosing the ADMINISTRATION!
• How to sell your textbook by pandering to college professors!
• How to kick-start your law practice, by using unusual, completely legal, but innovative techniques!

So some improvementator in Britain has got all the teachers asking the kids to use bigger, more flowery words.  That idea must have had its roots in some successful teacher telling his or her kids to spend a little time using just the right word for the job.  "You've used 'big' here.  How big?  Just slightly larger than usual?  Then say, a large thing.  A lot bigger?  Enormous, perhaps?"

Of course, this approach makes perfect sense; kids get lazy about writing, and need to be reminded that they should write as if they care about what they write.  One way is to have them think about adjectives and adverbs, which are the first line of attack on bland writing.

But I can just imagine this —successful— teacher being approached by her managers to help her fellow-teachers be a little more successful.  He or she becomes forced to become an improvementator.  Of course, the other teachers adopt a cartoon version of her technique, and ask their kids to use the most outrageous adjectives and adverbs they can dream up, using, of course, the inevitable Thesaurus.  Just be absolutely clear: I have nothing against a Thesaurus.  Some of my best friends are Thesauri.

If you watch TV (and of course you do!  We can help you watch MORE TV!!!) you will have seen millions of advertisements that will convince you that all these people are following some improvementator's recommendations.  Pharmaceutical companies probably have ways of suggesting how to use their drugs to increase a physician's profit, though of course that sort of thing is forbidden by the famous Hippocratic Oath, which doctors do not take anymore!

Writing well is not a simple thing.  I am by no means an expert, but thinking hard about what worked for me, I can think of the following ways in which my writing was affected for the better (in my humble opinion, of course).

(1) Read a lot.  A large volume of reading, of a variety of styles, gives you options for your own writing.  You get useful was of sorting out your own preferences; what works in what way.  Reading is the single biggest thing a good writer will have done.

(2) Write a lot of letters, and write carefully.  Personal letters get read and appreciated.  Write anywhere where they care about what you say, enough so that you have an incentive to write carefully.  I reviewed stuff for Amazon, and I had such a great time that I started writing.  I also joined a classical music appreciation list, and wrote and wrote, and of course, read a lot too.

(3) Take your writing exercises seriously.  Writing exercises are of various kinds: short response, long response, medium response, term papers.  Each one requires different skills, and you learn to pay attention to different aspects of what you're writing.

(4) Read older literature.  Modern writers use such careless language that you learn bad habits.  You can always write 'modern' if you want to; you don't need to have models of modern writing.

(5) Share your writing with good friends who write, and make friends with those who write.  They will often give you a good breakdown of what you do well, and what you do that they don't like.  It's up to you to see how much of what they tell you is worth responding to.  Part of being a good writer is to take criticism gracefully and objectively, and choosing what parts of it you need to take seriously.  (Don't make friends cynically; it is cruel to make friends with just one purpose in mind.)

(6) Read your own writing critically.  Notice what parts of it are clear, and what parts are screwed up.  Fix up the parts that need fixing.  If necessary, rewrite the whole thing.  This polishing up is invaluable.

That's about as much as I can think of, that would make sense as advice to very young people.  It is as senseless to expect every teacher of writing to be equally good at it as to expect the students in every writing class to be identical.  What makes a group of young people care about their writing is highly variable, and a school teacher can only be expected to do the basics of encouraging kids to avoid obvious mistakes and manifestly bad writing habits.  Ultimately a good writer creates him- or herself.

(7) To be a good writer, you must care about something, and write what you care about.  You must have the tools of writing ready when that moment comes.  If you care about the world around you, you read about the world, and you write about the world, and you examine your writing for effectiveness.  If you don't care about the world, what's the point in writing?  This is why it is hopeless to write just to make money.  Authors who set out to make money by studying what sort of writing makes people want to buy your writing, simply bursting with cleverness, are ultimately disgusting, and I wish they would stop writing.  This is what is behind my recommendation of reviewing products for Amazon.  If you've bought something from Amazon, I expect that it is something you were interested in, and you're going to be interested in whether or not it was worth the price, and how it could be improved.  (Never buy something if you don't like it.)  So write about it!  It's a natural.

(8) Observe.  I observe people, and I write what I see.  I'm not sure how much this will work for someone who desperately wants to be more commercial.  There are probably Improvementators out there who can help anyone become a more commercial writer, but I'm not one of them.  To me, a good writer is someone who has good ideas to write about, and can convey those ideas effectively.  Anyone who desperately wants to write, without ideas about what to write, is just a tragedy.

The world desperately needs people who write clear, attractive prose without resort to gimmicks.  Creative writing is important, but so are books that explain things to people, such as How to Change Your Door Locks.  Or, How to Cook Spaghetti and Meatballs.  I mean, just because you can cook doesn't mean you can write a good article explaining how to do it.  There is very likely an improvementator who claims to make any cook into a brilliant author of recipes (and in the case of cookery, it is just barely possible that it might be true), but the best idea is for a cook and a writer to collaborate, to write an excellent book on cooking, which neither one can do as well as that on their own.

Arch

[To be continued; we're going looking for carpeting for our playroom.]

*Formerly The Manchester Guardian,  but I expect they guard a wider region than just Manchester these days.

Left-Wing Politics, Labor, Socialism and All That

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A lot of people, many of them our friends, are baffled about politics in America.  Fear not: people across the world are just as baffled, except for truly ignorant people who know little of what went on in the past century or so.  For them, this is the first time ever that unemployment has been so high, the first time ever that Islamists are getting into their Jihads; for them this is the first time ever that Washington is going furiously at a war that we have no chance of winning, really.

Across the Atlantic, the British Labor Party is wondering what they can do to oppose the momentum of the Conservative party, which has currently got a huge majority in Parliament.  Their problem is a little different from the problems of the US Democratic Party, but in some ways, they’re the same.

Right after the Big Stock Market Crash of 1931, and the Second World War, a senator from Wisconsin started up a witch-hunt in Congress to eliminate Communism, and supporters of Communism, from the US.  This was actually just a stunt to get himself reelected, but it got everyone just as excited back then as Iran-Contra, and Watergate, and other sideshows we’ve had more recently.  (You’ve probably never heard of these, but they were pretty exciting back in the seventies and eighties.)  Soon after people got tired of this fellow (McCarthy was his name), and the President shut down the Congressional hearings, college students across US, sick and tired of the never-ending Vietnam War, began to think that Communism wasn’t such a terrible thing, and began to look seriously at Socialism, as a less-extreme alternative.

In wartime, authoritarianism does tend to flourish, and the Vietnam generation was intensely hostile to the WW2 generation, which was in charge at that time, and against all the concentrated wealth of Big Business whose misdeeds were becoming known as people began to look for pollution, poisoning, unsafe vehicles, unfair trade practices, and miserable working conditions in US factories.

This was our generation.  Inevitably, once the excitement of being young and intensely romantic faded, and once most of us got well-paying jobs, we quietly gave up being so concerned about the underdog, because most of us were not underdogs any longer.  Instead of worrying about the working conditions of the working class, we began to worry about our own lives, which should have been a lot more comfortable that they were, because after around 1980, all the money seemed to be headed towards the coffers of Big Business once again, and middle class taxes were rising, while the taxes of the really wealthy were actually falling.  In the chaos of the scramble to control the runaway Republican Party and its agenda of undoing the controls that the Democrats had put in place, and fertilizing the ground for Big Business and the super wealthy to scrape up still more of the national wealth, we forgot that the main concern of the true Socialist was the welfare of the working people, not the Middle Class, which has always been the pets of the 1%.  The Middle Class historically has sided with the Wealthy Class, not because its interests lies with the Wealthy Class, but because it is too afraid to side with the workers.

In the US, presently, we have the highly amusing situation that the working folk have been deceived into thinking that the Middle Class is its enemy, that taxes are bad (even if they pay for foodstamps, those horrible things that buy poor people nutritious, tasteless, low-grade food), and Social Security is the invention of the Devil (even if you have no other recourse if you’re unemployed).  The working class has forgotten that, even with the high taxes of the seventies, everyone was much happier, including the upper-crust.  Everything worked: the utilities, the roads, the bridges, the schools.  Now, despite lower taxes, nothing works.

In Britain, a country where Socialism of a limited sort had worked for several decades, Tony Blair, a right-winger within the Labor Party, completely sided with the US in its wrong-headed invasion of Iraq, which will be up there with some of the biggest mistakes in military history, not to mention one of the most unjust and illegal wars ever conducted by any nation.  Tony Blair was nothing but a Conservative mole within the Labor Party, and brought the Labor Party to its knees, to lose massively to the Conservatives in 2015.  In this article, a British political writer tries to anticipate what would happen if the most credible leader of the Labor Party (someone who plays a role in British politics analogous to that which Bernie Sanders plays in the US) was elected the leader of the LP.  (In the British system, the elected leader of a party becomes the Prime Minister, if the party wins a majority of the seats.)

The Brits, too, have had their Labor Party become a little too middle class, and afraid to demand the sorts of things that Labor has traditionally insisted upon, and in fact won, and which made life in Britain good for most Brits, and possible for many Scots, since Scotland and Northern England has long been the home of the poorer folks of Britain.  (It is this long tenure of Conservatives in Parliament that has driven Scotland to desperation, and to agitate for independence.  The Scottish National Party (the SNP) has won something like 15 seats in Parliament, an unprecedented thing, which signals the Scottish frustration with the Labor Party.

Who knows what will happen in 2016, if the Democrats continue to be afraid of making traditional left-wing demands, and stay home?  We must realize that the GOP is actually a minority party, even though it makes such a good showing during elections.  We must find courageous candidates for congress, and we must either convince Hillary Clinton not to be afraid of the right-wingers, and to stand for the working class, or we must elect Bernie Sanders, and support him strongly when he wins the elections.  Keeping US politics sane, and the US government working to keep the country running is not a one-time thing.  The One Percent can manage even if no government department works properly.  They're fine if the schools have no teachers, there are no policemen keeping the peace, and roads and bridges aren't maintained, and interest on college loans are through the roof.  They can go to private schools, and their private planes and SUV's can handle even the worst potholes.  (At least, so they think.)  For the poor, and the rest of us, government must work perfectly, or life is unbelievably hard.  The One Percent doesn't need government.  The rest of us do.

Arch


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Body Shaming

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This (body shaming) is a strange phenomenon, both that it happens, and that it is taken so seriously.  It does happen in other countries, but it is shaken off with a shrug; if someone was totally out of shape, he or she would be hurt, but, well, they know they're out of shape most of the time, so it is hardly news.  It is always easy to shrug off an insult that you've anticipated.

There is body shaming, and then there is some of this garbage that you read.  It is so off the scale that one must think of the perpetrator as a pathological case.  For instance, read some of the posts on Pink's page: "Shut up u uptight fat butch dyke."  This person doesn't care about Pink's shape; he or she simply dislikes her.  Is it necessary to take offense from the pointless post?  One of the things that amaze me is that people take offense at the maniacal utterings of raving madmen.
"Did you hear what he called me???"
"Yes, sweetheart, but he's crazy."
"But it makes me feel terrible!  What if some little kid heard it, and learned those naughty words?  Just because he's crazy doesn't mean he gets to insult me, does it?"
Yes, that's what it means to live in a world where crazy people are not all shut up behind soundproof walls.  Part of being civilized is to take some shit from random loonies.  Let's get over it, as a society.  Sticks and stones, people.  What happened to sticks and stones, that admirable response to verbal abuse?

I regret that we're becoming a nation of verbal abuse sissies.  Just as we don't allow our kids to start howling when a kids makes a face at them (and yes, I know: some of our kids do howl if anyone makes a face at them.  They are not cut out for middle management) we can't allow ourselves to be bothered by so-called body shaming.

Now, if someone in public office made a disparaging reference to someone's physique, and if that physique was not objectionable on public interest grounds, e.g. someone who was so thin that they fall through a storm sewer grating, or is so fat that they obstruct a squad car chasing a felon, then we have a problem.  If people are so unhealthily out of shape that it becomes necessary to remark on the fact as a matter of policy, e.g. we will have to permit a medical insurance company to refuse to give you an insurance policy, then the remark becomes reasonable.  Otherwise, public officials should not indulge in what is being called body shaming.  But if a private individual remarks that someone is overweight, it probably falls under their freedom of expression rights.  If the individual who makes the remark is manifestly unbalanced, it probably falls under the heading of Utterings of an Idiot.  In my opinion, such remarks must be ignored, not publicized.  Get over it, people.  We have very high standards of physical fitness now, and if you're out of shape, someone is going to call you out.  I'm out of shape, and every day I take a few minutes to mentally prepare myself for the possibility of being called a fat so-and-so.  If I can do it, so can you.

Arch

New Highly-Structured Teaching Systems: Direct Instruction, and CT3

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Brace yourselves.  New teaching methods are coming to a school near you.

In a recent post linked to from FaceBook, (Teacher Blasts Popular Classroom Training Program) a teacher describes her run-in with the No Nonsense Nurturer Program, a method for supposedly making teachers more effective.  Before you read the article, which is strongly critical of the coaching technique, you should give a little time for reflection on the problems —some of them perhaps unstated— that the method is designed to address.

I believe that part of the problem with grade school classrooms (and any sort of classroom) today is that students are not accustomed to classroom discipline.  This is just the basic behavior of being quiet and attentive in the classroom, respectful to the other kids, and respectful to the teacher.  Parents may pride themselves on their child being a lot less disruptive than some of the other children, but most people are not aware that kids are a lot worse behaved —in almost every school in the country— than they were a couple of decades ago.  A lot worse.  Some of the parents were probably themselves pretty badly behaved in class, and have probably forgotten what assholes they were as kids, and how much pleasure they got out of torturing particular teachers.  But trust me: modern classrooms are a lot worse.

Ignorant parents are quick to blame the teachers for this lack of classroom discipline.  The teacher is the first and easiest scapegoat anyone can find, and the school administration has also learned that blaming the teacher is a winning strategy from a lot of points of view.  Washington, too, has bought into the axiom that weak teachers should be removed from the classroom, and being unable to maintain discipline in the classroom is a major component of perceived “teacher weakness.”

Now, some people are brilliant at dominating a class, and keeping them on task, no matter how many unruly elements there may be in it.  Such teachers rejoice in the exercise of their charisma, and their ability to get students to do what the teacher wants them to do, and amazingly, students often love these sorts of teachers; it’s almost as though the students want to be given limits to how silly they’re allowed to get.  Much is made of this phenomenon, and a lot of classroom praxis revolves around this empirical observation.  But I think educationists over-emphasize how far this goes; the very best teachers do not dominate the class so utterly.  The older the students are, the less the Iron Lady method is appreciated, and the less it produces the desired results.

Though no one has come out and said this, the No-Nonsense Nurturer Program looks very like a sort of industrial approach to making every teacher a No-Nonsense teacher.  It is uncomfortable for the teacher at first, and the training phase is acutely awkward, as the article describes.  But given the fact that students do not learn a lot of discipline at home, the No-Nonsense teacher can quickly (and figuratively) slap the silliness out of his or her class, and get them on task, and keep them there, without pandering to their constant need for positive reinforcement that they seem to bring with them from pre-school.

Over thirty years, I too have been conditioned by my students to constantly give them little figurative gold stars for every little thing, which an undergraduate in Japan, for instance, would do as a matter of course.  American kids have grown up in an atmosphere of constant praise  —some of them; others, of course, live in a home environment of almost continual verbal abuse and demeaning, and both kinds of home background seem to result in the kids needing constant positive feedback from the classroom teacher— and sometimes they actively and explicitly elicit praise from their teacher, such as, “See how nicely I did my homework?  Look, there’s colored ink!!!”  Some teachers, such as the author of the article, are uncomfortable with being firm with a disruptive student.  From her description of how much she hated being firm with the kid, we see just how much of an elementary school environment has become the expected thing even in a middle- or a high-school classroom.  Can you think back to your own high school days, and recall an annoying kid who deserved to be squelched just so that the lesson could continue?  (Of course, some lessons are boring, and we’re rooting for the disruptive kid!  But, in hindsight, should a teacher be wasting her energy putting up with that sort of crap, or should she better spend her time doing what is expected of her?)

Well, even if we quarrel with the training program (and that’s the only way you can train a bright undergraduate into a drill sergeant), the fact remains that [1] once the training has been accomplished, that teacher is going to run a much more efficient classroom, and that classroom is going to achieve a lot more than they would otherwise, and [2] very quickly, the students will —if the empirical observation of the effectiveness of disciplining students is reliable— come to terms with the strict discipline, and learn to love it.  Or, at least, tolerate it pretty well.  Students will begin to learn that the firmness on the part of the teacher does not signal a deteriorating relationship, and that class time is precious, and there isn’t a lot of time for boosting the fragile egos of each and every kid in class.

Families are less and less capable of training kids to be realistic in their demands on interpersonal relationships with adults outside the home, and things will never improve.  Parents are just too busy being productive on behalf of their employers (who must have been trained in a similar No-Nonsense Nurturing Program for Bosses).  So classroom discipline will have a brief resurgence, until parents decide that it has to be jettisoned, because children are really too fragile for any sort of discipline!

Catholic Schools are much more effective at maintaining classroom discipline, because a nun can be firm with a child without being criticized, because of course, she has the authority of the Almighty behind her, unlike a teacher in a public school, who is, after all, just a poorly-paid flunkie of the school board.

The earphone sets, and the coaching team at the back of the classroom is probably a bit much, but it is just the sort of training scheme that you would expect from the industrial approach to all things that obtains in the latter 20th, and early 21st century.

Arch

Jef Rouner Explains Why Some Statements Are Wrong, and Not Opinions

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I'm not sure who Jef Rouner is, or even whether it's a he or a she, but they sure write a funny article.

Some people, s/he says, make certain statements, and claim that because it is an opinion, it cannot be wrong.

Wrong.  Jef Rouner goes through all sorts of reasons why such statements could still be wrong, or even when they're opinions, they could still be not worthy of any sort of respects, and just a hair this side of wrong.  When reasoning with incomplete data, not-wrongness is no longer black and white; you can be not wrong, or you can be wrong in various degrees.

I have my own opinions, or rather, points of view, regarding the subject.

First of all, a conclusion from various premisses is not an opinion.  If it has been made according to logically correct rules, then it will be right, otherwise it will be wrong.  To make a statement like "It is widely accepted that Democrats raise taxes.  I don't want higher taxes, therefore, in my opinion, nobody should vote for Democrats, and anyway, that's my opinion, so you can't say I'm wrong" are so incredibly wrong that one cannot even begin to explain why to someone who is not ready to listen to a long story.  Firstly, Democrats have raised taxes, but so have Republicans.  (Check out how high Reagan raised taxes.)  Secondly, this opinion is presented in the form of an argument, signaled by the use of "therefore".  Still, such a statement should simply be altered to say that, in the opinion of this person, people should all vote the way he or she would like them to, regardless of their personal preferences.

Jef also points out that to express the opinion that "David Tennant was the best Dr. Who" is not justifiable from anyone who has not seen episodes of the TV series from before 2005 (where, presumably, David Tennant would have had stiff competition from other incarnations of Dr. Who).  We're all familiar with close acquaintances who have outrageous opinion, who either have not seen evidence contrary to their beliefs, or have deliberately closed their eyes to such evidence.  I think we can all agree that the opinions of those sorts of people can be assessed as just plain wrong, even if they are opinions.  Read the article; it is beautifully written.

Arch

The Greek Crisis

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This might not completely float your boat, but here are two articles that give a little insight into the Greek economic crisis.

The first one, titled "11 Things About the Greek Crisis you Need to Know" tries to explain what is going on from the point of view of a Eurozone Agnostic; in other words, somebody who thought the Eurozone was a bad idea from the start.  Given that, he tries to explain how various interest groups are reacting (and over-reacting) in ways that make sense to them.  This is excellent reading, because we need to know what the assumptions of these people are, before we decide on our own positions.  The Greek Crisis is important to all of us, and the article goes some distance towards explaining why.

The second article "Thomas Piketty Explains the Greek Crisis" I have not read yet, but the comments accompanying it declare that the author has strong feelings about income inequality, which in my book means that he can't be all bad.  OK, I just hopped over and read a summary of it.  It is a report of an interview of Thomas Piketty which was conducted in German, and someone who has translated it into English is still working out how to publish it without violating copyright laws.

The whole business has to do with the mechanics of modern post gold standard economics.  There are a number of things that go up and down with time: bond prices, gold prices, stock market, and exchange rates, not to mention rates of inflation and tax rates.  All these things are given symbols, such as x and y and t, and Economists have equations that say what each of these things should do: go up, go down, etc, depending on the values of the other things.

The relationships are not rigid; they are somewhat fluid.  Economists however go on the assumption that the relationships are a lot more rigid that the rest of us believe, and they have observed how, for example, a poor state such as Kentucky, manages to stay above water, while still owing tons of money to a rich state such as, for example, Massachusetts.

Within a single country, the first article explains, it can all be managed.  The debt is never paid off, but we carry on.  Between countries, there is inflation, and the currency is devalued, and we carry on.  But with a single currency, devaluation is not possible, so the country that is under-performing gets screwed into the ground.  Read the article; it helps you get your head around all this sort of thing, using classical economics.

Many countries will never be able to be the economic powerhouses that the industrial countries are.  This does not mean that agriculture should be completely abandoned and industry must be the only way.  (The industrial nations will be least happy with that eventuality; after all, everyone has to eat.)  Even in the US, agricultural states always have deficits relative to the industrial states, hence the need for government subsidies.

The second article is even more interesting.  Mr. Piketty points out that Germans, who are being hard-assed about the lending, is a country that has never paid its debts.  It was forgiven enormous proportions of its debt by international agreement, and paid of the remaining debt using a variety of methods which are not available to Greece right now, because, I suppose, we cannot tinker with the currency.  (After this, the Brits will never agree to using Euros.)

One of the available solutions is to simply and painlessly encourage Greece to leave the Common Market, and give them their own currency, and give them massive international aid.  Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Greece are also in trouble, and the same prescription might be necessary for them as well.  However, the writer of the first article opines, the other countries of the Eurozone will make an enormous fuss about how Greece will leave the common market, to make an example of Greece to scare Ireland and Spain and Portugal (and Italy) into better fiscal behavior.  But better fiscal behavior is really not possible.  The Common Market (a.k.a the Eurozone) is a lovely idea in the abstract, but in practice, the economies are too unequal to be able to compete in the same league.

Arch

Myths About the Confederacy

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In a recent post: Why do people believe myths about the Confederacy? --possibly an article in the Washington Post-- James Loewen presents a persuasive case for the view that the Confederate States have won a propaganda war after they had lost the Civil War.  This article is worth reading by every American.  Some of the pseudo-facts mentioned by Mr. Loewen are so deeply imbedded in the minds of Southerners that they have now become accepted as facts, and are even taught to middle schoolers in many states.  I'm going to summarize some of the points in that article for the busy executive (and the slow reader).

A.  Many southern states voted to secede to retain slavery, rather than to protect States' Rights.
In fact, Mr Loewen argues--and presents evidence-- that it was the Northern States that were fighting for States' Rights, to not enforce a law that required runaway slaves to be returned to their owners.  This was a Federal Law, which the Northern States opposed.  The Southern States wanted no part of individual states voting to not enforce this law.  The specific documents Mr Loewen quotes make very interesting reading, especially a paragraph in the Texas declaration of secession, which very clearly states that African Americans did not participate in the struggle for independence from the British (I'm paraphrasing), and therefore did not deserve to be given any rights other than those of slaves.

It is not our intention to aggravate the hostile feelings of the African American community at this difficult time, but such feelings can only be made even worse by the attempts of certain Southern politicians (and Southern Society, generally) to whitewash the events of the Civil War.

B.  Support for the Confederates in certain states, e.g. Maryland and Kentucky, was not as great as one may infer from the number of war monuments in those states.
Mr. Loewen points out that visitors, and even residents --and certainly children-- in those states are led to believe that those states supported the Confederate cause.  Perhaps it was that Confederate politicians and families in those states were just richer, and could afford more monuments.  That would make sense, especially if they were the ones who had the benefit of slave labor.

C.  To this date, history texts are written in such a way as to obfuscate the true reasons for the Civil War.
Children are taught by texts that subtly suggest that the Civil War was a war of independence to reject Northern Tyranny (which it might have been, in the view of some), and that the South was struggling to preserve State rights, and not fighting for the preservation of slavery as such.  To my mind, this point of view goes way beyond placing a gentler, more generous take on the motives of Southern Politicians, after their having suffered a defeat.  This goes way beyond the mental adjustments that might be necessary for healing a fractured union.  It presents the Northern Unionist forces as aggressors, and the Northern cause as unjustifiable.  It also falsely reports the extent to which there was popular support for the war even among states that formed part of the Confederacy.   Maryland, for instance, was divided on the issue, and from what I understand from the facts Mr Loewen reports, a Confederate general extorted what amounts to tribute from the residents of a certain Maryland county (or municipality), in order not to raze the town to the ground.  Well, it is war, after all.  But it shows to what extent the citizens of Maryland must have supported the Confederacy: not very much.

Arch's Summary:
The way certain politicians --notably those who support flying the Confederate Flag in State Capitols, and so forth-- understand their history might flow from a deliberate intention to deceive, and from cynical political motives.  Or it could be from having been lied to by generations of Southern elders and teachers, the victims of a massive and deliberate campaign of disinformation.  Are they the liars, or were they simply lied to?  At any rate, kids in Texas are learning lies, and since Texas determines which texts are used in schools all over the US, kids across the US are learning lies in school.

[Added later]

However, we have to face the fact that the stated reasons for the Southern leadership to go to war were numerous.  What the Confederate Flag (sometimes called the St. Andrews Flag) stands for, and stood for, is very vague, and hardly a simple thing.  Over time the meaning of any emblem can change, and in different ways for different people, and the Confederate Flag is no exception.  This article about the Confederate flag, also in the Washington Post, seems to have a good overview of the subject.

In addition, talking about fairness, specifically, certain critics point out that it was far easier for the North to abandon the historically pro-slavery stance which was common in the 18th century in American colonies than it was for the South, simply because the North had mineral and energy resources which the South did not have, and could use coal and steam to generate wealth without the use of human labor.  Nevertheless, as the article on the Flag (linked above) points out, some Southern leaders were scornful more than a century ago at the rhetoric of their fellows about the reasons for going to war.  Call a spade a spade, and an ax an ax, they said; most of us were pretty clear that we went to war in defense of preserving the institution of slavery.  But to keep harping on that fact is, in the view of the South, somewhat self-serving on the part of Yankees and their descendants.

The fact remains that history books must be written in clearer language, to include all the causes for the Civil War, distinguishing between the main causes, and more technical reasons, so that young people can draw their conclusions about which reasons were the material ones, and which ones were mere excuses (and bear in mind that often in war, some stated reasons are only excuses).  Clear documentation, in this case, is essential, and direct quotes extremely helpful, and better than explanations.

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