"The Tea Party is Breaking the GOP" -- The Republican Incompetence Caucus

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In a recent opinion piece, political commentator David Brooks, with whom I tend to agree a lot of the time, took a look at the unraveling of the Republican Party.  The GOP probably thinks that the Democrats are universally rejoicing at the confusion within their ranks, but while most liberals (including those Democrats who continue to be liberals, and you know who you aren't) can't help feel some satisfaction in how the GOP is now suffering, after all the hostility it has directed towards the Democrats and the President, the fact of the matter is that the old Republican Party, despite some of the scum that infested it in times gone by, also was home to many perfectly sane and decent politicians, including the late State Senator John Heinz, Olympia Snow, and a few others who served their constituents well, as well as the entire USA.  But of late, Republican policy has changed from conservatism and obstructionism to viciousness and recklessness.  They have stopped serving the interests of conservatives across the USA, and instead have focused on very specific goals based only on how much those goals help their funders, namely Big Business, and how much of those goals fire the imagination of the most ignorant and bloodthirsty among them, and which goals are likely to rile up liberals the most, such as opposition to gun control, and Planned Parenthood, and Evolution.  As far as Evolution is concerned, most Republicans do not care.  But they know liberals do care.  In my humble opinion, they do it just to upset us.

Brooks's main thrust is that the Tea Party, and the leadership among the younger conservatives, began to go wrong when they took it into their heads to portray themselves as revolutionaries.  What made the Republicans most attractive to their political base was the fact that they slowed down change to what they thought of as a speed at which it could be done advisedly, with all careful consideration, instead of (what they saw as) the headlong race that Democrats wanted to adopt.

But admittedly, that was not sexy.  They wanted to romanticize their conservatism, and the Conservative Press embraced that with open arms, and between them the Tea Party and Fox News have elevated Republican dysfunction to a point at which they can no longer elect a speaker for the majority party.

The Republicans have historically been ---at least for the last century or more--- the party of the Haves.  At least since the Depression of the Thirties, it is the Democrats who have been the party of the Have Nots.  But their strategy of romanticizing their conservatism, which Brooks traces to the emergence of Rush Limbaugh, made radical conservatism, which presented a picture of good old, gun-toting, testosterone-filled, white male dominated, USA First, Anti-Islamic, abortion-scorning, Bible-Thumping into something any redneck could love, and succeeded wildly with the Have Nots, to the complete bafflement of the liberals.

It did not matter that the Democrats said they would raise taxes, but reduced them instead, and that the Republicans who promised to lower taxes raised them instead; it was the promise that was important: Read My Lips.  The innocent, ignorant power base of the GOP absorbs the rhetoric, loves the posturing and the romance of the good old cowboy USA, while it is uncomfortable with the Peace-Treaty making, pro-education liberals.  Liberals stand for taking care of the poor and elderly.  Liberals stand for more school.

Conservatives promise an endless summer, with no responsibilities.  Oh sure, they demand personal responsibility.  That means you can do anything you like.

The David Brooks article really details, with clear logic, why radicalizing their platform did not work for the Republicans, and might have very long-term consequences for them and for everyone else.  They see that the problem with not passing a budget is one of marketing, public relations, which means advertising.  They don't see that not passing a budget actually harms their constituents.  They think of it as Xtreme Politics.  The GOP has become seduced by Madison Avenue.

Anyway, we have to make enough sense about what's going on to avoid complete insanity, but it is impossible to make enough sense of it to actually affect the fallout.

P.S. Readers must be careful: whether the GOP is unraveling or not is obviously a matter of perception; unravelment is not a precise term, nor does it imply that the process is irreversible.  I for one —if you haven't figured this already— regard what's happening to the GOP with more alarm than satisfaction.  It would be presumptuous to offer solutions; the GOP, after all, belongs to those who are unraveling it (if they are in fact doing that).

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Public Addresses: Uniquely American Problems

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One of the hardest things to do, especially in political life in the USA, is to communicate effectively with the public.  This problem exists in both spoken communication: the announcements politicians make to the public, on YouTube, or on the Web, or over Television, and written communication: transcripts of speeches by political persons---Candidates, spokespersons, or what have you---or political writing.

For whatever reason, the American Public has become accustomed to shorter sentences, simpler arguments, a limited vocabulary; and has shown a preference for form over content, and style over facts.

Recently, there was a question on a public discussion group whether Socialism promised things that ultimately caused harm.

Now, obviously, the harm caused by anything is most frequently in the eye of the beholder.  The consequences of any sort of political action are many, and some of them are good, and some are bad, and whether the one outweighs the other is a matter of perspective.  Obamacare is a case in point.

*Thousands have gotten medical insurance, who did not have it before.
*Insurance companies have raised their rates, despite the fact that everyone coming on board for the first time has resulted in incredible increases in revenue.
*It is becoming increasingly clear how despicable the pricing of Insurance premiums is.  But bear in mind: classical free enterprise theory explicitly states that anything is worth the price people will pay for it.  This is one reason I detest classical free enterprise theory.
*The opposition of Conservatives and the GOP to Obamacare is being revealed as ultimately political.  In other words, they only pretend to oppose it because it is supposed to be bad policy; rather it is a notch in the gun of the Democrat Party, which is unpleasant for the GOP to admit.

Amidst all this, Bernie Sanders continues to put forward ideas that have been sidelined for decades: give teachers better wages; raise the minimum wage; repair roads and bridges and parts of the infrastructure that needs maintenance.  Strengthen Social Security.  Put curbs on the power of lobbyists.  Reverse the Citizen's United Supreme Court Decision.  Control the sales of firearms.

He gives the arguments that have been given for decades, which almost everyone outside the left wing of the Democrats (and a few idealists among the Socialists) rejected, saying that it would make the country a communist paradise.  But these ideas and arguments have not been put forward boldly.  They have been mumbled apologetically by Democrats who fully expected that they would be opposed.  But now Bernie Sanders is shouting them from figurative rooftops, and a new generation of Americans are hearing them for the first time.

Can it be true that there is someone who opposes the insane interest rates on student loans?  Is there really someone who thinks guns should be controlled, other than that crazy Obama?  Can there really be people out there who are for raising the minimum wage?  But won't that bankrupt businesses that depend of slave labor, such as fast food restaurants?

Is it possible someday that we could have a public transportation system that was cheap and reliable?  Us older folks have heard these ideas for ever, but some young people are hearing them for the first time, and it is possible that pretty soon it will not be a foregone conclusion that all these ideas will be rejected outright.

But to make simple, bold, unqualified statements ("unqualified" means without conditions; not that the statement is bad) is risky.  Simple-minded people love categorical statements, but categorical statements are usually false in the world in which we live.  When an intelligent politician makes a guarded statement, it is denounced as "too nuanced."  Nuanced means that the person says he or she will do something in certain circumstances.  How else is one to make a statement?  A bold statement is what George H. W. Bush made:  "Read my lips:  No New Taxes!"  Too bold.  He did put in new taxes.  He should have said:  "I will try my level best not to raise taxes, or institute new ones."  But that would have come across as wishy-washy.

Bill Clinton was well known for being cautious in his statements, or at least moderating them when questioned about them.  Well, he was bright enough to see that qualification was necessary most of the time, and honest enough to admit it, even if he is considered to have been a president of questionable integrity.  I believe that he was just about as honest as most presidents, though Obama appears to have set a high watermark for unimpeachable presidential conduct.

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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.

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[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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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