The Facts of the Case

Today one of my liberal Facebook friends linked to a blog post about Rick Santorum's stupidity while he was still running for the Republican presidential nomination. I can't cast the first stone at another blogger for not being timely, and anyway, that's not really what I noticed in the post.

Senator Santorum, you'll recall, claimed in public that only one university in California offered courses in U.S. history. Rachel Maddow, fearless defendrix of Truth, Justice, and the American Way, exposed Santorum's ignorance for all to see. Santorum then explained that what he "should have said was that none of the UC campuses teach a survey course in Western Civilization." This also isn't true, and after enjoying a hearty laugh at Republican Stoopid, the blogger expresses his bafflement about it:

I really don't get this. If you're Rick Santorum and you're issuing an apology like this, you have to know it's going to make it to the air and be fact-checked. Don't you turn to an intern or someone and say, "Hey, before I send this out, call up the University of California and make sure they don't offer courses in Western Civilization so I don't look like an idiot again"? And there were people who wanted this man to have the job where you get to order a nuclear attack.

He has a point.

The friend who linked this post commented "Don't let those silly 'facts' get in the way", and a commenter chimed in: "in the GOP emotions trump facts." I argued that in politics emotions trump facts, and that Democrats are no more interested in facts than Republicans are. My friend chided me for saying that there's no difference between the parties, which of course was not what I said (and which tends to support my position rather than his). And one difference is that if you're a Republican and you say something that isn't true, Rachel Maddow and other Obama fans will be all over your case; if you're President Obama and you say something that isn't true, Ms. Maddow will maintain a discreet silence about it, and the President won't "look like an idiot." After all, there's an election campaign going on, loose lips sink ships, we all have to do our part in the war effort.

For example, last week the President told Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone that his administration had cracked down on medical-marijuana dispensaries "because it’s against federal law. I can’t nullify congressional law. I can’t ask the Justice Department to say, 'Ignore completely a federal law that’s on the books' . . . ". Glenn Greenwald promptly pointed out that "as Jon Walker conclusively documents, the law vests the Executive Branch with precisely the discretion he falsely claims he does not have to decide how drugs are classified." I can't find that Ms. Maddow has pounced on this absurd falsehood. Neither have the Republicans, though.

But I'll stick with education. Last week during a story on protests over student debt in the US, Democracy Now! ran a clip of a speech by Obama in which he said, "We can’t price the middle class out of a college education, not at a time when most new jobs in America will require more than a high school diploma."

This is one of the President's favorite themes, repeated over several years, but it too is false. Even on its face it's suspect: if there are all those shiny new jobs out that which require college degrees, why are there so many recent college graduates who can't find work, and certainly not the kind of work they went into debt for? Alexander Cockburn did a good piece on the subject of the "Knowledge Economy" in March, pointing out that most jobs in America, including "new" ones (of which there just aren't very many, as each month's job report reminds us), do not require even a bachelor's degree. The late Gerald Bracey criticized Obama repeatedly on this point, in February 2009 for example (emphasis mine):

Obama said, "Right now, three quarters of the fastest-growing occupations require more than a high school diploma, and yet just over half of our citizens have that level of education." Scary, huh? Not really. This statistic was a favorite of ex secretary of education of education Margaret Spellings, about whom we can all express a sigh of relief that the operative word is, "ex."

If you look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics stats on job projections, it is almost true (but not really) that what Obama said is right. But there are two hugely compromising factors that make this statistic much less fearsome that it first appears:

1. The definition of "more than a high school diploma" is a weasel phrase, an incredibly slippery statistic. It does not mean a B. A., an Associates Degree, nor even a year of on-the-job training. The BLS projects that the overwhelming majority of jobs to be created between now and 2016 will require "short term on the job training." That's one week to three months.

2. The "fastest-growing occupations" account for very few jobs. For every systems engineer, we need about 15 sales people on the floor at Wal-Mart (and we have three newly minted scientists and engineers for every new job in those fields). The huge job numbers in this country are accounted for by retail sales, janitors, maids, food workers, waiters, truck drivers, home care assistants (low paid folk who come to take care those of us who are getting up in years), and similar low-trained, low-paid occupations. Note that I did not say these people are "low-skilled." As Barbara Ehrenreich showed after she spent two years working in "low-skilled" jobs, there really is no such thing (see her Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America).

The sentences I put into boldface are the key: "more than a high school diploma" includes one week to three months of "short-term on-the-job training."

So, either the President is ignorant or he's lying, but what he's saying is misleading, to put it kindly. Bracey says that Obama "accepted the same garbage that the propagandists, fear mongers such as Lou Gerstner, Bill Gates, Roy Romer, Bob Wise, Craig Barrett and many others--God help us, Arne Duncan?--have been spewing for years." Whatever the reason, Obama has no reason to worry about looking like an idiot, no matter how many lies he tells. If a Republican utters a palpable untruth, Rachel Maddow will criticize it publicly; if a Democrat does it, Maddow will find something else to talk about, like Teh Ex-Gey. Even the Republicans don't seem to be interested in exposing falsehoods like this; they're more interested in Obama's birth certificate. Republican media will claim that a Democrat is lying, but of course it's hit-or-miss whether they'll be be right about it.

This goes back to Noam Chomsky's dictum, shared with Martin Luther King Jr., that it takes no courage to attack the crimes and lies of your official enemies; what is harder, and often dangerous (though much less so in the US), is attacking the crimes and lies of your own side and its friends. But as Chomsky also suggests, it is precisely the people who attack official enemies exclusively who will crow about their courage in Speaking Truth to Power, while attacking the troublemakers who criticize the home team as cowards, drug-addled nuts, and traitors.

The Pitcher Cries for Water to Carry and a Person for Work That Is Real

I just finished reading John Holt's last book, Learning All the Time (Addison-Wesley, 1989), and while it's full of interesting ideas and stories, this especially caught my attention:

Schools, top-rank or low-rank, have always operated under the wonderfully convenient rule that when learning takes place, the school deserves the credit ("If You Can Read, Thank a Teacher"); and that when it doesn't, the students get the blame [150].

I've seen that slogan before, especially on Facebook. It occurred to me that if I were to thank anyone for my ability to read, it would be my mother, who taught me when I was four. She wasn't a professional, but you don't have to be to teach a child to read. Then I remembered my fellow students reading aloud in class in second grade. They read awkwardly, slowly, badly. I don't have to wonder why so few of them read for pleasure or use as they got older. Reading was hard work for them; for me, even in second grade, it was easy, a fairly transparent process I didn't have to think about as I took in the stories I read. Most people, I think, would conclude that my fellow students weren't bright enough to read well; I think they just weren't taught well.

Earlier in the book Holt quotes Bruno Bettelheim and Karen Zelan's Learning to Read (Knopf, 1982). After reporting how the vocabulary in elementary readers dropped from an average of 645 words in the 1920s to 153 in 1962, Bettelheim and Zelan speculated:

One possible explanation ... is that as the readers became more boring, children learned to read less well. The conclusion drawn from this fact was not the obvious one that as textbooks became more boring to children and teachers alike, children would have a harder time working up an interest in learning to read. Instead, it was concluded that the books were too difficult for the children and that things should be made easier for them, by asking them to learn fewer words! So each new edition of a primer contains fewer words in ever more frequent repetition, and in consequence is more boring than that which preceded it ... As this cycle continues up to the present day, things have gone from bad to worse [quoted in Holt, 29].

No wonder my kindergarten teacher, in 1956, didn't believe me when I explained that I'd been reading a version of The Three Billy Goats Gruff that was primarily text, in a book my parents had bought. She made me bring the book in and read from it aloud to her to prove that I had the chops; I still remember her surprise when I obliged. (This came up because one day I'd begun giggling during nap time, remembering the story. Even at that age I was No Damn Good, you see: I thought I was too smart to take a nap!)

I don't mean to put down teachers; only some are martinets more concerned with order than with learning. But my mother was no educational radical; she thought that learning shouldn't be fun, it should be work. But she inadvertently put into my hands the power to bypass a lot of the structural barriers to learning that school raised up. Not deliberately, of course: if you'd asked, any educator and any parent would have denied that reading, writing and arithmetic were taught so as to discourage kids from learning them; but that was the result. And despite those barriers, most kids manage to learn anyway. And many teachers try to clear space for their students to learn.

I think that parents are more of a problem: they suffered in school, and by God their children had better suffer too! Politicians pander to that attitude, in parents and in businessmen who believe that the purpose of schools is to grind out docile workers. Again, this is seldom declared upfront: it usually surfaces when someone objects to more effective teaching/learning methods by snarling, "Learning can't all be fun!" As Holt remarks, "What they usually mean by this is 'Learning can't ever be fun, or it isn't really learning'" (83). He adds, "Figuring things out, solving problems, is about as much fun as anything we human beings know how to do", which I think is partly true. "Fun" isn't really the right word. Solving problems isn't always "fun", but it's intensely satisfying and rewarding.

One more story. Holt tells of Leon, a seventeen-year-old African American student in an Upward Bound summer program.

He was at the absolute bottom of his regular school classes, tested, judged, and officially labeled as being almost illiterate. ... Until quite late in the evening Leon didn't speak. When he did, he didn't say much. But what he said I will never forget. He stood up, holding before him a paperback copy of Dr. Martin Luther King's book Why We Can't Wait, which he had read, or mostly read, during that summer session. He turned from one to another of the adults, holding the book before each of us and shaking it for emphasis, and in a voice trembling with anger, said several times at the top of his lungs, "Why didn't anyone ever tell me about this book? Why didn't anyone ever tell me about this book?" ...

It's worth noting that Why We Can't Wait is full of long, intricate sentences and big words. It would not have been easy reading for more than a handful of students in Leon's or any other high school. But Leon, whose standardized Reading Achievement Test scores "proved" that he had the reading skills of a second-grader, had struggled and fought his way through that book in perhaps a month or so. The moral of the story is twofold: that young people want, need, and like to read books that have meaning for them, and that when such books are put within easy reach they will sooner or later figure out, without being "taught" and with only minimal outside help, how to read them [27-8].

I know that everybody isn't going to read as much as I do, or as fluently or compulsively. And that's okay: schools should serve all students, and enable them to learn a wide range of things. But stories like Leon's always fill me with rage and despair, and have ever since I first read Jonathan Kozol's Death at an Early Age over forty years ago. It's not possible to give back the lost years to the many students who were denied access to learning while being held indoors and told they were stupid. What infuriates me is that in the face of this history, many adults fiercely resist any attempt to fix the situation for the future.

(The title of this post is the final two lines of Marge Piercy's poem "To Be of Use.")

Nobody Ever Tells Me Anything

An old friend came to Bloomington for a visit yesterday, someone I hadn't seen in many years. We had a great conversation, and got caught up on some of the books, movies, music, and ideas that mattered to us. Among others, I mentioned Gerald Bracey, the tireless critic of misinformation about American schools, and today after my friend had left I looked for Bracey's website to remind her about his work. I also wanted to point her to Bracey's articles for the Huffington Post, which I'd followed until they simply stopped appearing a year ago.

But my search also brought up Bracey's obituary: he'd died in his sleep last October 20, at the age of 69. Damn! Why had no one updated his page at the HuffPost? I eventually found a page by his successor, Susan Ohanian, who paid tribute to him and continues his critiques there -- something else for me to get caught up on. I soon found more obits and some useful links that I evidently hadn't noticed in the past year when I'd done online searches for him.

So, okay, this is year-old news. But it's news to me, and probably to other people as well who needed to know.