The Educational Octopus

Why do public school teachers send their own children to private schools at double the rate of the national average?

By Mark J. Perry 

In his latest weekly column, economist and GMU professor Walter E. Williams presents these facts about where various groups of parents send their own children – private or public schools:

General public: Nationally, 11% of all parents enroll their children in private schools, and 89% of American students attend public schools.

Public School Teachers: Nationally, more than 20% of public school teachers with school-age children enroll them in private schools, or almost twice the 11% rate for the general public.

Philadelphia Public School Teachers: 44% enroll their own children in private schools, or four times the national average.

Cincinnati Public School Teachers: 41% enroll their own children in private schools, more than three times the national rate.

Chicago Public School Teachers: 39% enroll their own children in private schools, more than three times the national average.

Rochester, NY Public School Teachers: 38% enroll their own children in private schools, or more than three times the national rate.

San Francisco-Oakland Public School Teachers: 34% enroll their own children in private schools, slightly more than three times the national average.

New York City Public School Teachers: 33% enroll their own children in private schools, three times the national rate.

Members of Congress: 33% to 44% enroll their children in private schools, three to four times the national average.

Walter concludes that:

The fact that so many public school teachers enroll their own children in private schools ought to raise questions. After all, what would you think, after having accepted a dinner invitation, if you discovered that the owner, chef, waiters and busboys at the restaurant to which you were being taken don’t eat there? That would suggest they have some inside information from which you might benefit.

In a 1995 article in The Freeman called the “Educational Octopus” I wrote:

What would you conclude about the quality of product or service X under the following circumstances?

1. The employees of Airline X and their families are offered free airline tickets as an employee benefit. The employees refuse to travel with their families on Airline X and instead pay full fare on Airline Y when flying.

2. The employees of Automaker X are offered a company car at a substantial discount and they instead buy a car at full price from Automaker Y.

3. Employees at Health Clinic X and their families are offered medical care at no additional cost as a benefit and yet most employees of Clinic X pay out-of-pocket for medical services at Clinic Y.

Universities: bastions of conformism

Students have become ban-happy self-regulators afraid of growing up.

By Joanna Williams

When news emerged last week that two students from the London School of Economics had been banned from wearing ‘Jesus and Mo’ cartoon t-shirts on a stall at the university’s freshers’ fair, it was only the most recent act of censorship carried out by students’ unions.

At the latest count, the students’ unions at six universities have banned the song ‘Blurred Lines’ from being played in their buildings. In the past few months alone, Derby University students have banned the UKIP candidate for Derbyshire police and crime commissioner from speaking in debates; the University of East Anglia has banned the showing of rugby and cricket matches sponsored by NatWest bank in the union bar; Lancaster University students’ union has banned ‘lads’ mags’ from the campus shop; and students at Essex University look set to ban Starbucks from their campus.

While a few students may challenge what has been termed a ‘war against free speech on campus’, or argue that students’ unions are not meant to be the moral arbiters of their members, what’s really noticeable is the louder clamour for more bans and increased censorship. The outgoing president of a consortium of students’ unions based in Medway in Kent has criticised the absence of a ban on political and religious extremists; and the Lancaster ban on lads’ mags has been labelled as not going nearly far enough in the perceived battle against sexism on campus.

It seems that far from revelling in the freedom of having left school and home behind, students are quick to impose new sets of restrictions upon themselves. This goes beyond socialising and shopping and impacts upon the academic realm too: research conducted at one university suggests 88 per cent of students were in favour of a requirement to make all students abide by a code of conduct and 82 per cent supported minimum attendance requirements with all the associated form-filling and register-taking.  It seems that students want external monitoring and regulation because they don’t trust themselves to withstand the temptation to miss seminars or behave inappropriately in the lecture theatre.  This lack of trust in themselves and each other is one reason why songs such as ‘Blurred Lines’ and ‘lads’ mags’ are described as ‘dangerous’ by those campaigning for bans: one can only assume that in their fevered imaginations it is only a ‘brave’ ban on such incendiary material that prevents mass rape on campus.

The Simple Truth

Restoring a naive view of truth

by Eliezer Yudkowsky

"I remember this paper I wrote on existentialism. My teacher gave it back with an F. She’d underlined true and truth wherever it appeared in the essay, probably about twenty times, with a question mark beside each. She wanted to know what I meant by truth."

—                           Danielle Egan (journalist)

Someone says to you: “My miracle snake oil can rid you of lung cancer in just three weeks.” You reply: “Didn’t a clinical study show this claim to be untrue?” The one returns: “This notion of ‘truth’ is quite naive; what do you mean by ‘true’?”

Many people, so questioned, don’t know how to answer in exquisitely rigorous detail. Nonetheless they would not be wise to abandon the concept of ‘truth’. There was a time when no one knew the equations of gravity in exquisitely rigorous detail, yet if you walked off a cliff, you would fall.

Often I have seen – especially on Internet mailing lists – that amidst other conversation, someone says “X is true”, and then an argument breaks out over the use of the word ‘true’. This essay is not meant as an encyclopedic reference for that argument. Rather, I hope the arguers will read this essay, and then go back to whatever they were discussing before someone questioned the nature of truth.

In this essay I pose questions. If you see what seems like a really obvious answer, it’s probably the answer I intend. The obvious choice isn’t always the best choice, but sometimes, by golly, it is. I don’t stop looking as soon I find an obvious answer, but if I go on looking, and the obvious-seeming answer still seems obvious, I don’t feel guilty about keeping it. Oh, sure, everyone thinks two plus two is four, everyone says two plus two is four, and in the mere mundane drudgery of everyday life everyone behaves as if two plus two is four, but what does two plus two really, ultimately equal? As near as I can figure, four. It’s still four even if I intone the question in a solemn, portentous tone of voice. Too simple, you say? Maybe, on this occasion, life doesn’t need to be complicated. Wouldn’t that be refreshing?

If you are one of those fortunate folk to whom the question seems trivial at the outset, I hope it still seems trivial at the finish. If you find yourself stumped by deep and meaningful questions, remember that if you know exactly how a system works, and could build one yourself out of buckets and pebbles, it should not be a mystery to you.

If confusion threatens when you interpret a metaphor as a metaphor, try taking everything completely literally.

Imagine that in an era before recorded history or formal mathematics, I am a shepherd and I have trouble tracking my sheep. My sheep sleep in an enclosure, a fold; and the enclosure is high enough to guard my sheep from wolves that roam by night. Each day I must release my sheep from the fold to pasture and graze; each night I must find my sheep and return them to the fold. If a sheep is left outside, I will find its body the next morning, killed and half-eaten by wolves. But it is so discouraging, to scour the fields for hours, looking for one last sheep, when I know that probably all the sheep are in the fold. Sometimes I give up early, and usually I get away with it; but around a tenth of the time there is a dead sheep the next morning.

The Perils of Parasitism

Fake government "shutdown" has defense contractors fuming

by Justin Raimondo

The government "shutdown" isn’t really a shutdown: the National Security Agency (NSA) is still functioning at full throttle, spying on Americans and violating the Constitution with impunity. And I doubt those aid packages to the Syrian rebels are being delayed by even a minute: after all, a heart-eating cannibal can’t live on human blood alone. The panda cam may be down, but the parasite class, headquartered in Washington, D.C., is still sucking at the teat of the federal Leviathan, as this knee-slapper of a Washington Post article – an interview with a military contractor – makes all too clear:

"Much of the impact of the shutdown is felt by the 800,000 federal workers who are simply furloughed without pay. But the ripple effects spread far and wide, to all the workers employed indirectly on government contracts. One of them, a software engineer with a large D.C.-area defense contractor who asked to remain anonymous, described Monday night what it’s been like to work under the threat of your sole client suddenly going dark."

The reporter, one Lydia DePillis, asks: "So what’s the atmosphere in the office?" Mr. Anonymous Parasite shrugs his shoulders, adjusts his fat ass so as to fit more comfortably in his cushioned $1000 office chair, and avers:

"Day to day, you don’t notice it in the work we do. I go in tomorrow, and I know I have a bunch of bugs to fix."

Yes, that spying-on-Americans software does indeed have a few bugs, but, hey, who would’ve ever thought that Snowden guy would give up his idyllic life in Hawaii for the cold of the Russian winter? Aside from that, however:

"There is that nagging sensation of, like, should I be looking for a new job soon? What’s going on?"

Is the gravy train about to end? Fat chance of that, but still:

"There’s a lot of chatter in the office. We have employees that work on the bases themselves. So they’ll work on an Air Force or Navy base. They actually don’t go to work tomorrow. They all are being stuffed into our office. So we’ve got to move chairs and tables around, because they can’t go to their normal jobs."

The political class is now a huge, voracious parasite

Citizens Are The Soylent Green Of Today's Politics

By Monty Pelerin

Neither American political party is worth supporting. Each has interests inconsistent with those of the American public. The claimed political differences are mostly cosmetic, designed for marketing advantage. Both parties act in their self interest which does not coincide with that of the citizens or the well-being of the country.

Each party behaves like a self-serving criminal gang. The quaint concept of serving the public exists no longer. Routinely they exempt themselves  from the rules and laws they impose on the rest of the country. Their policies enrich the political class while the rest of the country becomes poorer.

Mark Twain described Congress as our ”distinctly native American criminal class.” Albert J. Nock went further, generalizing Twain’s somewhat parochial observation:

Taking the State wherever found, striking into its history at any point, one sees no way to differentiate the activities of its founders, administrators and beneficiaries from those of a professional-criminal class

Lest the reader think these two individuals confused or biased, a more complete collection of quotes on government is available here: Do Only Dumb People Believe in Government?

How The Game Changed

As government grew in size and influence, the rewards associated with political office grew. Sacrifice and service were displaced with the opportunity for personal spoils. The motivation subtly changed from service to the accumulation of wealth. Mother Theresa quietly morphed into Gordon Gecko.

Today, politics is considered a lucrative career choice, not service to one’s country. The rise of the professional politician was never anticipated by the Founders of the nation. Yet, had the Constitution been strictly adhered to, the improper incentives that drove the change could never have occurred.

Euro Debt Crisis: Extend and Pretend Phase Begins

Greek Bailout Debt Swap Mooted

by Pater Tenebrarum

How can one continue to pretend that the government of a country that has been in technical default for 90 of the past 180 years and remains clearly bankrupt even after two major bailouts and two 'debt haircuts' in a row will somehow 'make it' and actually repay its debts one day?

The answer is: extend and pretend. As reported by Reuters, Greece, the EU's major leading indicator in terms of bailout policy, is proposing just that solution: 

“Greece is looking into swapping a big chunk of its bailout loans with a 50-year government bond as a way to achieve debt relief once it attains a primary budget surplus this year, an official close to the discussions told Reuters on Saturday.

Norway Breaks With Social Democracy

Like many other European systems, Norway has much to gain in bringing in more emphasis on individual responsibility and free markets in the traditional Social Democratic system

by Nima Sanandaji

Largely uncommented on in the US press, Europe’s long-standing social democratic tilt has changed. During recent years, almost all Western European nations have seen a dramatic fall in support for the traditional Social Democratic parties, which for so long have dominated the political landscapes. In response, the centre-left parties have morphed, moving towards greater emphasis on the benefits of free markets and individual responsibility. In several countries the former communist parties now claim that they fill the role of traditional Social Democrats. A new breed of modernized centre-left parties is likely to replace several centre‑right governments during coming years. The third consecutive loss for the German Social Democrats illustrates the continuing difficulties for Europe’s labor movements to gather the strong support that they previously almost took for granted.

Until recently oil-rich Norway has remained unique, as the only nation where Social Democrats have resisted change to highly generous welfare benefits. In 1999 the former Swedish social democratic minister of business, Björn Rosengren, famously called Norway “the last Soviet state” due to the lack of willingness to adopt market policies. But now even Norway is shifting with the recent election of a centre‑right government formed by Erna Solberg. Making the transition from a full-scale welfare state to a system which consistently rewards work more than public handouts will be a difficult one for Norway. Hopefully, the newly elected government will draw inspiration from the neighbor to the east. 

McDonaldising the student soul

In today’s McUniversities, ‘graduate attributes’ are being used to create McStudents with no individuality

By DENNIS HAYES

Students starting university this autumn might be excited about what they could become. They might want to be great thinkers, writers or scientists. But above all, they will want to be individuals. And this desire to be an individual, equipped with the knowledge and understanding needed to become critical and independent-minded, often means that students will dare to disagree and be different. 

Little wonder, then, that students can be challenging and difficult. This is not because they are encouraged by universities, under the banner of ‘student voice’, to express their feelings about things they know nothing about. No, students can be difficult and challenging because they have learned something about their academic subject and, on that basis, feel they can think independently, criticise and challenge. ‘Dare to be different’ might be a good slogan for any student. 

But such a slogan would now probably be banned if it appeared on a t-shirt in many universities in the UK. That’s because being an individual is now out, and being a McDonaldised product with fixed ‘graduate attributes’ (GAs) is now in. That is, in order to sell their graduate products to business, universities have drawn up lists of characteristics students must have acquired by the time they finish being processed.

George Ritzer coined the term ‘McDonaldisation’ as a neat way of describing how the process of rationalisation (an idea borrowed from sociologist Max Weber) was being applied to cultural and social institutions now subject to the four drivers of efficiency, calculability, predictability and control. Writing in 1993, Ritzer had a very depressing view of the McDonaldisation of the university:

‘The modern university has, in various ways, become a highly irrational place. Many students and faculty members are put off by its factory-like atmosphere. They may feel like automatons processed by the bureaucracy and computers or feel like cattle run through a meat-processing plant. In other words, education in such settings can be a dehumanising experience.’ 

Character Formation and the Origins of AA

The path of the just is as the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day

by Lewis M. Andrews

It is a fact little appreciated that the presidents of America’s early universities were pioneers of what we would now call mental health care, and bear some credit for central features of today’s therapeutic institutions. These teachers, like today’s, felt an obligation to provide their students with guidance on how to overcome life’s inevitable stresses and setbacks.

But this was before the days of psychiatry and psychotherapy, which did not come into existence until the early twentieth century. Rather, the approach of these early university presidents was to integrate moral education into liberal education in the arts and sciences. Although the most highly acclaimed American colleges and universities today enjoy a reputation as secular institutions, it is often forgotten that nearly all of these schools started in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as seminaries under the leadership of staunchly Christian presidents, and that the therapeutic guidance they provided was given within avowedly religious contexts.

Back in the USSR: The Sovietization of American Life

The ordeal of Ilija Trojanov

by Justin Raimondo

Ilija Trojanov was at the airport in Brazil’s Salvador da Bahia, on September 30, checking in for his flight to the United States, when the person behind the American Airlines counter told him that the computer had issued a "Border Security Crossing" alert – and that it was necessary to contact the American authorities before he could be issued a boarding pass. As the time for his flight approached he was told the airline was forced to refuse him entry to the flight – and that he must return to Germany.

Trojanov is an acclaimed author of 20 books, including Along the Ganges, Collector of Worlds, and Mumbai to Mecca. He is the co-author of Angriff auf die Freiheit (Attack on Freedom), with Juli Zeh, a 2009 jeremiad against State surveillance. Trojanov was on his way to the Denver conference of the German Studies Association, and had been issued an invitation to appear at the Goethe-Institut’s "New Literature From Europe" Festival in November.

He had earlier been denied a visa to enter the United States, but with the help of an American university he was finally granted his travel papers: thus the "security alert" came as a surprise.

So why all the trouble over traveling to the US?

In response to media queries, the US embassy in Berlin had "no comment" to make. That’s because no comment was necessary: Trojanov was among the prominentsigners of an open letter addressed to German Chancellor Angela Merkel protesting NSA surveillance on German soil as an "historic attack on our democratic, constitutional state." That is clearly the reason for this Soviet-style harassment by the Obama administration.

Behind the curtain at the IPCC

Pay No Attention to the Bad Data

By STEVEN F. HAYWARD

Thought experiment: Imagine you are a national security reporter, covering the release of a massive, 2,000-page report on domestic intelligence gathering activities and future threat assessment from the National Security Agency. But instead of issuing the full report, the NSA issues a 30-page “Summary for Policymakers” (SPM) written by political appointees at the Justice Department, promising that the full 2,000-page report will be released a few days later. Would you print a front-page story based only on the 30-page summary, or would you demand to see the full report?

If you’d go with the politically massaged summary, then congratulations​—​you too can be an environmental reporter. Because that’s exactly what the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) did on Friday, September 27, in Stockholm, releasing only the SPM while withholding the full report. And the media played along, generating predictable headlines over the weekend about the increasing certainty of climate scientists that humans are warming the world.

To be fair, if they had waited until Monday’s release of the full Working Group I report on the current state of climate science, they’d have had to make sense of a jargon-filled report that Dutch scientist Arthur Petersen told the BBC “is virtually unreadable!” Churchill once quipped about a massive bureaucratic report that “by its very length, it defends itself against the risk of being read.” The IPCC appears to be following this example.

The (Needed) Revolution Emerging in Higher Education

As higher education costs soar, the gap between wealthy and poor families widens as non-wealthy students are forced to become debt-serfs to pay for college

Higher education is just the latest in a long line of labor-intensive industries with enormous fixed costs that now faces competition from new technologies and new far more efficient systemic processes.

By Charles Smith

There is a revolution underway in education being driven by digital technology.  Like all technologically fueled upheavals, this revolution requires creative destruction of the current industry, which is resisting the revolution even as it attempts to embrace the parts that might preserve the status quo.

This is an old story:  Huge labor-intensive industries with enormous fixed costs face competition from new technologies and new systemic processes.  Those earning a living within the old industries resist the destruction of the institutions and cost structures that have supported them, but resistance is futile, for the new technologies and processes are faster, better, and cheaper, often by an order of magnitude.

Though the entire spectrum of education from preschool to doctoral studies is being revolutionized, I will focus on higher education, which is already being creatively disrupted by digital technologies.  All that is needed to fulfill the revolution is a parallel advance in systemic processes.

The Old System: Systemic Scarcity of Media and Knowledge

To understand the revolution, we need to start with the historical roots of the current system, which arose from a profound scarcity of knowledge and instruction.  In the ancient world, storing information was extremely expensive.  Even after Gutenberg’s printing press made mass-produced books available, books remained expensive.  Only a wealthy household could afford to buy more than a few books.

Informed instruction was similarly limited.  Instruction in universities was often one person reading a text aloud to a classroom of students; this is the source of Cambridge University’s longstanding academic rank of “Reader.”

Greens Anti-Coal War Turns Heat on World’s Poor

Social engineers are rarely fans of democracy

by Peter C. Glover

If ever proof were needed that capitalism works for the interest of the poorest and most vulnerable (and for all of us) while leftist social engineering works against those interests, consider the escalating green war on coal.

It’s a war being conducted from the very top. President Obama, the European Union, even the United Nations are among those doing their level best to prevent the exploitation of one of the most ubiquitous, and thus cheap, energy resource available to us.  In vain pursuit of controlling the global climate via the doomed war on man-made carbon dioxide emissions, social engineers are prepared to ignore both the economy-busting cost and, ultimately, the human cost.

But if the recent ignominious dumping of Australia’s carbon-tax-imposing Labour Government teaches anything, it’s that, in a democracy, it’s the people that call the shots in the global marketplace, not governments. Just ask Julia Gillard (who imposed the disastrous Oz carbon tax) and Kevin Rudd (who pushed her aside then tried to run with it). Quite simply, the message to democratic governments worldwide is straightforward enough: an industry and society crippling carbon tax is a step too far. Democratic governments can take their chances. We cannot, however, take the same view when it comes to the world’s millions still living in poverty. Not that they appear to factor in the ideological calculations of the unelected ‘greenist’ elites at the European Union Commission or United Nations (or greens generally).

Social engineers are rarely fans of democracy. They know well enough that electorates will allow them only so much rope; precisely why greens prefer ‘backdoor’ means, such as procuring regulations from government quangos. Apart from getting fellow green ideologues into key government roles, it usually means lobbying for policies that skew the free marketplace. In the case of energy, they lobby against hydrocarbon resources while contriving to represent renewable energy as a commercially economic alternative. Joe Average, for a while at least, is duly taken in. Unfortunately, as the world’s first government to impose a carbon tax just found out, you can fool some of the people some of the time…

Don’t think for one moment, however, that the social engineers are prepared to bow to the will of the people. It’s not in their DNA. Which is precisely why they have been lobbying hard for the world’s banks to step in and cut the usual investments and loans to hydrocarbon energy industry businesses; and lately, with some success. Investment loans are crucial to enable economically viable electricity generating power plants to be built in developing states.

Whatever the question, it is hard to imagine the Communist Party to be the answer

Democratic Failure In The Czech Republic Authors A Communist Party Revival

By Doug Bandow

The Czech Republic is one of the most successful members of the former Soviet Empire.  Dominated by the U.S.S.R. after the Red Army overran the country in the closing days of World War II, Prague was a freedom domino in 1989, joining its neighbors in overthrowing Communist rule.  Yet Czechs with whom I recently spoke fear liberty is in retreat.  Indeed, the former Communist Party might reenter government after elections later this month.

Czechoslovakia was one of several countries created in 1918 out of the remains of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  Cynics called the new entities “states for a season,” doomed to extinction.

The party’s revival is particularly incongruous because the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia, or KCSM, remains largely unreconstructed.  Throughout its rule the Party “interned more than 250,000 political prisoners,” noted foreign correspondent James Kirchick, yet after the Velvet Revolution offered only a perfunctory apology for its discreditable role.  In 1996 the communists channeled George Orwell in calling their 40 year rule “one of the greatest periods of social and economic growth.”

In fact, the KCSM is the only Communist Party in Eastern Europe which still unashamedly calls itself Communist.  Kirchick explained, “while Communist Parties in the other countries in the former Eastern bloc dissolved (Poland), transformed into social democratic parties (Hungary), or merged with pre-existing ones (Slovakia), the Czech Communists did no such thing,” instead digging in and maintaining their party’s “doctrinaire Marxist outlook.”  The Party even offered its condolences to North Korea, which maintains a particularly virulent form of totalitarianism, after the death of dictator Kim Jong-il in 2011.

The Party has benefited from the collapse of the Civic Democratic Party (ODS)—the leading party on the right since it was founded by Klaus more than two decades ago—which is polling just six percent.  TOP 09 is in better shape, but not much.  Polls put the two parties at under 20 percent combined.

The Country Party

The question is not what the Republican Establishment will do with these dissidents but what the dissidents will do with the Establishment

by Angelo M. Codevilla

The Republican Party died during the struggle over Obamacare. Its most vital elected officials chose to represent their voters. This left their erstwhile leaders to continue pursuing acceptance by the ruling party, its press and its class. The result is a new party that represents the roughly three fourths of Republican voters whose social identities are alien to those of the ruling class and whose political identity is defined by opposition to the ruling party. These voters are outsiders to modern America’s power structure. Hence the new party that represents them is a “country party” in the British tradition of Viscount Bolingbroke’s early eighteenth century Whigs, who represented the country class against the royal court and its allies in Parliament. The forthcoming food fight over the name “Republican” is of secondary importance.

The new party came to be as organizations such as the Club For Growth, the several pro-life organizations, the Tea Parties, etc. joined together with the Congressmen and Senators they had helped elect to mount an effort which was less an attempt to de-fund Obamacare than it was the assertion of a bona fide opposition to the ruling class.

This has been a long time coming. Obamacare was a trigger, not a cause. While a majority of Democrats feel that officials who bear that label represent them well, only about a fourth of Republican voters and an even smaller proportion of independents trust Republican officials to represent them. They hear themselves insulted from on high as greedy, racist, violent, ignorant extremists, and resent the ever-growing U.S. government’s edgy social, ethical, and political character.

But the Republican leadership’s kinship with the socio-political class that runs modern government is deep. Rather than defending their voters’ socio-political identities, they ignore, soft-pedal, or give mere lip service to their voters’ concerns. It chooses candidates for office whose election only steadies America on a course of which most Americans disapprove.