"Tolerance fails T-shirt test"

Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass ran a story about a fledgling social scientist at Oak Park's Gwendolyn Brooks Middle School, "Tolerance fails T-shirt test." Fourteen-year-old Catherine Vogt conducted an experiment, wearing a "McCain Girl" t-shirt one day and an "Obama girl" t-shirt another, recording the reactions she got from fellow students.

For the McCain t-shirt, these ranged from "very stupid" to death threats.

She suddenly became brainy when she wore the Obama shirt, according to the other students.

The reactions put me in mind of Herbert Marcuse, pre-eminent political philosopher of the New Left. In an April 29, 2005 Wall Street Journal article "How Conservative Came To Be More Than A Word" Daniel Henniger related how the demise of the Fairness Doctrine led to the rise of conservative talk radio and TV.

He recounted that in the '60's, pre-eminent New Left political philosopher Herbert Marcuse (who taught at Columbia, Harvard and Brandeis) urged "liberals to practice active 'intolerance against movements from the Right' in the name of 'liberating tolerance.' Thus, for example, liberal academics would vote to deny tenure for conservative colleagues -- and still do -- believing that this is a morally mandated act."

Any wonder that we have intolerance of seriously dissenting opinion at our colleges and universities? Now, at Brooks Middle School, we see the long arm of this policy, reaching all the way down to the grade schools.

It's no surprise, since violent, unrepentant New Leftists like Bill Ayers decided to change tactics from bombings to brain-washing. Apparently, he and his ilk realized that a more effective strategy to achieve cultural revolution was to be in charge of teaching and certifying student teachers. He is a professor of education with the titles "Distinguished Professor" and "Senior University Scholar" at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Is Compulsory Education the Problem?

Thanks to those who’ve commented on my first post with their thoughtful and pithy remarks! Governmentally-controlled, compulsory education is a significant source of today’s educational problems, from kindergarten through graduate school.

Interestingly, in the highly influential book, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, Richard Hofstadter quotes Horace Mann, complaining about the problems of public education: “…more than eleven-twelfths of all the children in the reading-classes in our schools do not understand the meaning of the words they read.” “…the schools have retrograded within the last generation or half generation in regard to orthography.” According to Mann, wealthier parents typically gave up on the public schools and sent their children to private institutions.

Mann was writing in 1837. Shocking, how similar his complaints are to those today. But then, the bureaucracy of public education, wherein the provider and the customer are not aligned in their self-interest, works against the student’s needs. In his book, Montessori, Dewey, and Capitalism: Educational Theory for a Free Market in Education by Jerry Kirkpatrick fruitfully applies Ludwig von Mises principles of bureaucracy to the problem and makes sense of some of the seemingly senseless aspects of public education.

However, I know many people who were fairly well educated in public schools of the 50’s and 60’s, and earlier. Even today, many Chinese, Serbian, and Somalian immigrant children manage to learn a tremendous amount attending public schools, even Chicago public schools. These students often go on to challenging college programs and achieve professional success.

Clearly, government-run schooling is a part of the problem, but not the whole story.

The Education of Free Human Beings

In this blog, I intend to explore the question: "What kind of education makes it possible to live well as a free human being?"

This isn't a new question, rather, it is the essence of liberal education going back to ancient times. The now much-abused word "liberal" is from the Latin word for "free," liber. In the ancient Roman republic, men were concerned about what a free citizen needed to know in order to function well.

Today, I'm concerned, very concerned, about what our young people know and don't know, and the consequences for liberty. What is their conception of freedom? If you want a daunting taste of what they don't know, take a look at this report from the Association of Trustees and Alumni
about college students.

However, I'm equally, if not more, concerned about how they hold and use their ideas. Do they know how to investigate and arrive at their judgments first-hand?

What are the consequences of what they know and how they know it? Do they want to be free to follow their own judgment and self-reliantly accept the joys and risks of life, or do they prefer the safety of the collective care of others?

Higher education is my focus, but to understand what happens at the college level, we have to understand what goes before.

Babies and toddlers constantly look, listen, touch, smell, taste. They devote themselves to examining and exploring their environment. They're balls of fire when it comes to learning, "let me do it myself" their clarion call.

Yet, by the time children are 8 or 9, how many are eager to go to school? Read books? Learn history? Math? Do their homework?

If not, why not? What's changed?

Is there a way to get back that fire?