Three cheers for Mika Brzezinski!

1. Newscaster's on-air Paris protest

US newsreader Mika Brzezinski has attempted to burn her script live on television in protest at being made to lead her bulletin on Paris Hilton.

What do you think of Mika Brzezinski's protest? Do you agree that Iraq should have been the lead story over Paris Hilton? You sent us your views.

I absolutely agree that Paris Hilton/Britney Spears/Lindsey Lohan/Madonna shobiz gossip should not be on the news at all. I admire Miss Brzezinski for having the guts to make a stand about this. I hope she isn't fired.
Glenn Lennox, Fort Worth, Texas, USA

Paris Hilton's story should be not the lead story but the forgotten story of the day.
Mark Chadbourne, Litchfield, Maine

Good for you, Mika! I work in news too, and I am sick and tired of seeing someone who essentially does nothing grabbing headlines when there's a plethora of important events occurring constantly around the world that would be extremely edifying to viewers were they actually to see them instead of pulpy twaddle about an heiress who got sent to jail. boo-freakin'- hoo. I say burn it!
Kristoffer Newsom, Sacramento, CA, USA

Good on her! I'm fed up with celebrity non-stories in the papers, when all I want to do is read the news. News editors - take note!
Mac Scotland, Glasgow, Scotland

A woman with integrity and sense! I've never heard of her but I love her!
Ben Wilson, Nottingham

I totally agree with Mika Brzezinski, there is no reason for the public to be hearing of stories of Paris Hilton coming out of jail when there are people in Iraq serving for their country. Good on you Mrs Brzezinski!
Lola, London

It is about time someone in the TV news media showed some sense. You could watch the news all day in the states and never know there was a war on at all.
Ms. Smith, Cambridge, MA USA

It's about time someone in a profile position stand up to the studio uppers. She is what America is really about. Taking a stance. Believing in something and taking the moral high ground.
Rohan, Sunrise Florida

I think she set a grand example for all 'real' journalists everywhere. Enough of Paris Hilton.
Holstein, New Haven, CT

Three cheers for Mika! It's long overdue for media personnel to stand up and make a stand over what the real important issues are today and not be distracted by fluff. Paris Hilton is a creation of the media-hype; it's time for the media to cut her loose and focus on the real issues.
Kathi Dickie, Fort Nelson, Canada

Am so proud of Mika's actions! We are sick to death of all the garbage and non-news on major stations in the US. There's nothing about Iraq, Darfur, global warming, questioning the illegalities of this Republican administration. We watch Daily Show, MSNBC Countdown or Bill Maher for that news!
Natalie Schlabaugh, Colorado Springs, CO USA

You go girl! It is absolutely sickening how US news producers try to push non-news instead of actual news. This way Americans stay ignorant of the real world and are more easily manipulated by the Bush crime family.
AJ, San Francisco, CA

If only we had more newsreaders and journalists like Mika Brzezinski. Shame on MSNBC for wanting to lead with Hilton and shame on her colleagues for ribbing her over it.
Ollie

Finally! Somebody is taking a stand, stop this madness. We do not care, best thing we can do is ignore Paris and her antics. There are more important issues we should be focusing on. Good for you Mika!!
simi, Dublin,CA

Oh, irony...

1. Reference - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A dose of silliness

I'll get around to writing an actual post before long——until then I'll top off my YouTube spree:

Sen. Obama on ethics reform

In 2004, over $2.1 billion was spent lobbying the federal government. That amounts to over $3.9 million per Member of Congress.

1. Remarks of Senator Barack Obama: Taking Our Government Back
2. Ethics Reform Fact Sheet
3. A Chance To Change The Game

"Wittgenstein" on film

So, I found these on YouTube just a bit ago. Apparently there was a screenplay-movie-thing made about Wittgenstein ("Wittgenstein") in 1993. It's pretty funny. Philosophical Investigations was published posthumously, by the way.

The Ten (Motor-Vehicle) Commandments

1. Vatican's 10 Commandments for Drivers

The Vatican on Tuesday issued a set of "Ten Commandments" for drivers, telling motorists not to kill, not to drink and drive, and to help fellow travelers in case of accidents.

The "Drivers' Ten Commandments," as listed by the document, are:

1. You shall not kill.

2. The road shall be for you a means of communion between people and not of mortal harm.

3. Courtesy, uprightness and prudence will help you deal with unforeseen events.

4. Be charitable and help your neighbor in need, especially victims of accidents.

5. Cars shall not be for you an expression of power and domination, and an occasion of sin.

6. Charitably convince the young and not so young not to drive when they are not in a fitting condition to do so.

7. Support the families of accident victims.

8. Bring guilty motorists and their victims together, at the appropriate time, so that they can undergo the liberating experience of forgiveness.

9. On the road, protect the more vulnerable party.

10. Feel responsible toward others.

WTF, Amadou Toumani Toure?

1. Essay 'insults' Mali's president
2. Africa 'must scrap insult laws'

The four rules of homeopathy

"Philosophy in the Conversation of Mankind"

I finally finished Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature by Richard Rorty last night, and the last chapter, "Philosophy Without Mirrors," had some very interesting ideas. After providing a lengthy critique of metaphysics, epistemology, the philosophy of language, positivism, and particularly the notion of "mirroring¹," Rorty presented his vision of the task of philosophy after surrendering ill-fated attempts at securing its objectivity:

Our present notions of what it is to be a philosopher are so tied up with the Kantian attempt to render all knowledge-claims commensurable that it is difficult to imagine what philosophy without epistemology could be. More generally, it is difficult to imagine that any activity would be entitled to bear the name "philosophy" if it had nothing to do with knowledge—if it were not in some sense a theory of knowledge, or a method for getting knowledge, or at least a hint as to where some supremely important kind of knowledge might be found.

There is no way, as far as I can see, in which to argue the issue of whether to keep the Kantian "grid" in place or set it aside. There is no "normal" philosophical discourse which provides common commensurating ground for those who see science and edification as, respectively, "rational" and "irrational," and those who see the quest for objectivity as one possibility among others to be taken account of in wirkungsgeschichtliche Bewusstsein. If there is no such common ground, all we can do is to show how the other side looks from our own point of view. That is, all we can do is be hermeneutic about the opposition—trying to show how the odd or paradoxical or offensive things they say hang together with the rest of what they want to say, and how what they say looks when put in our own alternative idiom. This sort of hermeneutics with polemical intent is common to Heidegger's and Derrida's attempts to deconstruct the tradition.

The mainstream philosophers are the philosophers I shall call "systematic," and the peripheral ones are those I shall call "edifying²." These peripheral, pragmatic philosophers are skeptical primarily about systematic philosophy, about the whole project of universal commensuration.

Great systematic philosophers are constructive and offer arguments. Great edifying philosophers are reactive and offer satires, parodies, and aphorisms. Great systematic philosophers, like great scientists, build for eternity. Great edifying philosophers destroy for the sake of their own generation. Systematic philosophers want to put their subject on the secure path of science. Edifying philosophers want to keep space open for the sense of wonder which poets can sometimes cause—wonder that there is something new under the sun, something which is not an accurate representation of what was already there, something which (at least for the moment) cannot be explained and can barely be described.

Edifying philosophers, unlike revolutionary systematic philosophers, are those who are abnormal at this meta-level. They refuse to present themselves as having found out any objective truth (about, say, what philosophy is). They present themselves as doing something different from, and more important than, offering accurate representations of how things are. It is more important because, they say, the notion of "accurate representation" itself is not the proper way to think about what philosophy does.

Whereas less pretentious revolutionaries can afford to have views on lots of things which their predecessors had views on, edifying philosophers have to decry the very notion of having a view, while avoiding a view about having views. This is an awkward, but not impossible, position. Wittgenstein and Heidegger manage it fairly well. One reason they manage it as well as they do is that they do not think that when we say something we must necessarily be expressing a view about a subject. We might just be saying something—participating in a conversation rather than contributing to an inquiry.

One way to see edifying philosophy as the love of wisdom is to see it as the attempt to prevent conversation from degenerating into inquiry, into a research program. Edifying philosophers can never end philosophy, but they can help prevent it from attaining the secure path of a science.

...to look for commensuration rather than simply continued conversation—to look for a way of making further redescription unnecessary by finding a way of reducing all possible descriptions to one—is to attempt escape from humanity.

Edifying philosophy is not only abnormal but reactive, having sense only as a protest against attempts to close of conversation by proposals for universal commensuration through the hypostatization of some privileged set of descriptions. [...] The resulting freezing-over of culture would be, in the eyes of edifying philosophers, the dehumanization of human beings. The edifying philosophers are thus agreeing with Lessing's choice of the infinite striving for truth over "all of Truth."

To see the aim of philosophy as truth—namely, the truth about the terms which provide ultimate commensuration for all human inquiries and activities—is to see human beings as objects rather than subjects, as existing en-soi rather than as both pour-soi and en-soi, as both described objects and describing subjects.

Whichever happens, however, there is no danger of philosophy's "coming to an end." Religion did not come to an end in the Enlightenment, nor painting in Impressionism.

---

¹

It is pictures, rather than propositions, metaphors rather than statements, which determine most of our philosophical convictions. The picture which holds traditional philosophy captive is that of the mind as a great mirror, containing various representations—some accurate, some not—and capable of being studied by pure, nonempirical methods. Without the notion of the mind as a mirror, the notion of knowledge as accuracy of representation would not have suggested itself. Without this latter notion, the strategy common to Descartes and Kant—getting more accurate representations by inspecting, repairing, and polishing the mirror, so to speak—would not have made sense. Without this strategy in mind, recent claims that philosophy could consist of "conceptual analysis" or "phenomenological analysis" or "explication of meanings" or examination of "the logic of our language" or of "the structure of the constituting activity of consciousness" would not have made sense.

²

Gadamer (like Heidegger, to whom some of his work is indebted) makes no concessions either to Cartesian dualism or to the notion of "transcendental constitution" (in any sense which could be given an idealistic interpretation). He thus helps reconcile the "naturalistic" point I tried to make in the previous chapter—that the "irreducibility of the Geisteswissenschaften" is not a matter of metaphysical dualism—with our "existentialist" intuition that redescribing ourselves is the most important thing we can do. He does this by substituting the notion of Bildung (education, self-formation) for that of "knowledge" as the goal of thinking. [...] Since "education" sounds a bit too flat, and Bildung a bit too foreign, I shall use "edification to stand for this project of finding new, better, more interesting, more fruitful ways of speaking.

6/21 update:

R.I.P. Richard Rorty... (10/4/1931 - 6/8/2007)

Green skylines?

1. Grow Up
2. Vertical farming in the big Apple
3. Multi-storey glasshouses the future of farming?
4. Let’s Get Vertical

:-(

1. Americans less happy today than 30 years ago: study

Americans are less happy today than they were 30 years ago thanks to longer working hours and a deterioration in the quality of their relationships with friends and neighbors, according to an Italian study.

"The main cause is a decline in the so-called social capital -- increased loneliness, increased perception of others as untrustworthy and unfair," said Stefano Bartolini, one of the authors of the study.

"Social contacts have worsened, people have less and less relationships among neighbors, relatives and friends."

By contrast, it appeared that based on the limited data available the happiness trend had remained largely stable in Europe, which had apparently avoided some of the changes in the American workplace like longer hours and more pressure.

i. Path to true happiness 'revealed'
ii. Dirt exposure 'boosts happiness'
iii. Happy planet index

Wittgenstein's Lecture on Ethics

My subject, as you know, is Ethics and I will adopt the explanation of that term which Professor Moore has given in his book Principia Ethica. He says: "Ethics is the general enquiry into what is good." Now I am going to use the term Ethics in a slightly wider sense, in a sense in fact which includes what I believe to be the most essential part of what is generally called Aesthetics.

And to make you see as clearly as possible what I take to be the subject matter of Ethics I will put before you a number of more or less synonymous expressions each of which could be substituted for the above definition, and by enumerating them I want to produce the same sort of effect which Galton produced when he took a number of photos of different faces on the same photographic plate in order to get the picture of the typical features they all had in common. And as by showing to you such a collective photo I could make you see what is the typical—say—Chinese face; so if you look through the row of synonyms which I will put before you, you will, I hope, be able to see the characteristic features they all have in common and these are the characteristic features of Ethics.

Now instead of saying "Ethics is the enquiry into what is good" I could have said Ethics is the enquiry into what is valuable, or, into what is really important, or I could have said Ethics is the enquiry into the meaning of life, or into what makes life worth living, or into the right way of living. I believe if you look at all these phrases you will get a rough idea as to what it is that Ethics is concerned with.

Now the first thing that strikes one about all these expressions is that each of them is actually used in two very different senses. I will call them the trivial or relative sense on the one hand and the ethical or absolute sense on the other. If for instance I say that this is a good chair this means that the chair serves a certain predetermined purpose and the word good here has only meaning so far as this purpose has been previously fixed upon. In fact the word good in the relative sense simply means coming up to a certain predetermined standard. Thus when we say that this man is a good pianist we mean that he can play pieces of a certain degree of difficulty with a certain degree of dexterity. And similarly if I say that it is important for me not to catch cold I mean that catching a cold produces certain describable disturbances in my life and if I say that this is the right road I mean that it's the right road relative to a certain goal.

Used in this way these expressions don't present any difficult or deep problems. But this is not how Ethics uses them. Supposing that I could play tennis and one of you saw me playing and said "Well, you play pretty badly" and suppose I answered "I know, I'm playing pretty badly but I don't want to play any better," all the other man could say would be "Ah, then that's all right." But suppose I had told one of you a preposterous lie and he came up to me and said, "You're behaving like a beast" and then I were to say "I know I behave badly, but then I don't want to behave any better," could he then say "Ah, then that's all right"? Certainly not; he would say "Well, you ought to want to behave better." Here you have an absolute judgment of value, whereas the first instance was one of relative judgment.

The essence of this difference seems to be obviously this: Every judgment of relative value is a mere statement of facts and can therefore be put in such a form that it loses all the appearance of a judgment of value: Instead of saying "This is the right way to Granchester," I could equally well have said, "This is the right way you have to go if you want to get to Granchester in the shortest time"; "This man is a good runner" simply means that he runs a certain number of miles in a certain number of minutes, etc.

Now what I wish to contend is that, although all judgments of relative value can be shown to be mere statement of facts, no statement of fact can ever be, or imply, a judgment of absolute value.

Let me explain this: Suppose one of you were an omniscient person and therefore knew all the movements of all the bodies in the world dead or alive and that he also knew all the states of mind of all human beings that ever lived, and suppose this man wrote all he knew in a big book, then this book would contain the whole description of the world; and what I want to say is, that this book would contain nothing that we would call an ethical judgment or anything that would logically imply such a judgment. It would of course contain all relative judgments of value and all true scientific propositions and in fact all true propositions that can be made. But all the facts described would, as it were, stand on the same level and in the same way all propositions stand on the same level. There are no propositions which, in any absolute sense, are sublime, important, or trivial.

Now perhaps some of you will agree to that and be reminded of Hamlet's words: "Nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." But this again could lead to a misunderstanding. What Hamlet says seems to imply that good and bad, though not qualities of the world outside us, are attributes to our states of mind. But what I mean is that a state of mind, so far as we mean by that a fact which we can describe, is in no ethical sense good or bad.

If for instance in our world-book we read the description of a murder with all its details physical and psychological, the mere description of these facts will contain nothing which we could call an ethical proposition. The murder will be on exactly the same level as any other event, for instance the falling of a stone. Certainly the reading of description might cause us pain or rage or any other emotion, or we might read about the pain or rage caused by this murder in other people when they have heard of it, but there will simply be facts, facts, and facts but no Ethics.

And now I must say that if I contemplate what Ethics really would have to be if there were such a science, this result seems to me quite obvious. It seems to me obvious that nothing we could ever think or say should be the thing. That we cannot write a scientific book, the subject matter of which could be intrinsically sublime and above all other subject matters. I can only describe my feeling by the metaphor, that, if a man could write a book on Ethics which really was a book on Ethics, this book would, with an explosion, destroy all the other books in the world. Our words used as we use them in science, are vessels capable only of containing and conveying meaning and sense, natural meaning and sense. Ethics, if it is anything, is supernatural and our words will only express facts; as a teacup will only hold a teacup full of water and if I were to pour out a gallon over it.

I said that so far as facts and propositions are concerned there is only relative value and relative good, right, etc. And let me, before I go on, illustrate this by a rather obvious example. The right road is the road which leads to an arbitrarily predetermined end and it is quite clear to us all that there is no sense in talking about the right road apart from such a predetermined goal. Now let us see what we could possibly mean by the expression, 'the absolutely right road.' I think it would be the road which everybody on seeing it would, with logical necessity, have to go,or be ashamed for not going.

And similarly the absolute good, if it is a describable state of affairs, would be one which everybody, independent of his tastes and inclinations, would necessarily bring about or feel guilty for not bringing about. And I want to say that such a state of affairs is a chimera. No state of affairs has, in itself, what I would like to call the coercive power of an absolute judge.

Then what have all of us who, like myself, are still tempted to use such expressions as 'absolute good,' 'absolute value,' etc., what have we in mind and what do we try to express? Now whenever I try to make this clear to myself it is natural that I should recall cases in which I would certainly use these expressions and I am then in the situation in which you would be if, for instance, I were to give you a lecture on the psychology of pleasure. What you would do then would be to try and recall some typical situation in which you always felt pleasure. For, bearing this situation in mind, all I should say to you would become concrete and, as it were, controllable. One man would perhaps choose as stock example the sensation when taking a walk on a fine summer's day. Now in this situation I am, if I want to fix my mind on what I mean by absolute or ethical value.

And there, in my case, it always happens that the idea of one particular experience presents itself to me which therefore is, in a sense, my experience par excellence and this is the reason why, in talking to you now, I will use this experience as my first and foremost example. (As I have said before, this is an entirely personal matter and others would find other examples more striking.) I will describe this experience in order, if possible, to make you recall the same or similar experiences, so that we may have a common ground for our investigation.

I believe the best way of describing it is to say that when I have it I wonder at the existence of the world. And I am then inclined to use such phrases as 'how extraordinary that anything should exist' or 'how extraordinary that the world should exist.'

I will mention another experience straight away which I also know and which others of you might be acquainted with: it is, what one might call, the experience of feeling absolutely safe. I mean the state of mind in which one is inclined to say 'I am safe, nothing can injure me whatever happens.'

Now let me consider these experiences, for, I believe, they exhibit the very characteristics we try to get clear about. And there the first thing I have to say is, that the verbal expression which we give to these experiences is nonsense!

If I say 'I wonder at the existence of the world' I am misusing language. Let me explain this: It has a perfectly good and clear sense to say that I wonder at something being the case, we all understand what it means to say that I wonder at the size of a dog which is bigger than any one I have ever seen before or at any thing which, in the common sense of the word, is extraordinary. In every such case I wonder at something being the case which I could conceive not to be the case. I wonder at the size of this dog because I could conceive of a dog of another, namely the ordinary size, at which I should not wonder. To say 'I wonder at such and such being the case' has only sense if I can imagine it not to be the case.

In this sense one can wonder at the existence of, say, a house when one sees it and has not visited it for a long time and has imagined that it had been pulled down in the meantime. But it is nonsense to say that I wonder at the existence of the world, because I cannot imagine it not existing.

I could of course wonder at the world round me being as it is. If for instance I had this experience while looking into the blue sky, I could wonder at the sky being blue as opposed to the case when it's clouded. But that's not what I mean. I am wondering at the sky being whatever it is. One might be tempted to say that what I am wondering at is a tautology, namely at the sky being blue or not blue. But then it's just nonsense to say that one is wondering at a tautology.

Now the same applies to the other experience which I have mentioned, the experience of absolute safety. We all know what it means in ordinary life to be safe. I am safe in my room, when I cannot be run over by an omnibus. I am safe if I have had whooping cough and cannot therefore get it again. To be safe essentially means that it is physically impossible that certain things should happen to me and therefore it is nonsense to say that I am safe whatever happens. Again this is a misuse of the word 'safe' as the other example was of a misuse of the word 'existence' or 'wondering.'

Now I want to impress on you that a certain characteristic misuse of our language runs through all ethical and religious expressions. All these expressions seem, prima facie, to be just similes. Thus it seems that when we are using the word right in an ethical sense, although, what we mean, is not right in its trivial sense, it's something similar, and when we say 'This is a good fellow,' although the word good here doesn't mean what it means in the sentence 'This is a good football player' there seems to be some similarity. And when we say 'This man's life was valuable' we don't mean it in the same sense in which we would speak of some valuable jewelry but there seems to be some sort of analogy.

Now all religious terms seem in this sense to be used as similes or allegorically. For when we speak of God and that he sees everything and when we kneel and pray to him all our terms and actions seem to be parts of a great and elaborate allegory which represents him as a human being of great power whose grace we try to win etc.

But this allegory also describes the experience which I have just referred to. For the first of them is, I believe, exactly what people were referring to when they said that God had created the world; and the experience of absolute safety has been described by saying that we feel safe in the hands of God. Third experience of the same kind is that of feeling guilty and again this was described by the phrase that God disapproves of our conduct.

Thus in ethical and religious language we seem constantly to be using similes. But a simile must be the simile for something. And if I can describe a fact by means of a simile I must also be able to drop the simile and to describe the facts without it. Now in our case as soon as we try to drop the simile and simply to state the facts which stand behind it, we find that there are no such facts. And so, what at first appeared to be simile now seems to be mere nonsense.

Now the three experiences which I have mentioned to you (and I could have added others) seem to those who have experienced them, for instance to me, to have in some sense an intrinsic, absolute value. But when I say they are experiences, surely, they are facts; they have taken place then and there, lasted a certain definite time and consequently are describable. And so from what I have said some minutes ago I must admit it is nonsense to say that they have absolute value. And I will make my point still more acute by saying 'It is the paradox that an experience, a fact, should seem to have supernatural value.'

Now there is a way in which I would be tempted to meet this paradox. Let me first consider, again, our first experience of wondering at the existence of the world and let me describe it in a slightly different way; we all know the like of which we have never yet seen. Now suppose such an event happened. Take the case that one of you suddenly grew a lion's head and began to roar. Certainly that would be as extraordinary a thing as I can imagine. Now whenever we should have recovered from our surprise, what I would suggest would be to fetch a doctor and have the case scientifically investigated and if it were not for hurting him I would have him vivisected. And where would the miracle have got to?

For it is clear that when we look at it in this way everything miraculous has disappeared; unless what we mean by this term is merely that a fact has not yet been explained by science which again means that we have hitherto failed to group this fact with others in a scientific system. This shows that it is absurd to say 'Science has proved that there are no miracles.'

The truth is that the scientific way of looking at a fact is not the way to look at it as a miracle. For imagine whatever fact you may, it is not in itself miraculous in the absolute sense of that term. For we see now that we have been using it to describe the experience of wondering at the existence of the world by saying: it is the experience of seeing the world as a miracle.

Now I am tempted to say that the right expression in language for the miracle of the existence of the world, though it is not any proposition in language, is the existence of language itself. But what then does it mean to be aware of this miracle at some times and not at other times? For all I have said by shifting the expression of the miraculous from an expression by means of language to the expression by the existence of language, all I have said is again that we cannot express what we want to express and that all we can say about the absolute miraculous remains nonsense.

Now the answer to all this will seem perfectly clear to many of you. You will say: Well, if certain experiences constantly tempt us to attribute a quality to them which we call absolute or ethical value and importance, this simply shows that by these words we don't mean nonsense, that after all what we mean by saying that an experience has absolute value is just a fact like other facts and that all it comes to is that we have not yet succeeded in finding the correct logical analysis of what we mean by our ethical and religious expressions. Now when this is urged against me I at once see clearly, as it were in a flash of light, not only that no description that I can think of would do to describe what I mean by absolute value, but that I would reject every significant description that anybody could possibly suggest, ab initio, on the ground of its significance.

That is to say: I see now that these nonsensical expressions were not nonsensical because I had not yet found the correct expressions, but that their nonsensicality was their very essence. For all I wanted to do with them was just to go beyond the world and that is to say beyond significant language. My whole tendency and, I believe, the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language.

This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless. Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it.

Enter the Internet!

1. Warnings of 'internet overload'
2. Enter the Internet!

Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum in Compulsory Education

I found this in my dad's garage yesterday evening and finished reading it this morning:



The first half of the book is phenomenal; I think that everyone should read it. But as he goes on, I think his disdain for the current system gets a little carried away. I'll save my criticism for the moment; here are some excerpts from his first speech in the book, entitled "The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher":

"Teaching means different things in different places, but seven lessons are universally taught from Harlem to Hollywood Hills. They constitute a national curriculum you pay for in more ways than you can imagine, so you might as well know what it is."


1. Confusion

"The first lesson I teach is confusion. Everything I teach is out of context. I teach the un-related of everything. I teach dis-connections."

"Meaning, not disconnected facts, is what sane human beings seek, and education is a set of codes for processing raw data into meaning."


2. Class Position

"The second lesson I teach is class position. I teach that the students must stay in the class where they belong. [...] The children are numbered so that if any get away they can be returned right to class. Over the years the variety of ways children are numbered by schools has increased drastically, until it is hard to see the human beings plainly under the weight of the numbers they carry."


3. Indifference

"The third lesson I teach is indifference. I teach children not to care too much about anything, even though they want to make it appear that they do. How I do this is very subtle. I do it by demanding that they become totally involved in my lessons, jumping up and down in their seats with anticipation, competing vigorously with each other in my favor. [...] But when the bell rings I insist they drop whatever it is we have been doing and proceed quickly to the next work station. [...] Indeed the lesson of bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about anything?"


4. Emotional Dependency

"The fourth lesson I teach is emotional dependency. By stars and red checks, smiles and frowns, prizes, honors, and disgraces, I teach kids to surrender their will to a predestined chain of command."


5. Intellectual Dependency

"The fifth lesson I teach is intellectual dependency. Good students wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. It is the most important lesson, that we wait for other people better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives."


6. Professional Self-Esteem

"The sixth lesson I teach is professional self-esteem. [...] A monthly report, impressive in its provision, is sent to a student's home to elicit approval or mark exactly, down to a single percentage point, how dissatisfied with the child a parent should be. The ecology of "good" schooling depends on perpetuating dissatisfaction, just as the commercial economy depends on the same fertilizer."


7. One Can't Hide

"The seventh lesson I teach is that one can't hide. I teach students that they are always watched, that each is under constant surveillance by myself and my colleagues. [...] The meaning of constant surveillance and denial of privacy is that no one can be trusted, that privacy is not legitimate [for learning, (as I'd prefer to interpret it)]."

As to the rest of the book... I do agree, adamantly, that there is a distinction to be had between schooling and education and that the current structure of public schools in the United States is not particularly conducive to the latter. However, I refuse to agree that compulsory schooling is of no value whatsoever, nor do I agree that there is no need for professional educators in the transmission of knowledge.

For one, I don't feel that we can leave the education of our nation's youth (especially those of lower socioeconomic status) entirely to the private sector. (By this, I mean the task of providing a supply of resources to assist in learning, e.g. books, supplies, teachers.) That is, in my mind, a necessary and warranted function of the state. I feel that knowledgeable citizens are necessary for a democracy to function, and to not provide the resources for all citizens to become so is absolutely against our values—that if economic circumstances ultimately shape the acuity of a child's intellectual development, the American dream is a façade. To this end, I feel that it is important to teach our children¹ (much better than we do now) how to think critically, as well as to enstill in them a solid foundational knowledge base. I feel that paid teachers can still play a crucial role in all of this, but again in a very different way. In addition, I feel that there is an undeniable need for professional educators to instruct those with special needs, although our current system tends (in my experience) to do this task very poorly.


Another thing caught my eye while I was reading:

Perhaps it is time to try something different. "Good fences make good neighbors," said Robert Frost. The natural solution to learning to live together in a community is first to live apart as individuals and as families. Only when you feel good about yourself can you feel good about others.

As a junior high English teacher, Gatto surprised me by completely misinterpreting Robert Frost's "Mending Wall" in order to underscore one of his points. For one, "Good fences make good neighbors" is not the message of the poem. It is taken entirely out of context and contrary to its intended meaning. Secondly, to be picky, Robert Frost didn't "say" that, one of the two characters in the poem did. That is like quoting a murderous character in a Stephen King novel and attributing the quote to King.

For good measure, here's Frost's poem in its entirety:

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me—
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

Gatto also seems to have a very piecemeal working knowledge of philosophy. His frequent references to Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle are sometimes justified, but his insistence that the dialectics of Aristotle, Hobbes, and Marx were the same, as well as his insistence that "Lord [Bertrand] Russell" was the most important philosopher of the 20th century² (again to underscore a point), rubbed me the wrong way.


Public education is in need of radical reform, not abolition.

---

¹And, if necessary, adults as well... once we ideally get rid of undue age segregation.
²It's actually all about Wittgenstein: TIME 100: Ludwig Wittgenstein

Umm....

1. A Questionable Nominee
2. Bush Nominates Anti-Gay Doctor to Surgeon General Post
3. Bush Nominates Surgeon General Who Supports 'Ex-Gay' Therapy
4. Green Party opposes confirmation of antigay doctor as Surgeon General
5. Pathophysiology of Male Homosexuality

On On Ethics

I read through On Ethics by Marshall Missner some weeks ago and I was a little disappointed... but I had a thought along the way:

Mr. Missner frequently evaluates the "validity" of ethical systems by using moral "touchstones" (for lack of a better word). When raising an objection to a given approach (e.g. utilitarianism), he appeals to more-or-less "deontological" ethical presuppositions.

But rather than judging the efficacy of an ethical system by its adherence to a certain deontological canon, why not take that set of prescripts and build an ethical system based upon it... or otherwise weave one that adheres to that canon on all accounts by some other method.

Just a thought.

"America Votes 2008" (better title: The Right to Vote)

CNN held debates for Democratic and Republican hopefuls for the 2008 ticket:
1. CNN Republican debate: Video streams and downloads
2. CNN Democratic debate: Video streams and downloads


I've probably said this already, but when the time comes, drop the "vote or die" bullshit. It is not your duty and obligation as a United States citizen to vote. People can complain about the extremely low voter turn-outs, but that does not mean that having higher turn-outs would be more productive or more beneficial.

What I would like to suggest is that informed and attentive votes are what we need to maintain a properly functioning democracy. Plato, in fact, ranked pure democracies as the second lowliest form of governance...and for good reason: if a society's actions are determined by people with little knowledge of what is at hand, the results are going to be far from ideal.¹

However, to deny anyone the right to vote also flies in the face of democratic society. Accordingly, I feel that it is best to leave the right in tact while acknowledging social responsibility. In that sense, everyone can and should vote, but only if they've put in the time to have a fairly sophisticated grasp of the issues and what is at stake. It is an entirely voluntary measure: if you wish to vote, you have a social responsibility to educate yourself, but you should not have one without the other.

If this principle became the norm, the discourse of political campaigns would be vastly different. It would no longer focus on "swing voters" and sound bites, it would be a genuine cultural discussion of policy and credentials. No Swift Boat Vets, no deception... those participating in the elections would be the ones who have dedicated their time to researching everything at hand and in doing so have earned their right to vote.

Neither you nor I would want Paris Hilton to have any influence on any general election.


¹Yep, I did say this before (albeit more elegantly):

I think Plato was correct in calling unmitigated democracy one of the lowliest forms of government (just above tyranny, in fact): while largely self-determining, it lacks virtue.

More:
i. Donkey voting

"..." 7

I intentionally wrote it out to be an illegible mess.
You wanted me to write you letters, but I'd rather lose your address
and forget that we'd ever met and what did or did not occur.
Sitting in the station, it's all a blur
of dancehall hips, pretentious quips.
A boxer's bob and weave.

And here's the kicker of this whole shebang:
you're in debt and completely fooled, that you can look into the mirror and objectively rank your wounds.
Sewing circles are not solely based in trades of cloth...
there's spinsters all around here taking notes, reporting on us.

As information travels faster in the modern age, in the modern age
as our days are crawling by so slowly...
Information travels faster in the modern age, in the modern age
as our days are crawling by so slowly...

Information travels faster in the modern age, in the modern age
as our days are crawling by so slowly...
Information travels faster in the modern age, in the modern age
as our days are crawling by so slowly...