Category: Teaching, Learning, and Education

I happened to check in on CNN.com and found this article entitled “Republicans unveil $100 million school voucher plan.”

Even though the Department of Education “just released a study that raises questions about whether private schools offer any advantage over public ones,” Congress wants to give families in poor schools up to $4000 towards private school tuition. “Supporters say poor parents deserve choices, like rich families have,” the article points out.

Ok. Time for Google-fu. From this site, you can find out what the accredited private schools in your area are. Remember, if it isn’t accredited, you should ask why. These days, most schools have websites. For example, if you live in Las Vegas, you will find a list which includes Las Vegas Day School, and if you enter that into the search engine of your choice (if ths school name doesn’t include a city, add it), you will find it — oddly enough — at www.lasvegasdayschool.com. With a little digging, you should be able to find tuition information about most schools, in this case $10,500 per year. This does not include uniforms, book fees, extracurriculars, transportation, or “After School Study Hall.” Please keep in mind, LVDS is a top quality private school. If your kid qualifies, and you can afford it, and there is a seat, by all means send them. Please feel free to research each school in your area. Keep in mind that church run schools can afford to provide education at below cost, and a plan which includes religious schools would probably not pass Constitutional muster. Also keep in mind that very small schools have lower expenses, and may be nothing more than a “front” for a homeschool group. Not that there is anything wrong with homeschooling, but homeschool is not a private school.

Finished the research? Good. So now you have a pretty good idea what tuition at a private school in your area costs? I bet it’s more than $4000 per year.

Now let’s move on to this report which tells us (emphasis mine):

[T]his report details the results of the Goldwater Institute’s first annual statewide survey of Arizona private schools, representing over 20 percent of private schools in Arizona. It shows that private schools serve a diverse student population and offer a variety of curricula at roughly half the average public school expenditure of $7,816 per student. The average private elementary and middle school tuition is $3,700, and 89 percent of private schools offer financial aid. Three-quarters of private schools surveyed are sectarian, but 83 percent of those schools do not require religious affiliation for admission. Ninety-three percent of private schools surveyed administer standardized tests annually. Nearly 80 percent of private schools surveyed offer kindergarten, and 49 percent offer preschool programs. Forty-three percent of Arizona private schools surveyed accept special needs students, and nearly half of them have room for more. Private schools typically have half the student population of public schools and have smaller classes, 14 students per teacher compared to 18 students per teacher in public schools on average.

To review, they got data from one out of every 5 private schools in one state. Most of them offered financial aid despite the fact that I have yet to encounter a private school that did so. Among those schools, 75% were religious and probably won’t be able to receive Federal funds. Is “average” the mean or the median? Does the “average” figure of $3700 include unaccredited schools? Does it include very small schools? Oh yeah, and at over half of these schools, good luck if your kid has any kind of “special need.”

Oh, and by the way, where is the money to fund this going to come from? The Social Security lockbox?? Congress and the President keep talking about bringing the budget deficit down, but then they turn around and offer to spend $100,000,000.00!

A voucher of $4000 is a cruel joke on the middle class. For more of my musings on this topic, see my fourth post. In that very early post I also point out that voucher programs can result in de facto government control of private schools (“If you want the money, you have to do things our way”). I don’t think anybody wants that.

The nice folks at NYC Educator also have things to say about this, and I’m sure other education-centered blogs will weigh in Shortly.

It is my personal opinion — and forgive me if you’ve heard me say it before — that everything that goes on at a school needs to be measured by one double edged yardstick: Is it safe, and does it help educate children? If something isn’t safe, it doesn’t belong in school, end of discussion. If it doesn’t help educate children, it is suspect. There’s a lot of leeway on this side, because sometimes non-educational issues effect learning. For example, school breakfast programs don’t really teach kids much (except maybe what a balanced breakfast looks like when it doesn’t include a bowl of sugary, unnaturally colored breakfast cereal), but hungry kids have a hard time thinking about math.

Now, one thing that The People In Charge say is that they want students to be able to solve problems. Many schools have elaborate programs with catchy acronyms to help kids solve problems. Yet actions speak louder than words, and most schools say through their actions that they don’t really care if problems get solved, as long as we can pretend everything is just fine.

All too many times, a problem is misidentified. You have probably had this experience: you try to talk to somebody about a problem, and that somebody focuses on the example you used instead of the underlying issue, or worse yet they percieve the problem as something completely unrelated to the matter at hand.

This brings me to an item I read this morning. “According to the U.S. Department of Education’s latest figures possible, in 2002, more than 2,500 children were expelled from school for a period of one year for bringing a firearm to school.” That’s pretty serious! Granted, there are over 47 million kids, in almost a quarter of a million schools. But to put this in perspective, the number of kids were expelled for bringing firearms to school in 2002 is roughly equal to the number of American soldiers who have died in Iraq to date. Please remember, this is only the number of kids who brought guns to school who were both caught and expelled. There is no way to know how many kids brought guns to school without being caught, or how many were caught but not expelled for some reason.

The item in question, correctly, goes on: “Statistics like this should give us pause and ask, ‘Why and how are children getting their hands on guns?'” Why and How are exactly the right questions, and in the right order! How unfortunate that the rest of the article focuses on the fact that we must keep guns out of the hands of kids because after all guns can kill people.

When I see the examples outlined — kids wanting to make “another Columbine” or “kill classmates and faculty” — I can’t help but ask why?? What is going on at these schools that this seems like a good idea? What is so horrible in that environment that killing people seems like a perfectly good way to solve the problem?

Of course guns are not safe and therefore do not belong in school. However, an environment that makes kids believe violence can solve their problems is also not safe, and also does not belong in school.

In closing: sure, it’s a great idea to send a bunch of white supremacists to be peacekeepers in a place where everybody is brown; the 10 most powerful figures in the Religious Right; you may have a Bad Boss, but I bet he didn’t try to have you put in jail as a terror suspect; and job growth is less than expected, with 121,000 new jobs being created in June (revised May number is 92,000). Remember, the economy needs between 150,000 and 200,000 new jobs in a month just to keep up with new people entering the workforce. So when the White House points out that 1.85 million jobs were created in the last 12 months, they are hoping you won’t notice that barely keeps up with demand.

Please notice, “Teaching, Learning, and Education” is a new topic category here on ShortWoman. I will be revising the category on old items. If you have linked to them, please be aware that you may have to revise the link. Sorry for the inconvenience.

The two most misused phrases in the education world today are “developmentally appropriate” and “kinesthetic learner.” In that order. When I was in school “peer group relations” and “self-esteem” were the most misused buzz-terms. But in real life, kids can do much more than most adults give them credit for, regardless of age; and the vast majority of kids called “kinesthetic learners” would be a whole lot less kinesthetic if somebody took away their sugar fix.

When it comes to standardized testing, there is a fine line between not enough and too much.

Most (accredited) private schools are better than bad public schools, but a startling number are really only as good as good public schools. Any private school that does not have a waiting list can’t really afford to let students get too far ahead of “good public school” levels, because it will hurt recruiting. If your 5th graders are doing 7th grade work, how do you get more 5th graders, and what do you do with them if they come? Put them in 3rd grade?

You can learn a lot about a teacher or school administrator by what they think about “drill and kill” versus “practice makes perfect.”

Remember when I said that if I were education czar I would compile standards of what kids should know and be able to do at what grade? It turns out that Washington is doing just that, albeit with less community input than I think would be optimal. Also, these are state standards, not national ones. The national standard under NCLB is still “better.”

A some point parents need to let kids develop responsibility for themselves. Preferably, this should be before college. It’s one thing to stand up for your kid, it’s another thing to do everything for your kid.

Dyslexia may be overrated.

Not new information to me, but it still bears mentioning that “educational flavor of the year” is not a good way to run a school. Wouldn’t it be simpler to use tried-and-true things that are proven to work? Sometimes I think the idea is that the teachers get bored with the old-fashioned way of doing things.

It has not been my imagination that textbooks are getting dumber. I first noticed this in 4th grade, and things have only gotten worse since then. If I may paraphrase Bart Simpson, “Now let me get this straight. We are behind, so we are going to catch up by going slower? Cuckoo! Cuckoo!”

A bunch of parents are starting to think that — since everybody says kids learn languages better and faster than grown-ups — Asian languages might be a better choice for schools to teach than Spanish in the coming century.

Good item on teacher recruiting here.

I hope you have enjoyed these admittedly random facts, and that you will be encouraged to think about education (among other things) for yourself.

In closing: How does this work? “Social Security numbers, names, and addresses, and were transmitted to an unknown hacker by the keylogger,” yet “No taxpayer financial data was lost to the keylogger.” Which is it? Krugman on the fear of fear itself. Star Trekking across American forests and Scottish Highlands. Apologies to Mel Brooks, but it must be good to be King. Coming soon to a news report near you, Crisis in Palestine. The West cut off the money to starve the “terrorists,” but the terrorists are the only ones with money. Muhammed Average gets caught in the middle. Norway is prepared for the End of the World as We Know It, but do they feel fine? And finally, the Duhpartment of Research shows that vegetables are good for you.

But I Hate Teacher Appreciation Week.

Depending where you are, either this week or next is Teacher Appreciation Week. The fact that it is a week at all is evidence that the whole thing is out of hand, inasmuch as the National Education Association only recognizes a National Teacher Day.

If you have a child in a school that celebrates Teacher Appreciation Week, you have most likely been approached — or at the very least received a note — reminding you of the event and asking you to help out at a teacher luncheon or maybe contributing for a group gift. Perhaps your local parent/teacher group is really out of hand and has organized events and suggested gifts for each day of the week. By way of contrast, look at the suggestions from the actual national PTA and the California PTA. Notice the emphasis on small tokens of esteem and community building expressions of gratitude. Oh, and better yet, notice that the folks in California encourage periodic (and inexpensive) appreciation of teachers throughout the year.

Someone needs to take the handful of busybody parents who are turning this into a big magilla aside and explain a few things to them. Teacher Appreciation is about saying thanks, nothing more. Parents do not have the time and money to pick a thoughtful gift or five for each of their kids’ homeroom teachers. And let’s not forget that in a modern school there are specialists to consider! Even if you only spend $5 on each of them, it adds up in a hurry. It is hardly fair to leave out each child’s Spanish, Drama, Music, PE, Art, Science and Math teacher. While you are at it, don’t forget the staffers who make it possible for everyone to get work done: the Principal, teaching assistants, reading specialists, school librarian, and probably a half dozen other people. Do we appreciate them any less because they don’t have a homeroom? Should we?

Nor, frankly, do teachers want to be buried under a mountain of gifts no matter how thoughtful from each of the hundred kids who they teach in any given week. They can only use so many “World’s Best Teacher” mugs, there’s only room for so many bouquets on their desks, they don’t a mountain of muffins for breakfast, they can really only keep track of a dozen or so Border’s Gift Cards without splitting their wallets.

And worst of all, kids get caught in the middle, ferrying notes and gifts. There is inevitably somebody who has brought something cooler and somebody who has brought nothing. And who exactly is teaching the kids during that teacher appreciation luncheon on Friday? Nobody.

This is a holiday not even Hallmark could love. Yeah, they’re skipping this one in favor of Mother’s Day.

In closing: You won’t be needing those Fourth and Fifth Amendments, will you? Good, good. Thoughts from Blumenthal on the Administration. What has Al Gore been up to lately? Some funny pictures. An article about why there never seem to be any pens in the supply closet. And last but certainly not least, Willie Nelson on the growing farm crisis: why good farms, healthy food, healthy environment, and healthy local economies go together.

So today I went and voted myself higher taxes.

About 20 local school districts are requesting more money from taxpayers. Such elections are a bit controversial: they pit the right of all children in the state to get a consistent level of education wherever they may happen to live with the right of parents to vote themselves higher taxes and better schools. Although theoretically any community can decide to pay more money for schools, the fact of the matter is that in poor communities — whether they are urban or rural — there is no more money. School inequity will be a fact of life as long as schools can receive funds from property taxes.

Another problem with such levies is that they are often approach extortion. Proponents will say that sure, you can vote against the levy, but then there will be overcrowding. Or if voters say no to the school expansion they will just have to spend the same kind of money on portable classrooms and surely you don’t want that. Or surely you don’t want to destroy the [insert popular program, class, or extracurricular here]. Or surely you want the kids to have the latest technology, don’t you?

Now, this last point is very sensitive in these parts. Large local employers include Boeing, several large medical/hospital groups, and Microsoft. Those companies all use computer technology. One of them makes computer technology. I suppose you could, through convoluted logic, say that school technology levies create local jobs. It wouldn’t be true, but you can say it. It isn’t like Microsoft has to write new code every time a school district orders a thousand new PCs.

I actually have a problem with this.

Computers are pretty expensive. Particularly when a school district wants to buy hundreds or even thousands of them. And these resources aren’t like desks, that last for many years and can be replaced piecemeal. And these resources aren’t like textbooks, where certain subjects like Math or English Literature just don’t change much from year to year. These computers that the local school district wants to buy today will be hopelessly obsolete in 5 years, unable to run modern programs and operating systems, many crippled by malware, and the school district will want to buy new ones. I have seen schools that had rooms full of obsolete computer equipment. Rooms full of taxpayer money long since spent and now occupying a room that should be full of children.

I am leaving aside for now discussion of the fact that most educational software that I have come in contact with in the last 10 years is crap. Furthermore, I will overlook the fact that the “computer curriculum” in most schools is nothing more than “Typing 1 and How to Use Microsoft Office.” Don’t tell me about how great digital textbooks can be and how schools can save on buying classroom quantities of classic literature unless you can tell me the title of the last book you read cover to cover at Project Gutenberg.

Almost all school districts would be better off leasing computer equipment. This would mean that every year or two, schools would have new, fast, virus free computers and peripherals. The money for technology could be planned and budgeted rather than begged from the populace every 5 years. Kids would consistently be using current technology — one of the stated purposes of having technology in the classroom in the first place. And school districts would not have to figure out how to dispose of ancient hardware. That is a win-win-win-win situation if I ever saw one.

If a High School or advanced Junior High group (I refuse to call it Middle School) wants to build computers, that’s wonderful and I applaud it. I wish more High Schools had hands on practical educational experiences. But the vast majority of computers in schools should really be leased.

Maybe you heard about it, and maybe you actually watched John Stossel’s “Stupid In America.” To be fair, Mr. Stossel is a small-l libertarian and has been airing his opinions about the American educational system since at least 1999, so we can all be forgiven if this sounds like things he has said before. This is only the latest salvo.

I’d like to take a couple paragraphs from Reason’s coverage of the show, as written by Mr. Stossel:

The Belgians did better [on identical tests given to Belgian and American students] because their schools are better. At age ten, American students take an international test and score well above the international average. But by age fifteen, when students from forty countries are tested, the Americans place twenty-fifth. The longer kids stay in American schools, the worse they do in international competition. They do worse than kids from countries that spend much less money on education.

This should come as no surprise once you remember that public education in the USA is a government monopoly. Don’t like your public school? Tough. The school is terrible? Tough. Your taxes fund that school regardless of whether it’s good or bad. That’s why government monopolies routinely fail their customers. Union-dominated monopolies are even worse.

Now, I am willing to let stand the facts he cites in the first paragraph, and assume he has statistics to back them up. Namely, 10 year old American students test well compared to their international peers, but 15 year old American students do not. Our inner scientists should immediately ask why: what are they doing that we are not; what is different; is it the schools, the teachers, the methods, the teaching materials? Obviously something changes between age 10 — when kids are doing fine — and age 15 — when they are not. By and large, the families and neighborhoods of these kids have not changed, which limits the number of factors which could be at work. Mr. Stossel does well to point out that our kids appear to get dumber the more school they attend and money is not the magic factor.

I would love to sit him down with John Taylor Gatto for an hour or so and televise the results.

Unfortunately for all of us, Mr. Stossel does not ask “what do the Belgians do with kids aged 10-15 that we do not?” Instead, he makes the logical leap that “the state monopoly on education is to blame.” He envisions a capitalist frenzy where “There could soon be technology schools, cheap Wal-Mart-like schools, virtual schools where you learn at home on your computer, sports schools, music schools, schools that go all year, schools with uniforms, schools that open early and keep kids later, and, who knows? If there were competition, all kinds of new ideas would bloom.” Strangely enough, Mr. Stossel appears unaware of the many private schools in the United States, schools with philosophies, fees, and performance levels as variable as snowflakes. Oh, and let’s not even bring up homeschooling.

Curious about Belgian schools? According to this, the multiple languages spoken in Belgium are an issue, and “As well as state schools, there are subsidised ‘free’ and independent schools, often run on religious lines, though their curricula and certification are recognised equally within the system.” This tends to indicate to me that the broad strokes of curricula are controlled at the national level, and some sort of certification is conferred much like “accreditation” in the United States.

Perhaps more important to the mystery of why 15 year old Belgians are smarter than 15 year old Americans is that they “start to channel students into general, vocational, technical or artistic streams depending on individual choice and ability,” and “Assessment is ongoing and rigidly enforced.” In other words, they admit the heresy that not everybody is college material. Vocational and technical training is a good thing. Furthermore, nobody gets promoted without having the skills and knowledge to move on. Notice the difference between No Child Left Behind and this ongoing, enforced assessment: in NCLB the school fails but the kids move on to underperform at a higher level; in Belgium, the student keeps working until they have the skills to move on.

Gee, no wonder.

In closing, I bring you coyotes in a neighborhood near you (Wile E…. er, wiley, aren’t they?), more approval ratings than you can shake a stick at (thanks, Sarah!), who says wheelchairs can’t be cool, maybe living wage is an easier issue to rally behind than secretly spying on Americans, and finally a must read item, States caught up in Real ID nightmare. Remember two things: the primary purpose of a driver’s license is showing that someone can safely operate a motor vehicle; and just because we know who somebody is doesn’t mean we know if somebody is a bad guy.

By now, most schools have already had their Christmas programs, and planning for some sort of Spring Extravaganza may well be well underway. Have no fear, next year’s Christmas program will be planned by the end of summer. This being the case, you might consider forwarding this to a school drama or music teacher, or saving it until the proper time.

Over the years I have attended, performed in, and planned many amateur productions with groups that ranged from preschoolers to adults and absolutely everything in between. These productions have included concerts, plays, pageants, musicals, operas, cantatas, recitals, competitions, and some things I am probably willfully forgetting. I would like to think I have learned a thing or three about such endeavors, and thus would like to share my extremely limited wisdom with you.

Consider your audience. It’s size, that is. With an adult production you can control attendance by issuing tickets, even if you don’t charge for them. When you are out of tickets, you don’t let anybody else in. If there is enough demand, you run a second night. That’s pretty simple. With a school production you must assume that each and every student will be accompanied by at the very least two parents, and perhaps five or six people once siblings and grandparents are figured in. It is safe to say that your bare minimum audience size will be three times the number of performers. Now think about that for a minute: Do you have enough room for all of them to sit? In chairs? Will the Fire Marshal be alright with that? Is there enough parking? If the answer to any of these questions is “no,” you must either reduce the number of performers — maybe break the performance into separate grade levels or groups — or find another performance hall.

Shorter is Better. Trust me, I speak for everyone when I say that it is better to do four musical numbers well than six badly. Furthermore, your younger performers and their parents will truly appreciate a shorter program. Not even movies usually run two hours anymore; what makes you think your production is worth that kind of time? This is another case for having multiple performances by separate groups. So some people will have to *gasp* be there for two nights. That’s show-biz.

Remember the Basic Rules of Stagecraft. Things like “risers are for standing on, not dancing and stomping.” “When performers turn around, their voices don’t go out to the audience.” “Large groups of children speaking in unison cannot be understood.” “Singing and choreography are at least three times as hard as either thing alone.” Please, make sure every performer knows the very first thing I ever learned about drama: YOU MUST SPEAK LOUDLY AND SLOWLY FOR THE AUDIENCE TO UNDERSTAND YOU. Oh, and I don’t care how much you loved “Cats,” it is a bad idea to send performers running through the audience, particularly if you have ignored my advice about audience size and thus have a standing-room-only crowd.

Avoid Anything Labeled “A Musical for Young Voices.” Seriously. Especially if it butchers old songs with cutesy lyrics. Particularly if it comes with an accompaniment tape or CD. A minimum of 95% of such works stink, and you have better things to do that try to find the one that doesn’t. We aren’t talking Rodgers and Hammerstein here. The plots are usually insipid, the lines designed to showcase the handful of kids with good stage presence and otherwise give a token line to everybody. The music is usually mercifully forgettable, although each song tends to be at least one verse too long — and you can’t cut verses when using a pre-recorded accompaniment. If you just have to do a musical, why not write it in house? Older kids can write the lines, or you can adapt a short book. As for music, we live in a world with thousands of folk songs and hundreds of Christmas songs. These are familiar songs which students might encounter again someday, not some throwaway tune that they will never hear again.

Consider and Communicate Logistics. This is absolutely vital when you have multiple groups of performers! Not one person in your audience came to see somebody move music stands for 10 minutes. Consider the most efficient way to use your performance space over the course of the entire show. Use curtains, risers, scenery, judicious intermissions, announcements, and multiple stage hands to advantage whenever possible. Furthermore, be sure your performers know where to go before the show, how to get to their place in the show, and where to go after the show. Do not assume they know. When your performers are students, make sure their parents know when and where to drop them off, pick them up, and what they should be wearing. Make this known at least two weeks before the show, and remind them as critical times approach.

Thank you for your patience. Season’s Greetings, everyone!

If someone in the Capitol were to suddenly lose his/her mind and say “Let’s put the ShortWoman in charge of the educational system,” I know what I would do.

My first day, I would call for a great conference to discuss High School Graduation Requirements. Specifically, I would assemble a small committee, maybe a dozen people, recruited to more or less equally represent parents, business leaders, community leaders, and front line teachers. These people would be encouraged to solicit a wish list from their peers before the first actual meeting.

The goal would be to come up with a list of knowledge and skills that most parents, communities, businesses, and teachers can agree every single high school graduate should have. This list would be broken into broad topics, but get very specific. For example, “Ability to read” would be followed by a list of the types of documents that any high school graduate should be able to read and understand (IRS instructions, newspapers, cookbook, etc.). “Broad understanding of Social Studies” would be broken down into specific requirements for History, Geography, Cultures/Customs, Economics, and the like. Some of the requirements will not be things that can be determined on a multiple choice test. Being able to reason through a multi-disciplinary problem can be that way. These requirements would then be compared to the entry requirements for state universities, with the goal of completely eliminating remedial college coursework after implementation.

Some people are coughing and sputtering that such requirements will make it more difficult for students to receive high school diplomas. Yes, yes it will. But at the end, it will be clear that someone who has obtained a high school diploma has accomplished something, and has a practical, minimum level of education which employers and the community can depend upon. Besides which, it turns out that many students want to be challenged and will surely rise to the occasion, given the opportunity. It will also change the meaning of the “dropout rate,” which currently means the percentage of kids who can be pushed through the system minus those who the school can pretend are attending elsewhere.

Once this comprehensive list was compiled, it will be broken down into age appropriate grade level requirements. So, at the beginning of the school year, Little Jimmy may come home with a bit of paper for his parents that says “Your child is in third grade. By the end of this year, as a prerequisite for continuing to the next grade, he will know the following….” Social promotions will stop, because it will be clear when a child arrives at the next grade unprepared. Summer school will continue to be an important piece of the puzzle, both for students catching up and brushing up, and for teachers who are learning valuable teaching methods. Teaching methods, by the way, will be measured against whether or not they actually work.

By way of follow-up, it turns out that Real ID (Good! Fight it in court!) and bus and train safety (Hello! London! Madrid!) are unfunded mandates. Other items to consider: FOIA reveals FBI has thousands of pages on peaceful groups, another opinion on the “shrinking” budget deficit, and two views on biofuels.

Today I was reading an article about a PBS documentary called “The Education of Shelby Knox.” The show, to air tonight, documents the transformation of Miss Knox, Bible-Believing, chastity pledge taking girl, into a remarkably wise young woman who — while still a devout Christian — believes in tolerance and comprehensive reproductive education.*

Comprehensive reproductive education, as contrasted with “abstinence only” reproductive education, teaches about contraception and disease prevention, along with basic biological facts about human reproduction. Abstinence only programs are the only kind for which a school can get Federal funding, meaning our tax dollars pay for a semester of “just say no.” Furthermore, in Texas and some other states, abstinence only is the only thing schools are allowed to teach. Miss Knox began to see the problems with abstinence only programs when she found that her school district had very high rates of teen pregnancy and STDs. Make no mistake, abstinence is a very effective form of disease and pregnancy prevention, but only if you do it — um, don’t do it — every time.

I support comprehensive reproductive education too, but for different reasons than many people. I find the philosophy of “they are going to do it anyway; they should at least have protection” to be unsatisfying. If that is our yardstick, then we should take down speed limit signs, since most people exceed the speed limit anyway. Instead, I begin with one basic premise: adults have a right to medically accurate information about contraception. Notice that I am speaking of adults. If you cannot agree with me on this statement, then we truly have no middle ground to start on. Enjoy your theocratic utopia.

Now then. Adults have a right to this information. Indeed, in 1965 the Supreme Court ruled that adults have a right to more than information: they have a right to contraceptives. Is it realistic to expect every adult of childbearing age to make an appointment to consult their doctor about contraceptives? In this age of managed care, in a country where 15% of the population has no medical insurance? No.

Alright, so we have a right to medical information and we aren’t getting it from our doctors. Nor is it reasonable to expect every citizen to go to college and find out about it there. And since at least 99% of the population has genitals of one flavor or another, this is hardly a special interest topic that concerned parties should look up online.

Now, in this nation, a young person legally becomes an adult when they turn 18 for most purposes. Most high school graduates are 18, making them legally adults. Not only are most high school seniors adults with the moral and legal right to this information, but high school is the last realistic place where such information can be mass-distributed, with professionals on hand to answer questions as they arise.

Parallel to this topic, I would like to repeat that pharmacists who refuse to dispense prescription contraceptives and “morning after pills” for moral reasons are skating on thin ice indeed. Not only will these same people gladly fill prescriptions for male performance and lifestyle drugs, they forget that prescription contraceptives have other medical uses. Furthermore, just like when Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said that any judge who was against the death penalty should resign, any pharmacist who is against dispensing legal, medically indicated prescriptions should resign. To do less is to follow their morals only when they inconvenience others.

Gosh, it feels good to use a conservative argument against conservatives.

* In order to not be flagged as a naughty-naughty site by various filters, I am specifically not using “the S word.” I don’t have to spell it out, do I?

I have for many years had an interest in education and the educational system. I think it may have started with a copy of Why Johnny Can’t Read or The Closing of the American Mind found on a discount book rack when I was in college. The one incontrovertible conclusion I have come to is that absolutely everything that happens in a school needs to be measured by two yardsticks: Does it promote student safety? and Does it educate students? Once we have established that it is safe and educational, then we can start asking more difficult questions, such as what it teaches and how well it does so. If it isn’t safe and educational, it doesn’t belong in school. The end.

Perhaps my ideas on education and education reform are biased by the fact that I read downright subversive things on the subject, such as the writings of Etta Kralovec and former award winning teacher John Taylor Gatto. Kralovec speaks to me about what schools should be like; Gatto speaks to that part of me that realized many years ago that most teachers are not out there to teach independent thought. There are of course many excellent exceptions to this idea, but they are yet a minority. Perhaps one in ten of the teachers and professors you remember wanted you to truly think beyond applying a narrow classroom concept to a narrow classroom example.

Nevertheless, I read a news item last night that caused my jaw to drop open. It involves a series of experiments in India involving unschooled children and unsupervised computer use. This IT expert set up computer kiosks in areas of poverty, positioned so that only kids could use them. And then he set the kids loose. The results are consistent:

With the computer switched on, the children press all the keys and every mouse button.

But Sugata has noticed a pattern emerging after the first initial chaos.

“You find that the noise level begins to come down, and from somewhere a leader appears.

“Often his face is not visible in the crowd, but he is controlling the mouse because suddenly you see the mouse begin to move in an orderly fashion.

“And then suddenly a lot of children’s voices will say ‘Oh, that pointer can be moved!’ And then you see the first click, which – believe it or not – happens within the first three minutes.”

Narput Singh has the mouse and takes control. And within three minutes he has clicked and, to his surprise and pleasure, inadvertently opened a game.

He doesn’t distinguish between educational games and those that are just for fun, and he is soon learning English words through a painting game with colours to fill in.

Whilst he is picking up the use of the computer directly, others around him are absorbing what he does.

For Sugata, it is this group learning which is significant.

“We know that in nine months the entire group of children in a village would have reached approximately the level of an office secretary, which means they know dragging and dropping files, they know downloading, they can play video and audio and they can surf the internet”.

That’s right. Within 3 minutes, leadership evolves, and they figure out how to use a mouse. Mr. Sugata’s conclusion: “Groups of children given adequate digital resources can meet the objectives of primary education on their own – most of the objectives.” And remember, these kids started the experiment barely literate and with no computer experience whatsoever. Of course, his idea of “meet[ing] the objectives of primary education” may differ wildly from your or mine or the Principal of the local school’s idea, but the concept is intriguing, startling.

Maybe schools are the problem.

In closing, it is not too late to make noise about the Federal Government’s back door effort to put together a national ID card system at state expense. This thing goes beyond the stated purpose of trying to keep drivers licenses out of the hands of illegal immigrants. Remember, the purpose of a Drivers License is to show that you know how to drive. Just because it gets used as identification does not make that it’s primary purpose. The fact that non-compliant cards “could not be used as IDs for boarding planes, entering federal buildings or even to pick up mail at the post office” makes them an internal passport, required at checkpoints everywhere. And you won’t be able to challenge it in court, in person anyway.

I once watched a cashier refuse to take a check from a man because he had a state ID card instead of a state drivers license. He looked at her as if she were out of her mind and simply said “I am legally blind!”

Another bit of anecdotal evidence showing that we need more ability to think independently in this country.