Tuesday, October 12, 2004

Homeschool or die: "I've never quite been able to wrap my mind around the notion that parents should not be notified that their children are being taught how to perform oral sex or are seeking to kill off the next generation. But the San Diego Unified School District has lowered the concept of in loco parentis insciens to new depths. I mean, you'd think that even the worst and most indifferent parent in the nation might like to know if his child is being targeted by suicide bombers, if only to take out an insurance policy."




Massachusetts: SJC set to weigh school funding: "The Supreme Judicial Court will hear arguments tomorrow about whether the state is shortchanging children in its poorest school systems in a lawsuit that could have sweeping implications for the way Massachusetts finances public education. If the state's highest court agrees with a Suffolk Superior Court judge that Massachusetts is failing to give enough money to poor districts, the ruling could force the state to overhaul the way it funds schools and require that hundreds of millions of dollars more be spent on education. The lawsuit, which is being argued 11 years after the SJC declared that Massachusetts had violated its constitutional duty to provide an adequate education to all public schoolchildren, could also influence similar cases pending in 23 other states, legal specialists say."




MODERN ACADEMIC ANTHROPOLOGY

Roger Sandall looks at one course in it:

"For instance, what use will it be? Will it be the kind of anthropology which helps students deal with the world in which they must somehow make a living? Or will it be the kind which merely spreads confusion, adding to the large number of resentful unemployables already walking Australian streets? In the two American film episodes which introduce the series, the following principles are emphatically announced:

"We study anthropology because we want to affirm and celebrate life, and understand it in all its richness, its complexity, its incredible diversity. Each human pattern for survival, each blueprint is in its own terms equally valid, worthwhile, and creative. Anthropology asks that we give up our ethnocentrism, the tendency to judge what others do solely by our own values and standards. If anthropology has one cardinal tenet, it is the equal validity of all cultures; that is, cultural relativism."


Moralistic effusion of this sort is hard to get a grip on. But there are advantages in having the dogmas of the Church of Cultural Relativism spelled out so clearly. Diversity is a Good Thing in itself. Ergo, a thousand false beliefs (about witchcraft for example) are actually better than one true belief about it. All cultural "blueprints for survival" are equally creative and worthwhile. Ergo, comparing and contrasting the "creative and worthwhile" moral premises of Nazi totalitarian culture with English parliamentary culture is not allowed.

All cultures are equally "valid". Well, if that's true we can all relax, for it obviously follows that western culture is okay too, and we don't have to feel apologetic about Darwin and Einstein or making a trip to the moon.

But that's not how it works at all. All cultures are equally valid-but some are more valid than others. And as if to demonstrate his own gift for self-contradiction, the narrator has no sooner given his sermon on "equal validity" than we see a film sequence showing the arrival of the Spanish in Mexico, accompanied by wails of complaint about "ethnocentrism". It seems that when Aztecs massacre their neighbours in imperial wars, it is just the spontaneous creativity of a boisterous soldiery validly doing its own thing. But when Spaniards massacre Aztecs, it's an awful sin.

Is this helpful? What is the practical consequence of naively translating the all-forgiving religious notion of equality before God into the moral language of anthropological relativism? Its most likely result is to paralyze thought, to neutralize moral judgment, and to maximise intellectual confusion

More here.


***************************

For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

***************************

No comments: