Tuesday, December 11, 2007

EDUBLOGGER WANTED

There are quite a lot of education bloggers around so I am pleased to say that this blog survives the competition well enough to get around 150 hits per day. That may not seem much but it is better than 99% of all blogs.

What I put up here is basically whatever I come across in my days's reading that interests me both from a libertarian/conservative point of view and from my point of view as a former teacher at both the High School and University levels.

Education is however a huge field and I am acutely aware that I cover only a small fraction of what I could cover. And I think that a wider coverage would lead to more readers. So I would be very pleased if I could get a co-blogger who would help expand what the blog covers. Getting access to an established blog is a lot easier than starting a new blog so I hope someone will contact me about this.

Their general orientation would of course have to be libertarian/conservative but I think that any regular reader of this blog would fill the bill. The most consistent message of the blog so far has been that there should be much more privatization of schooling. I write from a country where over 40% of High School students already go to private schools so that is not totally blue-sky.





Academic Free Speech For Me, But Not For Thee

By Richard L. Cravatts

As evidence of what Professor Edward Alexander has called "the explosive power of boredom" in rousing the liberal professoriate to its ideological feet, Harvard's own Professor of Anthropology and of African and African American Studies, L. Roland Matory, called upon his academic peers once again in a November faculty meeting to foster

"a civil dialogue in which people with a broad range of perspectives feel safe and are encouraged to express their reasoned and evidence-based ideas."

And what were those "reasoned" ideas that had caused professor Matory to feel "unsafe" on Harvard's insulated campus? Criticism of Zionism and Israel, of course, an issue about which Professor Matory and others have many notorious opinions, but which are being suppressed, in his view, through "widespread censorship of dissent about Israel-Palestine." Professor Matory's implication is that on this one issue-criticism of Israel-the sacrosanct notion of "academic freedom" is being threatened by those pro-Israel opponents who wish to stifle all speech critical of the Jewish state.

But like many of his fellow travelers on the academic left, Professor Matory makes the mistake of assuming that academic freedom, and its stepchild academic free speech, is a bundle of rights that can be exercised without regard to those two other fundamental principles of higher education: academic responsibility and a fervent commitment to actual scholarship, as opposed to ideology parading as what he calls "reasoned and evidence-based ideas." With great regularity, academic imbecility and fraudulent scholarship have been substituted for reasoned inquiry on our campuses, and, observes Michael Rubin, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, "academic freedom is meant to protect scholarship, not replace it."

Professor Matory is not the first academic to bemoan the oppressive and fearful might of pro-Israel forces in stifling any criticism or discussion of Israel; and his outrage and trepidations might inspire sympathy save for the inconvenient fact that the sheer volume and frequency of chronic, unrelenting, vitriolic, and one-sided demonization of Zionism and Israel on campuses worldwide makes Professor Matory's claims of being cowered into silence by Israel's supporters a bit disingenuous.

In that respect, Professor Matory shares a similar view with the Kennedy School's Stephen Walt, who, with University of Chicago's John Mearsheimer, recently published The Israel Lobby, a book-length version of an earlier paper that revealed the existence, in their minds, of a powerful, cabalistic lobby in America working to sway public policy and jeopardize America's international standing, all to Israel's advantage.

"The goal [of the Israel Lobby]," they wrote, in words similar to Matory's own wild observations, "is to prevent critical commentary about Israel from getting a fair hearing in the political arena." While their insidious bit of scholarship, which Eliot A. Cohen, a professor at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, called an "inept, even kooky academic work," soared to the top of the non-fiction bestseller's list and sent the pair off on a nationwide book tour, they still manage without embarrassment to proclaim that they are, like Matory," touching the "third rail" of political discussion and fearfully go public with criticism of Israel.

Professor Matory also recalled how another luminary of the academic netherworld, Norman Finkelstein, was disinvited from Harvard because of his unrelenting criticism of Israel. Finkelstein is a man who Professor Steven Plaut of the University of Haifa has called a "pseudo-scholar and Holocaust trivializer" who "used his position at DePaul University in Chicago to promote his open celebration of Middle East terrorism." His best known screed, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections On The Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, minimizes the magnitude of the Holocaust while simultaneously making the perverse accusation that it is used by Zionists to extract sympathy from the world community and to justify the oppression and subjugation of the Palestinians by Israelis.

Finkelstein, who was recently denied tenure at DePaul, has now also adopted the position that his failure to thrive, academically speaking, is the direct result for being bold enough to speak up against Zionism and Israel-and he has been punished into silence accordingly, even while he regularly visit college campuses nationwide where his forbidden speech apparently is heard by eager audiences.

What Professors Finkelstein, Walt, Mearsheimer, and Matory have all apparently failed to realize is that they have not been silenced at all in their unrelenting rants against Israel; in fact, the very opposite is true: they have achieved world-wide notoriety and, in some quarters, wide acclaim for their views. More importantly, in their zeal to preempt the insulating force of this notion of "academic freedom," they have sought to deprive their ideological opponents of the same rights and protection; that is, while they want to be able to utter any calumny against the Jewish state and suffer no recriminations for their speech, they view any speech from those challenging their views to be oppressive, stifling, unreasonable, and, in the popular term used by those who frequently utter second-rate ideas, "chilling."

But the issue is far more obvious than the professors care to realize, and much less insidious. Those who speak back to ideologues such as Matory, Finkelstein, Walt, and Mearsheimer do so not to suppress criticism of Israel; academic freedom grants the professors the right to spew forth any academic meanderings they wish, but it does not make them free from being challenged for their thoughts.

"Free speech does not absolve anyone from professional incompetence," says Michael Rubin; and those who question divestment petitions, or critique the anti-Israel and anti-American "scholarship" parading on campuses as Middle Eastern Studies, or answer back when a work purports to reveal a sinister Jewish cabal controlling U.S. foreign policy, or correct such notions as Professor Matory's that Israel is "quashing the rights of millions of Palestinians refugees to lands, houses, and goods stolen as a condition of Israel's founding in the late 1940s" are not stifling debate about Israel. They are using their own academic freedom to rebut what they see as distortions, half-truths, propaganda, mistakes about history, or outright lies.

There is nothing unseemly about countering speech-even hateful speech-with more speech. In fact, that is the very heart of the university's mission. Professor Matory claims that he is seeking a greater civility on campus through reasoned academic discourse, but his real intention seems to be to create that civility by having only his side of the discussion be heard-without the uncomfortable necessity of hearing other, dissenting views. Like many of his fellow academics, he proclaims widely the virtues of open expression, but only for those who utter those thoughts with which he agrees. But true intellectual diversity-the ideal that is often bandied about but rarely achieved-must be dedicated to the protection of unfettered speech, representing opposing viewpoints, where the best ideas become clear through the utterance of weaker ones.

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Professor Matory and Larry Summers

Professor L. Roland Matory of Harvard, the subject of Richard L. Cravatts' AT article today, is further revealed in this post by Hillel Stavis, owner of the former Wordsworth Bookstore, a favorite hangout of mine in Harvard Square in years past, on Solomonia (hate tip: Powerline).

Attending a recent lecture by Matory, Stavis was stunned to find himself attacked by name on apparently false grounds. He goes on to describe this other and even more disturbing aspect of the lecture:
But what is most disturbing about Professor Matory's apparent obsession with Israel and Jews (at one point he referred to "a moneyed and media connected American Israeli defense force" - I guess we can dispense with the usual coded language observation) is the unavoidable realization that for Professor Matory who was at the epicenter of ousting Larry Summers, ostensibly for sexist remarks, Israel was the primary trigger. It seems clear that for Professor Matory, Summers' original sin was his opposition to the Harvard divestment - from - Israel campaign expressed long before his (in)famous speech on women in the sciences.

It would seem that Professor Matory has a bad case of Jews-on-the brain. He is beset by Israeli colonizers and their minions on campus: Practitioners of "character assassination, dis-invitation, and other losses of career opportunities campaign contributions, income or friends, and, above all, the damage done by fervent Zionists to the process of intellectual inquiry and debate in this university". By dis-invitation, he was referring to the wide opposition to the Harvard English Department's invitation to Tom Paulin, an Irish poet who has called for the murder of all Jewish settlers, including men, women and children (a position predictably skipped over by the Professor). Continuing his breathless rant he claimed that even his teaching compensation was not off limits for the vaporous cabal: "Even my annual salary is set by officials who appear to feel threatened by my bringing up this issue."


Source




Yet more messing around with British primary schooling

The Labour government just runs around in circles. Nothing is ever thoroughly pretested. What is right today is wrong tomorrow

Children are to be taught and tested at their own pace and primary school pupils will study fewer subjects to concentrate more on the basics and a foreign language, under a radical shake-up to be announced tomorrow. Some of the traditional subjects such as history and geography, or art and music, could be rolled into one, The Times has been told. As well as French and German, primary pupils may get the chance to learn Urdu and Mandarin.

The system of "one size fits all" national curriculum tests taken annually by all 11-year-olds and 14-year-olds will be swept away and replaced by twice-yearly tests pitched at the level of individual children. The changes will come in a ten-year "children's plan" to be outlined by Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, who admitted yesterday that the British system was not yet "world class".

The aim of the changes will be to ensure that the very bright are continually stretched and the stragglers are given sufficient support. The rigidity of the present national testing system, which challenges schools to ensure that as many as possible reach minimum levels of achievement for their age, will go. Instead a child would take a level four test, for example, not at a given age but when they reach that level.

The new system would allow most pupils to take two shorter tests when they are ready, instead of one longer test fixed at age 11. Pupils could sit their tests either in the summer or the winter, instead of all during one week in May. The reforms are intended to stop teachers spending too much time drilling pupils to pass the tests because children will only sit the assessments when their teachers believe that they are ready. The results will still be published in tables to show parents and authorities how schools are progressing.

Head teachers welcomed the reform but gave warning that schools would still face too much pressure if the results are used to compile league tables. Mick Brookes, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said: "We think the concept of when-ready testing is the right concept. I agree we want to get away from the rigidity of the current system."

Mr Balls wants to take out "some of the clutter" from the timetable and make the teaching of a language at primary school compulsory. Sir James Rose, who led the review that promoted phonics as the primary way to teach reading, is to head the first "root-and-branch" review of the primary curriculum for ten years. Mr Balls told BBC 1's Andrew Marr programme yesterday that the curriculum needed to have "more space for maths and more space for reading and also to make sure that every child is being taught a foreign language in primary school."

Recent research from Manchester University suggested that around 51 per cent of teaching time is already devoted purely to English and mathematics as teachers drill young children to pass their SATs tests. The plans respond to concerns that, after ten years of steady improvement, progress in the three `r's at primary school has come to a standstill.

Mr Balls denied that the need for a Children's Plan after ten years in government was an admission of failure. There had been "a sea-change" under Labour, he insisted, adding: "We are doing better than we were, but it's not good enough. We aren't world class. "I want to move to a much more flexible approach to testing which will take the burdens off children and be better for teachers to track the individual progress of every child."

Source

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