No Subject

[Douglas <dougwils@moscow.com>]

Dear visionaries,

I tried to go away, but a few more questions have arisen. I will try to
keep my answers brief so that no "hate-filled" stuff spills
out.

In response to Dan Schmidt's question about market forces: I am not a
market absolutist. Adam's Smith's invisible hand directs the marketing
flow of child pornography and cocaine just as much as it does SUVs and
floor wax. So I do not think that "the market" can save us, or
provide any kind of ultimate direction for us. But I do think, within the
context of a society that has its basic moral bearings, the market is a
good way to sort out many goods and services, including education.

        

With
regard to the "inconsistency" of disparaging natural selection
when I favor market forces in education, two comments. First, I don't
think the market is an ultimate answer for anything. Secondly, even if I
did, the market rests upon intelligence -- information. I do not believe
there is any naturalistic way to account for the formation of the first
information required for genetic encoding and subsequent
reproduction. The jump between inorganic and organic matter had to occur
when there was no reproductive competition at all, and hence natural
selection could have done no selecting.

For Daniel Kronemann: Yes, I debated Paul Brians a few years ago. Glad
you enjoyed it. I am only Rev. on my good days, and am happy to be called
Douglas, or, if you prefer, the Hate-monger.

        

Just a few
brief responses:

        

1.
Children should not be denied an education just because they cannot
afford it. I agree. So why are countless thousands in our nation being
denied an education while sitting in the government schools?

        

2. Parents
do not necessarily know what is best for their child's education. Again,
this is true in some particular instances -- there are poor parents. But
in our circumstance, here in Moscow, the parents whose children are
getting the best education are those parents who are most directly
involved.

        

3. The
green hair issue. No one is maintaining that a clean cut kid cannot be a
blockhead and that an alternatively decked out person cannot be a good
academic student. What I do maintain as a generalization is that cultural
discipline is part of the process of educational discipline. And while
debating this, let us not forget that many involved parents agree with
this correlation and put their kids in private schools where there is
cultural discipline. This, in its turn, accelerates the performance
decline in the government schools. Government school advocates have to
recognize that all of this has moved from a pedagogical debate to
a pedagogical competition. Attending a debate, you can leave with
the opinion "what brung ya." In a competition, real things
happen in a real world. And what is happening is that government schools
are experiencing an exodus. If you want to know why, then perhaps it
would be a good idea to ask the hundreds of people who are leaving. You
may not like their reasons. But they still have them.

        

4. The
religious nature of education: It is true that Marx said that religion is
the opium of the people. But of course we now know that Marxism is the
crack cocaine of the people.

        

The
Chinese have a wise proverb that says if you want to know what water is,
do not ask a fish. In the same way, if you want to know the nature of
Enlightenment categories, it would be hard to learn them from anyone born
in the last 250 years. The neutral "facts" that are supposedly
the foundation of all "secular" education have done a superb
job in hiding their fundamentally religious nature, and they now
constitute an invisible and authoritative orthodoxy. It has taken a while
but this orthodoxy is now having to deal with some true heretics.