Classroom management: the enemy of critical thinking

 I understand that classroom management is tough, but suppressing the native intellect, initiative and originality of students is a deplorable way to do it.

Freedom's erosion begins with "correct speak" - RESIST

 Man must be “master of his own thoughts,” said Spinoza. He must never be “compelled to speak only according to the diktats of the supreme power.” That is the first task of the heretic, then: to resist compulsion. To speak as he sees. To never fear to express the truth. To refuse, at all costs, to say anything as abominable as “her penis.”

Brendan O’Neill is the chief political writer for spiked magazine, based in London. The above was taken from his new book, A Heretic’s Manifesto: Essays On The Unsayable, in which sources for the above quotations and references can be found.

No one can tell you what to think...

 but they can erode your confidence in your ability to trust your own thoughts.

First - teach conclusions, not basis for conclusions.

Second - deny correct answers that do not match the answer guide (even if true and correct).

Third - belittle with facial expression and tone of voice, those whose conclusions differ from the accepted narrative.

Fourth - count as correct, answers that are clearly incorrect.

Fifth - communicate impatience if you are caught thinking before replying (orally or in writing).

Censorship - requiring libraries to "include" limits freedom

All libraries -- public, private and school -- contain curated collections. None can hold EVERYTHING; all must select how they allocate limited physical and financial resources. The goal is to serve the community without prejudice and collection development has to have a basis.

Today, too often, the basis for a place in the collection is it's immediate popularity (not quality) -- to serve the library's desire for circulation numbers which help directly and indirectly in obtaining funding.

When a child, I used the Carnegie Public Library in Pawnee City, Nebr. One person curated that library's large collection -- Miss French. The variety of material was broad but each passed her test of quality.

Illinois just passed a law REQUIRING inclusion of some material. This is censorship of a library's independence. How can you prohibit a negative? Failure to include a resource in the library is distinctly different from "banning" it. The vague law is government overreach and so vague as to be unenforceable -- except when selectively applied.

Illinois has become the first state to penalize public libraries for removing books under a new law signed by Gov. J.B. Pritzker on June 12.

The law requires public libraries across Illinois to adhere to Chicago-based American Library Association’s (ALA) Bill of Rights in order to remain eligible for state funding.

While the ALA standards require libraries to provide materials presenting “all points of view on current and historical issues” and not to exclude books because of the author’s background or views, the Illinois law specifically focuses on just one tenet, which says that library books “should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.”

The stated goal of the law, which takes effect in January 2024, is to encourage libraries to either adopt the ALA standard or develop their own polices that “prohibit the practice of banning specific books or resources.”

In Philately - Dealers are the bridge between the halves and the halve-nots

 Watching this hobby from an emotional but physically proximate distance, I am troubled by the current expressions that dealers and collectors are in conflict and an organization representing one cannot merge with one representing the other, as a "conflict of interest" would result.

Philatelic dealers are the link between available items and those that seek them. Much work is involved in pulling together these resources, accurately identifying them, and facilitating collector access to them -- whether through listings online, or schlepping them to a stamp show.

Being married to a man whose deepest love (perhaps besides his family) is the hobby he's pursued since childhood, I've been openly puzzled and skeptical about the validity and value of this hobby. Forty-plus years in, I can bear witness that it does indeed have value -- to the individuals for whom it meets any of various functions in their lives. The fact that the pursuit and joy is not limited to one thing, but is highly individual and various, affirms the value I observe.

A digression for a moment - the area I'm least in awe of is exhibiting. Unfortunately, for some who are overly concerned with medal levels achieved, exhibiting provides external motivation to what is otherwise a pursuit of intrinsic motivation. Numerous studies affirm that the application of external rewards, diminishes intrinsic motivation. Therefore, contrary to popular philatelic views, I see exhibiting as a diminishment of the hobby, rather than its apex.

Back to the perceived conflict of interest - I deny it wholeheartedly. Dealers are facilitators, not the enemy. Again, I've watched close up as my husband's love of the hobby  has traveled the path of sharing -- from writing to publishing to hosting stamp clubs to maintaining vigilance on authenticity ... to now serving his beloved hobby as a dealer.

Yes, there are dealers whose primary personal driver is profit and who will offer appallingly little to a widow for her husband's collections. Shame on them. These are actions we feel are morally reprehensible. Yet, even then, the dealer is providing a service in disposing of something of no value to a non-collector (in this case the widow) and making it available to those who seek those items.

I can't imagine there are many who have the time or connections to scour the country for the little pieces of paper they seek. Dealers are the work horses who do this for them. We should thank them, not deride them. They are not the enemy. They are the facilitators -- most doing it secondary to the same joy they share with the collectors they serve.

Postscript - as I was writing this, an email came in from my sale of a postcard through Ebay:

Dear vintagedoky,

Hi from the UK, I just wanted to say "Thank you!" for the great post card, which arrived a couple of days ago. It was really fantastic and looks like a genuine 1950's card. My son is studying Graphic Design in Falmouth UK, so I posted it to him as well as the envelope it came in (I live in Oxford UK) and he was really pleased. He loved the stamps on the envelope you sent it in - Thomas Jefferson etc. and he also loved the post card itself. I realised that the street scene is of Gallup New Mexico and I was telling him how it was in the song "Route 66", so he is going to look it up. Anyway I just wanted to say thank you, as we both love your postcards and I will be buying more. There's nothing like this in the UK that I've seen, and they are a very reasonable price. Thanks again, Paul Galley, in Oxford.

Perfection as the enemy of progress -- From my 2018 Facebook post

I don't want to live in a world where only perfect people's contributions are accepted. (And where the definition of perfection is fluid and changeable.)

 

I don't want to live in a world where only perfect people's contributions are accepted. (And where the definition of perfection is fluid and changeable.)

 

I don't want to live in a world where only perfect people's contributions are accepted. (And where the definition of perfection is fluid and changeable.) 

Great art can be created by not-great people. Great literature can be created by flawed souls. Great legislation can come from not-great individuals. All forward progress of civilization stops when the process of reaching for new and better is frozen by the fear of error; when moments of clarity are denied based on the struggles that preceded them.

 In this great demand to remove Chuck Close portraits from art museums and rethink displaying Picasso's work, remove Confederate monuments, etc., where does it stop? If we are to be consistent, we must next remove all Catholic churches.

 

 

 

The Natural Gas wars of 2023

...  a useful reminder that the inexorable march of government mandates, the endless effort by our rulers to enforce their “scientifically” unchallengeable dogma on what they see as a population of ignorant drudges, can be resisted.

How the Gas Stove in Your Kitchen Became a Symbol of Freedom

The left framed its latest crusade as a ‘right-wing culture war.’ We’ve seen this pattern many times.

By Gerard Baker WSJ: 

Jan. 16, 2023 2:27 pm ET

The Great Gas Stove Rebellion of 2023 probably won’t resonate with future generations of freedom-loving folk the way the Boston Tea Party does. It’s unlikely that the plucky protagonists in the struggle to save our ovens and ranges from the grasping hands of regulatory totalitarianism will one day be celebrated as the Samuel Adamses and Patrick Henrys of the kitchen appliance age.

“Give me smoothly regulated gas-flow cooking capability or give me death!” has a flaming blue ring to it. But it lacks somehow the peal of urgency, the alarm of existential threat our stone-kiln-firing predecessors could adduce to fuel their noble cause.

Still, the little victory secured last week over the forces of progressive technocratic authoritarianism is significant in its way—even if it may prove only provisional and someday in a bleak, electrified future, our Vikings and Kenmores are eventually prised from our cold, dead hands.

The small triumph chalked up for common sense and normality is so rare these days it’s worth celebrating in itself. It’s also a useful reminder that the inexorable march of government mandates, the endless effort by our rulers to enforce their “scientifically” unchallengeable dogma on what they see as a population of ignorant drudges, can be resisted.

More than that, the way the episode played out last week has been an instructive exercise in how modern society advances, how the ascendant left is the locomotive force behind our culture and politics. We evolve today through the imposition from above of new rules and dogmas—as if that is a stable, natural process and any attempt to resist it is ignorant, reactionary extremism.

You can tell this from the way in which much of the media reported on the attempted gas-stove grab.

As conservatives—and, much of the apolitical public—began to raise their voices against Commissar Richard Trumka Jr.’s diktat declaring war on gas stoves, the media took up the familiar narrative.

“How Gas Stoves Became a Right-Wing Cause in the Culture Wars” explained Time Magazine.

An unelected official proposes some indefensible new regulation in the name of “science” that materially and adversely affects the lives of tens of millions of Americans—and it is somehow another front opened by the “right wing” in their “culture wars.”

It happens all the time. You can frame a good deal of the political and cultural evolution of the country in the past few decades in this way: The left elites compel adherence to their latest ideological orthodoxy and anyone questioning it is waging culture war. It happened with same-sex marriage, the idea that sex is independent of biology, the proposition that all white people are racist, the assertion that the planet is burning. All started out as intellectual hobbyhorses of the left fringe and quickly wound up being examples of the “far right” trying to impose its will.

This fits the wider narrative of our ruling intellectual classes: that it is the conservative side of the political spectrum that has gone extreme, that all our contemporary political woes—hyperpartisanship, divisiveness, the extremism of our political discourse—can be traced to the Republican Party’s jumping off the right of the ideological diving board into the deep end of fanaticism.

Yet the 2022 Gallup Poll Social Series, an annual survey of thousands of Americans, found new confirmation that it is the Democratic Party, not the GOP, that has moved toward the extreme in the past few decades and in the process has driven much of the cultural agenda.

Last year Gallup found that the percentage of Democrats who identify themselves as politically liberal rose by 4 points, to 54%, a new high, with 36% declaring themselves moderate and only 10% conservative. In 1994, the proportion of Democrats identifying as liberal was 25%. In 2010 it was 40%.

Over the same period the proportion of registered Republicans who identify as conservative has only edged up—from roughly 60% in the 1990s to 72% in 2022. Most others identify as moderate.

“Increased liberal identification among U.S. Democrats has occurred across all demographic categories,” writes Lydia Saad, director of social research at Gallup, commenting on the survey. “But that shift has been particularly pronounced among White Democrats.”

Since Democrats now seem heavily to favor the illiberal imposition of many of their notions, it might be time to retire the term “liberal” in describing them. But the sharp swing to the left is clear.

Some of these ideological changes do, it’s true, become quickly embedded in wider public support. Gay marriage is the obvious example. But most don’t. Resisting them, like resisting assaults on our kitchen appliances, isn’t extremism. It’s patriotism.