The sorry condition of State-run education

It's getting worse with Common Core. I suppose if enough parents oppose Coomon Core standards, we can keep the current system, but the current system is broken too. Government is not likely to voluntarily give up control of education, so what can we do as a nation to improve education?

Just as government can't come up with solutions, neither can any private sector group come up with a complete answer to education. There's no plan that can address education as a whole and solve the problems. The answers will come from thousands of different sources across the country. Government forces will continue trying to squash home schooling, but parents must fight back.

If parents demand the freedom to develope innovative answers locally, then we'll be on the road to better education. The end result will not likely look anything like the traditional classroom, but then who says that's the best way? One thing is for sure, we can't allow the State to enforce one set of standards on the nation.

Chris Christie a Moderate Liberal Populist

http://www.ontheissues.org/Chris_Christie.htm

the above link is to a site that goes over Christie's time in office, then uses a test to score his political make-up. This is correct, yet, Republican moderates are hailing Christie as a conservative, and not just a regular conservative, but a serious damn conservative by God who can win, baby win! Moderates are all over Christie right now because his popularity is around 75%. They say Christie is a straight-shooter who fights for lower taxes and worker rights against union control, and he cuts spending. Man, what more can you ask for?

Christie is currently spending millions on education that feeds a failed bureacratic system -- taxes are astronomically high in NJ mainly because NJ pays $16,841 per student, and Christie is adding more. Today, Christie announced that he embraces Obamacare for his state. Yes, Gov Christie is a staunch conservative -- the moderates really can pick 'em can't they?

When moderate Republicans believe media hype that surrounds one of their own, like the hype that surrounded "The Maverick" John McCain around 2006 and 2007, they're always set up when this champion is chosen to run against a Democrat. Media turn on the moderate, and the moderate has no defense, because the moderate was lured into the Centrist Liberal Populist world of phony adulation from the Left, then a big smack down takes place at the strategic moment.

Christie will be destroyed because he's particularly susceptible to praise. He eats it up and loves popularity. The media and Left will play him like a bass violin. Christie will bask in the glow of agreement with interviewers regarding GOP conservatives who've become too partisan, then the partisan wolves on the Left will attack when Christie is fully exposed, and the GOP base will turn away -- same old story.

A dishonest populism

Paul Johnson, in his book The History of the American People, wrote about ordinary Americans in the beginning:

It was short step from admitting ordinary folk had a right to the best to giving them a full share in government--and giving it to them not grudgingly but eagerly. Words like 'husbandman,' 'yeoman,' 'esquire' quickly dropped out of use, being replaced by 'citizen'--a decade before the French Revolutionaries took it up. Collectively, the citizens were the 'Publick.' Cato thought: 'Every ploughman knows a good government from a bad one.' Jefferson agreed. 'State a problem to a ploughman and a professor. The former will decide it often better than the latter, because he had not been led astray by artificial rules.' John Adams invented a hick-farmer archetype, Humphrey Ploughjogger, and extolled his sense and shrewdness in newspaper ariticles. He was 'made of as good a Clay as the so-called Great Ones of the world.' The mob, the herd and the rabble, as the Great always delight to call them.' were, wrote Adams, 'by the unalterable laws of god and Nature, as well entitled to the benefit of the air to breathe, light to see, food to eat, clothes to wear, as the nobles or the king.' All that was necessary was to educate them, to add knowledge to their native wit. 

Populism was part of the early American mindset, and it was, and has been, a double-edged sword in need of context. The final sentence in the above passage from Johnson is one key to understanding. While it's part of a great American philosophy that all people deserve the air to breathe, light to see, etc., not all Americans have complemented their "native wit" with education. Recently, both Republicans and Democrats have participated in a dishonest populism. Democrats have used populist rhetoric to gin up anger at companies like Bain Capital and their CEOs, like Mitt Romney once was. The recent Democrat attack ad against Bain Capital and Romney shows some ordinary people who are claiming Romney didn't care about workers and their situation, only about making money.

I grew up in poor, then later middleclass, communities and lived in such communities until I was around 30 years old. I've heard this type of resentment expressed thousands of times against the owners of business or at some general idea of rich people -- those people with money. The populist anger at the rich is passed along with little thought given to economics, the market, the nature of wealth management, etc. This is because most of the people who simply repeat the attacks on the rich haven't received an education, for whatever reason. Then, there are those who do receive an education, but the education entails a bias against capitalism, so their view toward companies like Bain Capital are skewed. Honest thinkers on the Left like Steve Rattner, Corey Booker and Harold Ford, Jr. have spoken out against the unthinking, populist attacks on Bain Capital and their type of business.

The Right is guilty, at times, of an anti-intellectual populism, sort of like the patronizing praise from Jefferson from above. Is it true an ordinary farmer is more insightful than a professor? Well, it depends. Ordinary working people usually have a type of practical intelligence that's missing among intellectuals, but there's no natural, "native wit" that's superior to higher learning. If a farmer has learned the practical lessons of work and necessity and has complemented his "native wit" with a broad, objective education, then the farmer might have an edge on an intellectual who hasn't lived much in the work-a-day world, and his insights might be richer.

Ordinary people who haven't received an education can believe things that make no sense, and they can say things that are incredibly ignorant. This reliance on populism is a con game played by the political elite to expand their voting base and gain more power -- those ordinary people flattered by pandering pols who praise the uneducated, ordinary, natural intelligence are being played, and if the time ever comes when they want the pols to really listen to and act on the brilliant things they have to say, they'll discover who it really is that doesn't care about their situation but only about gaining more power over their ordinary lives and choices. 

Morning Joe 3/2/2012 -- This time they'll get it right

Yesterday I wrote that Mika and Joe appeared depressed, but, obviously, there's nothing like an education discussion in Fort Lee, NJ to get the juices flowing. Scarborough and Mika were animated once again, starting out talking politics and advancing the narrative that Republicans are focusing on contraceptives. In reality, that world beyond the political realm, Republicans aren't focusing on contraceptives -- they are focusing on "religious" freedom, and the Democrats/media are focusing on contraceptives in an attempt to frame Republicans as enemies of women's reproductive rights. This is theater of the absurd -- real life absurdity, because you can't make it up. Democrats/media are pulling out every deceptive trick, and Republicans are missing an opportunity to nail them to the wall.

Scarborough, forever the centrist compromiser, wants Republicans to move along. In other words, the Republican Center want to move along and let Democrats win the issue and continue to violate freedom of choice. Obviously, freedom of choice applies only to Democrat choices and Democrat freedom.

Republicans should not drop the issue, but expand the issue to cover statism in general. Contrary to the idea that Republicans should yield on this, the whole election should be about not yielding to statism. Let's forget religious intitutions are involved here, and let's forget that contraceptives are involved -- the issue is government intervention in decisions between employers and their employees, and government intervention in the freedom of people to make free economic choices. No one has to work for a certain employer, and a certain employer shouldn't have to offer employees anything the employer doesn't want to offer. And if we turned healthcare over to the free market, then individuals could shop for healthcare insurance across state lines, and insurance companies would compete to provide the policies people want and can afford. This is a statism vs free market issue, and how it became about religious freedom, contraceptives and women's reproductive rights, I don't know, but it's surely absurd.

Morning Joe got around to discussing education, and it's the same discussion we all hear every so often when government officials, state and federal, get together and highlight a particular effort they promote as successful which shows that government run education is turning around, and if only the rest of the country would follow these examples, all would be well. Then teachers' unions and bureacracy kick them all in the teeth and nothing changes, except government run education changes for the worse.

Say No To Newt

Gingrich is supported in the polls by name recognition and past accomplishments. As the Republican primary goes forward voters will learn more about Gingrich, and they will drop him. Gingrich is a rightwing progressive in the tradition of Teddy Roosevelt. Gingrich has praised Woodrow Wilson and FDR, so any free market/limited government rhetoric now is only pandering, which should insult the limited government Tea Pary conservatives. Libertarians understand Gingrich's statist tendencies, but Gingrich still has some conservative cred, although as conservatives look more closely, they're getting the picture.

Gingrich has been frustrated lately because he's pulled out all his political tricks and he only has South Carolina to show for his manipulative efforts. For anyone who's followed politics and Gingrich's career since 1980 or so, they either share Gingrich's statist/progressive vision or they see through his present facade. I'm not sure how many rightwing progressives are in the Republican Party. I'm not even sure progressivism really explains Gingrich's political views. He's much like Obama -- he's an authentic statist who can't imagine a world of free choice in the private sector. Gingrich probably believes his interventions into the economy and the affairs of foreign nations would be better for Americans than Democrat/liberal/Leftist interventions, but they wouldn't.

Gingrichs's proposal to colonize the moon is one example of his grandiose statist vision. Some visionaries might defend Gingrich's moon idea in the spirit of thought experimentation and futuristic planning, but we are nowhere near a practical justification for this type of government spending. While Gingrich's mind is on the moon, we're sinking into financial ruin. Ron Paul has signalled the seriousness of our problem by promising to cut a trillion dollars from spending in his first year as President, if elected, and this is not enough.

Our statist system is convoluted, terribly inefficient, and it's reached the point, after decades of steady building, of being a roadblock to economic growth and wealth creation. We'll have to spend the next decade, at least, unwinding the statist knots which have tied the hands of investors and producers and educators. The American people face a global economic transition for which most are not prepared skill-wise or education-wise. A small portion of Americans have separated themselves from the rest of the population through the knowledge and skills they possess, and until enough catch up there will be great wealth disparity and way too much pressure on the welfare state to keep way too many people afloat.

To correct these problems, systemic changes are necessary. We can no longer tweak around the edges and demand more taxes from Fat Cats. Our greatest fundamental problem is the inability to sustain real economic growth and real wealth creation, two areas in which Gingrich has too little understanding to be of much help, but his statist grandiosity could surely do a lot of damage. I predict enough voters will realize this to neutralize any threat of a President Gingrich -- oh, I hope so.