Category: Education

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Trinity Christian College – Dr. Martin Vrieze

Trinity Christian College in Palos Heights, Illinois, was founded in 1965 or thereabouts. It is a reformed Christian college, founded on the idea that science is not neutral, that all knowledge is influenced and shaped by a person’s worldview, and that Christians, therefore, need to study in a Christian College to reach an understanding of the world that is in harmony with their faith

You can buy it or not buy it. As a student, it was clear to me that the history and philosophy departments were trying their best to follow the program, but English classes seemed to me to be pretty well the same kind of classes you would be taking at York or the University of Toronto or the University of Western Ontario or the University of Chicago.

If you took art and needed to learn how to draw the human figure, you had to go to Saint Xavier University down the street to see a nude model because, apparently, Christians didn’t do nudes.  Well, at least not on Trinity’s campus.  I’m amazed we had a pre-med program– when did they ever get to look at a human body?

As for the business and accounting departments, they were all eager little capitalists who believed that religion was largely relevant to Sunday mornings. The philosophical perspective of my friends in these departments could be summed up thusly: “Hey, watch your language guys– there are girls around.”

Philosophy, at Trinity, was like the art: we didn’t do nudes. You had to go elsewhere to study the shapes and contours and shadows of an undraped human mind. We studied rationalism and humanism and scholasticism and Marxism and read Kant’s Transcendental Critique and always, near the end of the course, bang, biff, whap! we put them in their places.

Christian Reformed Doctrine held that all of us have a prior faith commitment which coloured all of our conclusions about science and truth. So Kant could write ten critiques if he wanted but he would be no closer to the truth because he was, at heart, a humanist. Geez, that’s a gross simplification. But it will have to do: I don’t have all day.

So, at the end of the course, our professors would expose these philosophers’ hidden biases, offer the “correct” Christian perspective, and then we would move on to the next great fraud.

Now, this Christian philosophy was not supposed to be the same as a reactionary, conservative philosophy. Heavens no! Even if, at the end of the long torturous journey through the Bible, Augustine, Aquinas, and Herman Dooyeweerd, and Abraham Kuyper, we ended up, lo and behold, agreeing with Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. I didn’t get that at the time. I didn’t get it until I was at a Christian Labour Association of Canada banquet five or six years later where the guest speaker, Bernie Zylstra, attacked the media for attacking Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. I didn’t get it until I realized that a lot of these devoted “Reformed Christian” thinkers were astoundingly similar, in outlook, to neo-conservatives like Daniel Bell, Patrick Moynihan, and Irving Kristol. (Oddly, they opposed support for Solidarity in Poland at first, because they thought it was doomed to failure, and because they fervently believed that communist regimes never liberalize, while our cuddly U.S.-friendly capitalist autocratic regimes– like Pinochet in Chile, and Somoza in Nicaragua, and the Shah of Iran– do.)

Reformed Christian Philosophy…. in a word, we believed that truth was handed down from high, given to us in the Bible, but also– as per some Scholastics– through “general revelation”, evidence to be found in creation itself, and in natural law as divined through science. That explained why non-Christian scientists occasionally or often hit on a “truth” or two even while blinded by their own humanistic determinism– they were working from evidence from God’s own hands, his creation, which is an expression of divine will, and part of the way God communicates with us sinners.

I don’t mean to be too glib. Our professors, Dr. John Roose and Dr. Martin Vrieze, were respectful of their achievements, and properly awed by the depth and breadth of their insights. But we were convinced that the great reformed thinkers– Abraham Kuyper, Herman Dooyeweerd, Bob Goudzwaard, and others could hold their own with these mighty intellects. Especially Dooyeweerd who was rumoured to be almost as smart as Kant, and maybe even smarter, if not at least equally incoherent.

And then there was Contemporary Philosophy.  (Actually, it may have been “Philosophy of History”.)

I took this course in my senior year, I think it was, with a few philosophy die-hards, with Dr. Marten Vrieze. I have no idea why I thought this but I had the idea that Dr. Vrieze was a bit pissed off at the Reformed establishment for some reason. It may have been because, unlike some of the other reformational professors like Calvin Seerveld and Robert Vandervennen, he hadn’t been asked to sign on to The Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto, one of the other, bigger Reformed Christian Colleges, or the new King’s College in Edmonton. I had a feeling he was fed up with something. Whatever the reason, the course was an eye-opener and it completely altered my perception of Christian philosophy.

There was no text-book, no digest, no over-view: content was taken from philosophical journals and books by the philosophers. These philosophers were not dusted off from their positions in the pantheon of all-time BIG thinkers, buffed and admired, then discredited. These were living, breathing philosophers, mostly, who were engaged with living, breathing currents of philosophy and were way ahead of the constructs and discredited frameworks of Hume, Descartes, and Kant.

It would be impossible to do justice to their ideas here, so I’ll do an injustice instead, just so you know what I’m talking about. Ludwig Wittgenstein, a logical positivist, believed that truth was a construct of language and formal structures of thought, within which we distilled our experiences of the world into a coherent narrative. It wasn’t so much the ideas that mattered, as the way the ideas were expressed, shackled, as they were, to the expression itself.

Karl Popper believed that we formulated our perspective on the world in a sort of complex of patterns and systems of thought called paradigms. A paradigm was “true” as long as it was useful. As human knowledge would begin to exceed the framework of this paradigm, it might be overthrown, and a new paradigm would take it’s place. Again, it didn’t really matter if a paradigm was really true or not– there probably was no such thing as a “true” paradigm.

Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend developed these ideas even further, and I remember, in particular, and argument from Paul Feyerabend that demonstrated, finally, to my satisfaction, that the idea that 2 + 2 does not necessarily equal 4 is not nearly as silly as it sounds. You can’t make any person who hasn’t taken advanced philosophy believe this.

What these gentleman called into question was the idea that you could measure a worldview, such as reformed Christianity, against it’s own reference points. Reformed Christianity would argue that even without the Bible, the evidence of creation is sufficient to explain a just and loving God and a purpose to life. Popper would argue that this world view prevailed only as long as it was “useful” to humanity. With the Renaissance and the Age of Reason, this paradigm was challenged, and eventually over-thrown.

More to come…

Some neo-cons like Irving Kristol support the idea of “intelligent design”. It’s very difficult to imagine that Kristol really believes in it. Maybe he does. Or maybe it just confirms the idea that neo-cons are just a bunch of neo-prudes with reactionary instincts who really don’t care for facts and information unless they can be marshaled in support of their conservative politics.

Forrest Gump is a neo-con’s wet dream of a movie.

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Autism and Witchcraft

In his presentation, Wakefield sounded impatient but righteous. He used enough scientific terms — “ataxic,” “histopathological review” and “vaccine excipients” — that those parents who did not feel cowed might have been flattered by his assumption of their scientific fluency. He also tried to defend himself against a few of the charges laid out in The British Medical Journal — offering defenses that did not hold up before the journal’s panel of editors but were perhaps enough to assure an audience of his fans that he did, in fact, have defenses. Some part of Wakefield’s cult status is surely because of his personal charisma, and he spoke with great rhetorical flair. He took off his glasses and put them back on like a gifted actor maximizing a prop. “What happens to me doesn’t matter,” he said at one point. “What happens to these children does matter.”

Andrew Wakefield has had a wildly pervasive influence for a man without the slightest claim to scientific credibility. But he’s a good case study. Scientific truth sometimes seems drastically disadvantaged in our age of the anecdote, the interview on tv, the tears on Oprah. It must be true if you cried.

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Getting Paid for Doing Your Job

As a matter of principle, I find it repugnant when governments or corporations “solve” a problem by offering employees and contractors an “incentive” or reward for doing the work they were hired to do– properly.

So we hire teachers, we expect certain credentials when they apply, we pay people to make good judgments about the quality of these applicants, we provide them with extra training and benefits, and we put them into the classroom. And then we say, “tell you what– if you do what we hired you to do, there’s a big fat bonus in it for you.” That’s what it looks like to me when we offer bonuses and incentives to teachers or anyone else to meet certain standards. We are proclaiming, loudly and clearly, that we don’t expect the other people we employ to do their jobs properly.

The U.S. is doing this with teachers, and a columnist with the New York Times recently proposed that they do the same thing with States and Cities that run pension plans: offer them money to do the job they are already paid to do. But this time, succeed.

People rightly question the idea of rewarding young students for getting good marks. Are we training them to expect a gift every time they do something right? What happens when– as is inevitable– the rewards stop coming?

Let your yes be yes and your no be no. I think anyone hired as a teacher or administrator or executive should be told what he is expected to do and how much he will be paid to do it. If he doesn’t do the job, let him or her know that he or she needs to find another job.

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We Don’t Need No Education

What if a high school (or middle school) didn’t give grades, didn’t have a structured curriculum, and allowed students to design their own courses? I think most people will read that and say, “Obviously it can work or you wouldn’t ask that question.” Then they will tell you, “but I don’t believe in it”.  St. Ann’s Website.

And that’s pretty well where it is. Most people don’t believe it. The same way most people refuse to believe that the crime rate has been declining for 10 years. Here’s a New York Times article about the school, and a lengthier article about the visionary founder.

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Here and There: Neo-Puritanism and the Dutch

I am prompted by this ridiculous story about a young woman training to become a teacher. She had once posted a picture of herself drinking, wearing a pirate hat, at a party, on her Myspace page. later in life, while in placement as a prospective teacher, her supervisor googled her and spotted the picture and expressed his deep, solemn, disapproval. He and the dean of Millersville University School of Education, in their ultimate, beneficent, instructional piety and wisdom, decided that Ms. Stacy Snyder was thereby not worthy of a teaching job, and denied her a teaching degree.

Ms. Snyder went to court and, stunningly– to me– lost. (Of course, this was a U.S. court, where judges are elected by the same people who made Britney Spears a household name). The ruling was that this was not an infringement of her right to “free speech”. Is that what they thought the issue was?

How dare they? How dare those puritanical, self-righteous, stupid zealots deprive this young woman of her dreamed-of career because she didn’t meet their fanatical standards of purity and innocence?

I’ll bet those gentleman are patriotic. I’ll bet they are pious. I’ll bet they are believers. I’ll bet they would feel far more comfortable living with a bunch of Islamic extremists than they could ever imagine. I’ll bet that deep down in their tiny, crispy, blackened little hearts, they would love to force Ms. Snyder to wear a burka.

* * *

One thing I’ve always liked about the Dutch– and one reason a lot of people don’t like them– is this kind of pragmatism that was apparently too rational and sensible for the delicate Americans.

July 9, 2010

[I’m going to note in fairness here that getting accurate, detailed information about this well-worn story about the six-year-old kissing his classmate is difficult, and there are websites out there that believe the offense was more serious than just one kiss. On the balance of things, however, I still think giving the six-year-old a suspension was a tacit confession that the adults in charge had no clue about their jobs, children, or life. While I’m at it, let me note that as for the woman who sued McDonald’s because the coffee was too hot– I’m on her side. There’s a lot more to that story than the media generally admits. It’s become a stalking-horse for conservatives who want to relieve corporations of liability for their defective or dangerous products.]

Speaking of alleged urban myths… has there been a single confirmed use of the “date rape” drug yet?

We appear to have quietly entered an era of Neo-Puritanism in North America. While you can show any kind of violence, blood-letting, torture, cruelty, dismemberment, and murder on television or movies at any time or place, we have become extremely weak-minded and hysterical at the idea of sex.

Part of this is due to the unfortunate, unholy alliance between feminist psychology and Christian fundamentalism in the 1980’s. Off-hand, you might think these two cultural streams had very little in common. They did. But there was one thing they shared: an almost frantic paranoia about sexuality. The result: a kindergarten student is suspended for kissing a classmate on the cheek. Another student is taken away in handcuffs are drawing pictures of weapons. And another student is busted for waving a chicken-finger like a gun.

But the most egregious sins of this ilk are committed by middling managers– people who have some authority because they are astute suck-ups with a bit of education who can fill in forms and transfer money to consultants. They are afraid to make real decision and, therefore, not really smart enough to evaluate advice either. They always tell you, “the consultant said…”, or “the expert said…” So they see the 6-year-old kissing a classmate and they are too crumblingly stupid to realize that this was not ever what was intended by the term “sexual harassment”. * * *

What if your school day consisted of playing guitar, making papier-mâché “aliens” for your Mars project, dropping eggs from the roof to see how they splattered, and learning how to create puppets? Insanity, right? That’s how St. Ann’s School in Brooklyn Heights operates.

I don’t know why it’s taken me 54 years, but I have finally begun to realize just how arbitrary so many of our social and cultural institutions are. In the 60’s and 70’s, we often talked about how schools basically train us to be mindless consumer drones, but, only a few years later, we began to “realize” how impractical it would have been do things otherwise.

And here is St. Ann’s, a towering affront to conventional wisdom. St. Ann’s does not award grades. There are few rules. Students are encouraged to explore their creative sides. And the kids are all right– they go on to good colleges and universities. The sky does not fall in on them.

I have no problem believing that a school like this would be quite successful, and that the students who spend all of their high school years in this institution would be capable, accomplished, and competent, and ready to take on the world.

I think thirty years ago I would have believed the products of this system would be nearly illiterate. Just as I would have believed that someone without access to surgery would die young. Or that a nation without a military (like Costa Rica) would be invaded by its neighbors.

At the same time, the Obama Administration is pushing the Bush educational program: teaching to the tests. Firing teachers and principals if a school does not meet the minimum average. Not an iota of effort made in the direction of teaching children how to actually think: we’ve gone back to the 1950’s where we only want them to read, write, and show up at the assembly line– or, more likely, Walmart, for their minimum wage jobs– and consume, consume, consume.

Go into debt — the modern form of indentured servitude.

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Education Pimps

It is very hard to imagine anything nice or interesting about the University of Phoenix, a private, for profit university which has over 500,000 students. I imagine myself as a student at this corporate meat-grinder and feel depressed.

The problem is this: why would a for-profit corporation care about history, or philosophy, or literature, or music, or art? They would only care about it as something that can be packaged and marketed to impressionable young people as a component of a certificate which will entitle them to a good-paying job which entitles them to a home and a car and nice clothes and vacation trips to Europe where they can examine ancient artifacts and artworks and take digital pictures and post them to Facebook and make wise investments and retire and die alone. They would be as interested in history as Microsoft is interested in literature, or IBM is interested in music, or General Motors is interested in nature: only insofar as it can be used to sell a product.

The online versions of schools like the University of Phoenix are even more depressing. You take courses over the internet on your computer. You punch in and punch out. You fill in the blanks, check off the boxes, get your scores. Does this even remotely begin to teach you the process of thinking on your feet, or responding to situations and expressions, or learning to connect to other people?

The rats who run the University of Phoenix understand few things:

  • many potential students don’t have $100,000 to pay for a degree
  • the government has lots of money
  • students can apply for loans
  • students at the age of 20 or so have no real understanding of 2 things: a) what the real odds are of them getting that “high-paying” job the University of Phoenix claims will be theirs when they graduate, and, b), how hard it will be to pay off that student load
  • all of that money is just sitting there waiting for them to skim off most of it to line their own pockets

 

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Information Highway Robbery

Apparently there a lot of orphaned books out there. These poor little documents have no mothers or fathers or other living relatives. They reside in research facilities and libraries. But fear not little books– Google wants you.

Google has cut a deal with an association of publishers and an association of authors: we will take all those books. Thanks. Goodbye.

Google wants to scan in all these books. I don’t think they plan to sell access to them directly– they will profit by having you end up at their websites whenever you do an online search for any text in any of these books.

This is not all bad. In fact, this could be wonderfully useful. What has some people upset is that Google, in order to protect their investment, is demanding exclusive rights to this material. And they must have paid some money to the people in charge at the publishers and authors associations– people in charge– for these rights. Will any individual publishers and authors ever benefit? Almost certainly not as much as the people who negotiated the deal will benefit. This is the same principle behind the government giving away oil and gas and water: we citizens get nothing. They get lavish campaign contributions and parties.

Google would probably argue that if they don’t get exclusive rights, it won’t be in their interests to scan all these books in, so they won’t do it, and nobody else will either.

You also have to understand that this agreement is not the same as legislation. Google has simply paid off the only groups likely to be able to muster a legal battle against them. If you were to start scanning in all these books yourself and then offer them online on your own web page, Google would likely resort to the standard corporate practice of threatening you with their lawyers with no intention of ever actually allowing the case to go to court.

The article in the New York Times.

Need some therapy? Apparently those librarians do. They are angry about this deal. They think it stinks. And they are “mad”, “angry”, “upset”.

A good therapist could provide an effective solution to this problem: they just need to get some therapy. They aren’t “angry”– they have “anger issues” that need to be addressed.

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Open Source Books

I do not know what to do with my books. I don’t even know how many I have. Probably over a thousand. They sit on their prefab bookshelves, two layers deep, along my basement wall. They look fine. They testify to my learning and erudition. They show that I am not one of the thoughtless mob who spend hours and hours watching television.

Books have become very, very expensive. I know of a student at the University of Waterloo who recently spent over $900 for her course books. Is there some kind of scam going on with the universities and book publishers? Students are always told they need the latest, newest, revised edition. No effort is made to make new editions compatible with old editions, by retaining a consistent paging sequence, or by publishing addendums, or online updates.

How on earth can a laptop computer cost less than your course books? The computer requires thousands of manufactured parts from all over the globe, carefully assembled and tested, and shipped thousands of miles. Yet you can buy a new laptop for $500 or $600 nowadays. You can buy a lawnmower for $240. You can’t buy five books for less than that?

I think we need a movement. We need a group of intellectual hackers to devise an alternative to the established publishers, to write new text books and publish them on electronic readers like the Kindle. We need students to organize themselves and demand that professors adopt these new electronic books for their courses.

Their objection, of course, will be that they only want this particular book, a printed, published one, for the course. Only this book will do. Just as, in the computer world, first it was “only IBM will do” and then “only Microsoft will do”. Finally today, more and more users, including governments and corporations have discovered Linux.

What would happen if Universities supported this movement and began to require that all books be supplied in digital format and that they cost less than $20 each? Well, what would happen if they told the publishers they were no longer going to buy their inefficient, over-priced, tree-slaying compendiums? The publishers would have no choice. First, they would claim that they would be driven out of business. Then some smaller, more nimble publishers would start filling the gap. Then the big companies would buy them out and double their prices.

If there are enough hackers out there to support Linux– very efficiently, I might add– then there must be enough intellectuals, scientists, and others who would support a new “open source” text book system. In fact, isn’t Wikipedia a demonstration of this exact idea?

The Amazon electronic book reader.

It connects to Amazon through a wireless network– that is not compatible with European standards. Has the publishing industry learned anything from the music industry? Indeed they have: they appear to be just as stupid. A monthly subscription to the New York Times on Kindle– which is free, online– is $13.99. All right, so you buy a Kindle, and you decide to read five or six online news magazines or news papers, a few books, a few reference works… how long before you arrive at over $100.00 a month? And you are paying this for a technology that eliminates the publisher’s need to actually print something, on paper, and transport it to your eager little hands.

Add that to your cable bill, your phone bill, your cell bill, your iTunes bill, your movie rentals, and your CD collection… I think they’ve lost their minds. Why not do what Google, and most online newspapers have learned to do? Discretely sell some advertising in a non-intrusive way and hope to earn back the revenue through volume of hits?

[2009-11]

Apparently the State of California is now trying to do just what I describe here: it is creating digital versions of text books for high school and making them available online for free.  Story here.

[2010-08-01 ]

I just read that there is a website devoted to this cause.

“The drive-through, which accounts for 60 percent of the chain’s business in the United States, was reconfigured to become more efficient….” The New York Times in an article on the resurgence of the McDonald’s Restaurant chain, January 11, 2009.

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School Prayer Martyrs

Just once, could we please get the media to ask these students who insist that they are being denied their rights to exercise their religion, if they would stand up in front of their own Christian Colleges and demand that they permit an atheist to address their convocations and commencements. Just to show that it really is a principle at stake here.

When that happens, I will cease to be nauseated every time I hear another whiney Christian high school student bitterly complain that his religion is the only religion banned from public schools and it is just so unjust that he can’t express his deepest spiritual beliefs in his valedictory.

As if… as if these Christians really believe that they would be tolerant of other religions if they were in charge. This is the fundamental deceit of these bizarre confrontations: these Christians don’t want freedom of speech or pluralism. They want prayer, and the ten commandments to be obligatory at public schools. But when they complain to the press about their rights being trampled, nobody seems to want to bring that up. They pretend that they have always been tolerant of different religions and cultures, and that they have always had a very high regard for the rights of individuals to hold differing beliefs on major issues. And, by golly, if a student was selected to deliver the valedictory and he chose to say that the influence of religion on public life in the U.S. was pernicious and destructive, then, these Christian students so high on principles of free expression, would stand up for his right to deliver that speech too.

Even moderate Christian Colleges don’t invite feminists or evolutionists to lead official functions. They don’t believe there is any thing to “debate” about abortion or stem cell research. They barely invite Christians of different denominations, let alone Jews or Moslems. But we’re supposed to be outraged when a public high school decides that the rights of non-Christians in the student body or among the tax-paying parents should be respected.

The Banner (official magazine of the Christian Reformed Church) on August 5, carried another story about a poor little oppressed Christian high school student who won’t be permitted to lead his fellow graduates in prayer at his graduation. It’s about time The Banner and all the other Christian periodicals and websites that carry these stories start clarifying whether they really care about free speech— guest editorial by Noam Chomsky, anyone?– or if it just another feel-good pat yourself on the back self-serving tale of contrived repression.

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Ward Churchill

Ward L. Churchill is a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado. In the U.S. The nation that represents a shining beacon of hope to the world because of it’s democratic values and it’s devout belief in freedom of conscience and religion and a free press and free speech.

Do you take that all seriously?

Really, how significant is it when a university professor makes public comments indicating that he just doesn’t quite want to jump on the all-patriotic American bandwagon after 9/11 and actually dares to question the complicity of U.S. corporate interests in the attacks on the Twin Trade Towers?

Well, the Board of Regents– purely by coincidence, you know– not as if there was ever even the slightest question of abridging Professor Churchill’s freedom of speech, of course– decided to investigate Professor Churchill’s academic history, as, I’m sure, they did for all the professors at the University of Colorado, and with equal diligence and objectivity.

Lo and behold! Professor Churchill may have actually made a statement or two that might have been somewhat historically inaccurate! Fire the tenured sonofabitch! Done. The constitution is safe.

Now get this, so there is no confusion: he was fired because he had “falsified history” and “fabricated history”. He was also found to be “disrespectful of oral Indian traditions”.

These deliberations took place behind metal detectors and police guards because, the solemn regents reported, they had received death threats in the past month. Well, several death threats. A death threat. By e-mail.

Oh ye Regents of Colorado! Oh you proud and circumspect men, of towering integrity and courageous principle! You have saved your students from the misapprehension that the purpose of our freedoms is to be free! George Bush owes you a great, big, monstrous FAT one.

The truth is, Ward Churchill sounds like he may well be a liar and a scoundrel who doesn’t really deserve the support of anyone. That doesn’t change the fact that the regents targeted him for review because of his beliefs about 9/11.