Category: Education

Posted on

That Contrived Inspirational Teacher Movie: “Freedom Writers”

Just once, I would like to see a movie about a young teacher who doesn’t care about his students, can’t wait to move on to a better paying job, and doesn’t want any students intruding on his private life ever. And, it turns out, is a pretty good teacher. And he has a principal who really tries hard to manage his school well, and retain good staff. And when this teacher wants to take a field trip, his principal says, “of course– we take field trips all the time.”

This scenario is more likely than you think: life is not a Hollywood movie. What makes a good teacher? Dedication is one factor. Loving students is important. But, surprisingly– to Hollywood– it helps to be smart. To be competent. To know how to do a good job.

Not going to see that movie. Ever. We have been conditioned by the movies (see list below) to believe that good teachers care deeply, personally about their students, have all the time in the world for them, evenings, and weekends, and really don’t need the slightest academic ability because most of his or her skills will only be applied to “real life” problems, like gang violence and poverty and … well, not sex anymore– those “gang members” in “Freedom Writers” seem to be absolutely celibate. Doesn’t seem to be any thing in their journals about their boyfriends or girlfriends… They might be getting shot at, but at least nobody’s hitting on them… I guess these are unusually spiritual gang members.

Or could it be the Erin Gruell has provided us with a sanitized version of the story? One wonders, of course, what else she has chosen to leave out. She certainly didn’t omit even the tiniest fragment of student adulation of her. In the film’s most disingenuous scenes, the head of her department, wildly caricatured– if you believe the movie, she has made it her purpose in life to sabotage good teachers–opposes the demands of her students that she continue to teach them into their junior and senior years. We are given to understand that there isn’t a single other worthy teacher in the system, and that it is only right and good that Gruell should never apply her special gifts to the new, equally needy students entering grade 9.

There’s not much in the film about how learning really takes place, how students actually learn to write and express themselves, how students acquire self-confidence, how teachers pass on skills and techniques. It’s really all about what a lovable, heroic person Ms. Gruell is, and to make her as lovable as possible, the movie leaves out all the little potholes and pitfalls of real life. That’s not inspirational: it’s delusional.

Did you notice my deception in the first paragraph? I was wrong, of course. There is one movie that actually tells you about a dedicated but rather chilly professor who comes to realize that he has wasted most of his life: “The Browning Version”. If you find yourself getting extremely nauseated by “Les Choristes” or “Dangerous Minds” or “Freedom Writers” some Saturday night, go and rent “The Browning Version” (if you can) and take the cure. Even better: rent “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” and try to understand how charismatic, visionary teachers may not be a good thing.

Of all of these, aside from “The Browning Version”, “To Sir, With Love” is probably the least smarmy, and “Mr. Holland’s Opus” is probably the most smarmy and gooey, and “Dead Poet’s Society” is the phoniest. Most of these films create a straw man villain to inject some tension into the story– invariably a principal or Board Member who really, really wants the students to be bored and oppressed.

If you liked most of these movies, I’ll bet you’ve never seen “The Browning Version” or “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie”. You should. You must.

It is a dose of reality, a cold bath of truthfulness and authenticity, in a field of mushy, indeterminate ideals and beliefs. The truth is that any of the teachers in these movies could just as well be Jean Brodie, teaching her little brood the blessing of Fascism, and inspiring them with misguided fervor. The truth is that the high school band in “Mr. Holland’s Opus” would never have played that well in real life. The truth is that the poetry in “Dead Poet’s Society” didn’t express much about the lives of any of the characters in the movie because if it had, the audience would have been as frightened of real poetry as real people are frightened of real poets in real life.

And “Brodie” is the only one of these films to recognize that there is a danger in charismatic teachers. Make it a double feature: “Dead Poets Society” and “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie”. Which film has more truth?

Copyright © 2007 Bill Van Dyk All rights reserved. July 20, 2007

The problem with “Freedom Writers”…

I’m sure a lot of the events in the film really happened, even if not quite as depicted in the movie. I’m a former teacher: even good students don’t quite prostrate themselves before good teachers the way these kids did. There’s always at least one smart ass, or more, and not all students are little angels waiting for an encouraging teacher to see the good in them.

By half way through the movie, I didn’t trust anything it was showing me. That doesn’t mean I believe all of it was false– just that the movie clearly set out to “Hollywoodize” the story. I didn’t believe the head of the English Department could be that ridiculously obstinate, or that a rival teacher would be so transparently jealous of his “honor students”. I really doubt that the real students were as disinterested in sex as these students were, or that all of them would conveniently lose their personalities during the second half of the film so we could all focus on how amazingly grateful they are to Ms. Gruell.

There’s a story here, probably a really good one. And if it had been told honestly, it would be an inspiration to us all. You would think, wow, there is hope for mankind. But I can’t think that about this film– it is so rigged.

Inspirational Teacher Movies, Ranked:

The Gems:

  1. The Browning Version (Michael Redgrave)
  2. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Maggie Smith)
  3. To Sir, With Love (Sidney Poitier)
  4. Up the Down Staircase (Sandy Dennis)
  5. Asphalt Jungle

The Stinkers:

  1. Freedom Writers
  2. Les Choristes
  3. Mr. Holland’s Opus
  4. Lean on Me
  5. Dead Poet’s Society
  6. Stand and Deliver
  7. Dangerous Minds
  8. The Substitute

About Schools:

  1. Ridgemount High

 

Posted on

Allan Bloom & Leo Strauss and Real Political Correctness

The 20th was a century unlike any other.

I am this moment interested in one particular difference– the democratization of knowledge– the massive influx of middle-class and poor students into post-secondary institutions of higher learning that occurred in the 1960’s, and our ever-so-sweet, controversial, apocalyptic moral decline. Here we are. We’ve declined. We have the morality of alley cats. How did we get here?

For all the white noise and rhetorical flashes over the issue, it’s really not all that complicated. Until the 20th century, only the children of very rich, very privileged people could receive a higher education. These were children of people who benefited from the status quo. They were the status quo, either the church or the aristocracy. And all intellectual conversation took place on their terms, in their language, in a manner congenial to their ultimate self-interests, especially when it concerned noblesse oblige.

And then suddenly you have democracy and a prosperous middle class and suddenly children of hard-working middle-class parents get to go to college, and buy records, and go to movies, and read books, and suddenly Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom are whining about the tragic loss of culture and learning when what they really mean is that their privileged little ivory towers no longer command the landscape, and those suckers, those helplessly inane but physically peerless farmer’s boys, were no longer mindlessly willing to go immolate themselves on spears and in trenches in order to preserve Allan Bloom’s right to buy $4,000 dinner jackets, smoke Cuban cigars, and troll the streets of Paris looking for rough trade.

The same elitist attitudes certainly exist today. There has been no decline. If anything, there is probably more elitist achievement and behavior today than there ever was before. But the elitists are outnumbered. And they hate it. They just can’t stand the fact that Bruce Springsteen sells more copies of his songs about seducing New Jersey girls named Sandy with tight unzipped jeans, than the Chicago symphony will ever sell of any work by Beethoven. More people have seen “Blade Runner” than will ever see “Hamlet”. Besides, I’m not all that sure that “Hamlet” really is more important, or more of an indication of sophisticated and developed taste than “Blade Runner” is.

The bottom line is never surprising. Neo-cons like Bloom and Strauss and their disciples (who don’t occupy quite as many positions within the Bush administration as they used to) want to build a world in which their social and political class get to dictate culture to the masses. For all their bitter complaining about the “nanny state”, they are far more authoritarian, and far more willing to over-rule popular taste.

They are and always have been the real advocates of “political correctness”: patriotism, chastity, prurience, and consumerism.

 

Posted on

Really True Lies

Quite a few years ago, I was teaching at a Christian High School in Chatham, Ontario, when a gentleman named Dan Veltman was booked to speak to our youth about modern culture.

It was an odd presentation. Most church people who condemned rock’n’roll and television and movies at that time didn’t really know the names of any of the bands or actors or writers, or how modern culture was packaged. Veltman did. But people who did know something about popular culture usually didn’t make simplistic black and white judgments about what was “evil” out there and what was good. Veltman did– it was all evil. He showed us evil album covers and played us evil music and discussed subliminal advertising which wanted you to think about evil things like “sex”, and backwards masking. Our students– I kid you not– were thrilled. They were absolutely delighted to know that the the music they listened to was absolutely, irredeemably evil. They wanted more details.

It was very entertaining, like the orgies depicted in the film “The 10 Commandments” before Moses arrived with the tablets to set things right again. You could have your cake and eat it too. You could enjoy watching the skin, and then pat yourself on the back by rooting for Moses. I don’t think any of the students actually changed their listening habits or viewing preferences. They just felt better knowing that we knew that they knew that drugs and sex and violence were bad.

The formula hasn’t changed much for “True Lies”. Want to be a god-driven biblical prophet to today’s youth? Fork over $1295 (come on– you can get your church to raise the money) and join the “True Lies” team. We supply the power point presentation (the orgy) and you supply the fire and brimstone. Teenagers will actually ask you to make a presentation to their parents. Just so parents can see that they are really mature and self-controlled, and shocked, I say, shocked, to know that there is so much sex in the movies.

Cost of a good dose of self-righteous vilification? $495. The presenter gets to keep that money. It’s a franchise.

Interestingly, “True Lies” tries to enhance it’s currency with youth by claiming links to Hollywood and bands like Metallica, among others. We know evil. Chalmers website shows a picture of him standing with Jessica Simpson.

He claims to have actually interviewed a serial killer. “Which rock’n’roll song made you a killer. Come on. Was it ‘Do you Really Want to Hurt Me’?”

That’s rather amazing. While preaching against Hollywood values, he proudly poses with his arm around Jessica Simpson. Look at me: I’m hip. But not too hip. Jessica and I are headed right over to the malt shop to meet Bobby and Ritchie and the Fonz….

I wonder how many schools and churches see what I see: a money-making scam run by people with the astounding audacity to claim to enlighten your children about how our culture is trying to trick them while selling you a paschal of hokum.

The trouble is that the real immorality in our culture is rooted in an ideology of unlimited wealth and consumer gratification. Your teenagers won’t even sit still for a lecture on immorality: it has to be presented in the form of rock videos!

The sexual immorality and drugs are a relatively small part of the equation. Chalmers rapturously caresses his Hummer, beams next to Jessica Simpson, touts his celebrity endorsements, and offers to sell your house, while promising to wean your children off those decadent, twisted Hollywood values.

What qualifications do you need to be a Christian expert on culture, the media, and communications? $1295.00 U.S. And, you can’t smoke. Can’t drink. And you should be an expert on…. say, did we mention the $1295.00? By the way, if you don’t complete that first year, “True Lies” gets to keep your money. But you get books and brochures that you can sell– at wholesale prices.

Seriously, the application to become a speaker for “True Lies” asks one question that relates to a person’s actual expertise on popular culture: “name the last three movies you saw”. But that’s okay, because the expertise is supplied by headquarters, in the form of Powerpoint presentations.

From the website: “This video covers some of the themes of today’s popular music, including sex, violence, Satanism, rebellion against parents, and drug use. Video contains lots of quick moving MTV footage, designed for the MTV generation.” Yes, your children won’t fall asleep while they are being saved from eternal perdition.

Who is Phil Chalmers? He drives a Hummer, which is displayed somewhat fetishisticly on his web page..

How much do you want to bet…. that none of these workshops and seminars provided by “True Lies” includes any form of two-way discussion at all. Since their speakers are not really experts, and you are not expected to question the absolute reliability of their conclusions about pop culture, why would there need to be? Besides, then you would actually be trying to teach young people to think.

Chalmers real goal is simply to replace one set of programming instructions with another. Buy this….

As almost every other American “ministry”, the web page is mostly about buying the box set for $40.00. The money-changers are in.

And… he’s a Re/Max agent. I kid you not. On the same web-page where he promises to save American youth from the ravages of Satanic music and film– hey, are you moving?

Unexpected: www.truelies.org now just pops right up with Phil Chalmers’ charming buzzcut at www.philchalmers.com. . His website–curiously– has a link to thesmokinggun.com

Posted on

High School Uniform Benediction

St. Benedict’s is a new Catholic High School in Cambridge, Ontario. Here’s their website. Nice looking building, isn’t it?  [Ah… the website is gone.]

The students are nice-looking too. They all wear uniforms. The school promotes peace and healthy relationships. I applaud.

But I’ve never liked the idea of school uniforms. What’s the big deal? Why do some people have this compulsive need to tell people what they should be wearing?

I’ve heard the arguments in favor of school uniforms. Most of them essentially sound like this:

  • if we don’t tell students what to wear, girls will be sexually attractive and boys will want to have sex with them.
  • if we can’t tell students what to wear, how can we expect them to obey us when we’re telling them to do other things?
  • nobody will be fat any more, so everyone will be accepted by their peer group.

The other thing that annoys me about St. Benedict’s dress code is that they prescribe only clothes made by a certain manufacturer and sold by a certain vendor. The manufacturer is Denver Hayes and the vendor is Mark’s Work Warehouse.

What gives? It is understandable, if still somewhat bizarre, that a Catholic High School would tell its students what they may or may not wear to school, but why on earth should they require clothing made by a particular vendor?

Anybody with any common sense can see that the perfectly rational thing to do would be to specify the type of clothing– beige khaki pants, for example– and let students (or their parents) shop around for the best price.

Ah– but then little differences would be apparent. Five pockets instead of four. A slightly different shade of beige. No no no. Everyone must be EXACTLY alike.

Why do I have a suspicion that this deal was concocted by Mark’s Work Warehouse? Probably they claimed to be offering special pricing to the school if the school would guarantee that all students have to shop there. Probably there really isn’t any discount at all. Probably the items are now over-priced. Do you know of a single vendor that reduces his prices when he knows that he has no competition?

Hmmm. I also noticed that kilts are now banned. So much for the upside of school uniforms. There is a Catholic high school in Waterloo that requires kilts. I always found it somewhat ironic that the girls at this Catholic school were required to wear what looked to me like something we used to call “mini-skirts” when I was in high school.

What’s the point? I’ve heard uniforms defended, cleverly, as a way of reducing the peer pressure on kids. This is a “liberal” defense, to counter-act the impression that only militaristic conservatives want uniforms. (There is a link on St. Benedict’s web-site to a Catholic group that opposes the war in Iraq, so you can’t really accuse them of being “conservative”.)

Nobody has more expensive clothes than anybody else. Nobody has better brand names in their wardrobe. Our children will be judged by character instead of appearance. Is it true? Does it really happen? Are you telling me that there are no unpopular kids in schools with uniforms? That there is less bullying or cliquishness or self-righteousness? That people are more inclusive and fair and kind?

I don’t believe it. If anybody has a reliable study that shows that this really happens, I’d like to see it. And even if there was some reduction of bullying and harassment within the school, what about between schools? If uniforms are successful, won’t that mean, by definition, that kids from other schools, in different uniforms, become identified as outsiders?

In the meantime, I’ll continue to believe that good school spirit is the product of good schools, and good schools are the result of skilled, wise teachers, and wise leadership, but mostly the result of good kids.

St. Benedict students and staff are shy– I can’t find a single picture of anyone on the entire web-site.

How many rules do you need? Well, you start with the top and the bottom, shirt and skirt, and pants. Then boys start wearing jewelry. So you ban jewelry on boys. So someone says, “that’s sexist” because girls can wear earrings. So you allow earrings for boys. But some girls start wearing 2 or 3 earrings. So you ban all earrings on boys and girls. Then someone wears a nose-ring. You ban all jewelry. But what about our WWJD bracelets? Then the shoes– high heels, backless sandals, whatever. Then someone discovers that the rules don’t specify hair colour. For some reason, anal, militaristic apparatchiks get really upset with blue hair, so you have to add more rules. Then the length of the hair. Sooner or later, someone will shave their eyebrows or something, and you’ll have to ban that. And so it goes…

Yes, this sequence really does happen out there.

St. Benedict’s Dress Code:
Students are required to wear the charcoal gray uniform pants, the beige khaki pants, or blue or beige uniform shorts purchased through the school supplier. Only pants and shorts purchased from the school supplier will be acceptable;

At the bottom of the webpage is the motto:

St. Benedict CSS – A Celebration of People

… who all look alike.

Christian Home and School Magazine (March/April 2004) has a generally fawning article on school uniforms. A teacher claims that, “boys used to gather to comment on girls in the hallways, but now boys and girls are treating each other as equals…. that sexual edge is pretty much gone.”

Hmmm. I think I’ll remain skeptical. In a previous life, I used to be a boy and I can assure any teacher that nothing short of a Freightliner Express up the noggin is capable of preventing boys from thinking about the way girls look no matter what they are wearing.

To it’s credit, Christian Home and School gives some space to a Christian School in Calgary that decided against uniforms because they are associated with “elitist” schools in the city.

Posted on

Even Enemies Have Real Paranoids

Schools across the United States, in response to the entreaties of Homeland Security Fuehrer Ridge, are implementing emergency procedures to be used in case of… an emergency.

What emergency? In the letters sent home to parents, they don’t often say. They say things like “in light of increased concerns for community safety”.

So what, exactly, do they think is going to happen. The plans include evacuating the students to the gymnasium and ensuring that there is an “adequate” supply of food and water. For what? How can you prepare for an emergency when you are not prepared to seriously discuss exactly what kind of emergency you will be facing?

So it’s up to us sober-minded observers to speculate. Let’s consider some possibilities.

1. Foreign terrorists crash an airplane into the school. Not all that likely, you have to think. Why this particular school and not one of 8,000 others in the vicinity, say, of Chicago or New York? Is it realistic to prepare every school for an airplane crashing into it? How will the terrorists find your school in particular? Schools don’t stand out like World Trade Centers and Pentagons. And do you honestly think that even a terrorist wants to target children? (Well, maybe they do.)  There’s a reason why they chose the World Trade Centre— adults screwing other adults. So let’s leave that one aside for now.

2. Nuclear Bomb: They haven’t found any in Iraq yet. What a disappointment that must be to the Bush Administration. But if they did find one and they found that Iraq, or Al Qaeda, or somebody, had the means of delivering the bomb to New York, the gym would not be adequate protection, and all that duct tape and plastic won’t keep the radiation out. And even if it could, all the parents, in their unprotected workplaces, would be dead. Let’s not talk about that one either.

3. Chemical, Radioactive, or Biological Weapons Attack: according to some very smart people, the only biological weapon that could possibly pose a serious threat to large numbers of people is smallpox. Anthrax just doesn’t travel very well (how come you never hear about it any more) and most other biological agents can’t be delivered over a large area very effectively. Only the U.S. and Russia have any stores of smallpox, and as far as we know, they haven’t been selling them off to tin-pot dictators like they did chemical weapons, so smallpox is probably not a big concern.

There are the nerve agents, chlorine, and other chemical weapons. So I suppose these schools are concerned about somebody attacking the school with chemical agents. How? Dropped from a plane or launched from a mortar or rocket-launcher, you have to suppose. How would these villains get close enough to the school to launch such an attack? They could smuggle the compounds and the delivery technologies into the U.S., maybe through Mexico or Canada, and then drive to your town and position themselves near your school and, bingo! Or they could get into many, many small planes and drop the agents over the school yard during recess.

Then all the students rush into the gymnasium and the teachers duct-tape the doors and cover them with plastic.

Be honest. You can just see that happening, can’t you?

Part of being a rational, sane person is the ability to judge risk accurately and effectively. There are many bad things that could happen to your child at school. He could be bullied. He could be molested. She could fall and hurt herself. The school could be hit by a tornado or hurricane. There could be a fire or an earthquake.

Or some lunatic with easy access to semi-automatic weapons could walk in the front door, shoot the security guard, and kill dozens of students and teachers.  But we are not going to do a fucking thing to prevent that.

This has happened hundreds of times.

In the history of the U.S., not a single a school has ever been attacked by a terrorist.

Do you feel safer now?

The real reason schools are taking these precautions: It’s all Tom Ridge, you know. Yes it is. He is the Bush Administration’s official in charge of “homeland security”. Now, think about this. Who makes a better Republican? Someone who feels safe and prosperous and secure? Or someone who believes that enemies are out there on all sides, just waiting for an opportunity to whack us? Of course! Ridge is out to create an entire new generation of republicans, of fearful paranoids ready to grant their government any powers at all to save us from “evil” people out there who are jealous of tax-free dividends and gas-guzzling SUVs!

Think about this: the last time our society immersed itself into a culture of paranoia and fear was the 1950’s. Remember all the bomb shelters and McCarthyism? Right. Ten years later, we had the greatest uprising of youthful dissidence in the history of this country. Interesting to think about.

Posted on

Maryland Schools Sell Out

Why aren’t parents enraged when schools invite corporations to present plays and organize field trips for students at public schools?

This is one of the most insane things I’ve heard about. Schools throughout the United States are inviting corporations to pay for field trips and even to give “dramatic presentations” to students to get their corporate messages across to a captive audience in an “uncluttered” environment.

So, are these generous corporations sending children to museums and art galleries and theatres?

No. They are sending your children to Toys R Us and Petco and Saturn dealerships..

Isn’t this an insult to your intelligence? I mean, they are not even pretending to attach any real educational value to these excursions. Toys R Us, for god’s sake!

At Petco, the hapless students are presented with coupons entitling them to free goldfish. Not a free goldfish — a coupon. They have to blackmail their parents into returning to the store to redeem the coupons. This is allowed? This is legal? Don’t any parents care about this kind of crass exploitation of their children’s minds? Don’t they find it annoying to have two-bit hucksters in the classroom instead of a teacher?

They are seeing plays designed to teach children the virtues of consumption, the environmental friendliness of energy companies, and how wonderful it is to buy things.

The word “uncluttered” comes from Tom Harris, vice president of sales and marketing for “The National Theatre for Children” which basically presents advertising to children disguised as entertainment, and with the informed consent and complicity of principals and school boards.

Mr. Harris says it’s easy to dupe principals into accepting commercial intrusion, though he wouldn’t use the word “dupe”. Apparently, 95% of school boards are clueless enough to allow it.

The word “uncluttered” is chilling. In other words, the one environment in which children are not yet assaulted and bombarded with continuous advertising has opened the gates. The other chilling word he uses is “captive”. The children have no choice. They have to be in school. The parents have no choice– they have to send their children– it’s the law.

Was there ever a more flagrant expression of government intrusion into private lives than this?

This is as close as it gets to the government actually ordering its citizens to consume. This is the government actively promoting the gospel of conspicuous consumption. This is not free enterprise. This is corporate fascism. The minds and thoughts of the young must be turned to the “correct” attitude.

You don’t believe the National Theatre for Children is engaged in sheer propaganda? Read this description, from their website, of one of their programs:  In “Mission: It’s Possible,” a program favored by Wisconsin Gas, patriotic Professor Dabney Wabney is assigned by the government to produce a fuel that is plentiful, clean, and safe. After extensive research and the help of friends and colleagues, she discovers that there is no need to invent this elusive fuel because it already exists – natural gas. The show’s plot also explains where natural gas is found, how it is transported into people’s homes and why it is considered kind to the environment.

Are the children really learning about the environment and energy efficiency? Or about what a great, environmentally friendly, kid-loving corporation Wisconsin Gas is? Can’t wait to see an Enron or Monsanto-sponsored production! Just imagine what children can be taught about genetically modified foods and nuclear power plants!

Another production, conspicuously sponsored by Dole Food Co., promotes the virtues of eating fresh fruits and vegetables– and provides the children with coupons for Dole products.

Other productions, to be fair, try to discourage the children from smoking and promote environmental concerns. These are the Trojan Horses of this scam, usually sponsored by municipal water and waste departments

Even the tobacco companies recognize that it is a political necessity for them to pretend to want to discourage children from smoking.

Shoprite and United HealthCare are sponsors. Sponsors pay up to $1,000 per performance at elementary schools, or $10,000 per week at middle schools.

The National Theatre For Children actively promotes itself as a venue for corporate sponsors to get their messages to school children, with subtlety and tact, of course, but no less effectiveness.

As if corporate sponsorship of school outings and theatrical presentations wasn’t stupid enough, some school boards have prohibited trips to places of real educational value because of “security concerns”. Presumably, they are thinking that Osama Bin Laden is still out there and plotting right now to attack a group of American school children on a field trip to the Smithsonian.

I’m sorry if this offends anybody, but it has to be said that these people are either insanely paranoid or monumentally stupid or, more likely both..

Posted on

Heartless Merciless Bastards

The penalties also include a lifetime ban on receiving welfare or food stamps for those convicted of drug felonies, prohibitions against getting certain jobs in plumbing, education and other fields, and the loss of the right to vote, for life in some states. New York Times, December 28, 2002

In the 1990’s, the Christian government of the United States put its heart into getting “tough on crime”, because they loved everyone. One of the things they did was pass a law that deprives convicted criminals of access to social programs intended to help people trapped in the cycle of poverty and social dysfunction.

Well, who are they intended to help? I don’t know. The U.S. government often acts as if it should be a crime to be poor, period. But let’s think about this. Most robberies are committed by people who need money. Most people who need money are poor. If a poor person commits a crime, steals money, because, after all, they have none, then let’s make sure they are always poor.

Not that welfare amounts to anything that could be interpreted as helping anyone get out of poverty in the first place, of course. But the logic is clear. The way to get rid of poverty is not by sharing the fabulous wealth most of us possess, or by making it easier for the poor to access education and social services, but by making your life on earth as hellish as possible, and one of the things we can do to ensure that is to make sure that you will never get any help again if you steal once.

States can opt out of the lifetime ban on welfare, but only two, New York and Connecticut, have.

The law is the brainchild of former Senator Phil Gramm, now vice chairman of UBS Warbuck, the investment bank. Well, we knew he wasn’t going to join Habitat for Humanity after his little lucrative stay in the Senate. It’s payback time for Mr. Gramm. After years of passing laws that are monumentally beneficial to the rich and to corporate interests, the corporate interests have put him more directly on their payroll. And it’s probably cheaper for them than it was when they had to contribute to his election campaigns instead to keep him in servitude.

In many states, convicted felons are barred from jobs like plumbing, teaching, health care, or security. I’m not making this up. In Pennsylvania, theft of two library books is sufficient to ban you for life from working in a nursing home. A man who was convicted of possession of marijuana (and received probation) when he was 18 recently discovered that, after 30 years of working in the health care field, he could not get a new job in the same field because of that previous conviction.

This is because our leaders love Jesus.

“The consequences affect millions of Americans. Thirteen million felons who are in prison or have done their time live in the United States, according to an estimate by Christopher Uggen, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota. That is almost 7 percent of the adult population.”

[2011-03: that figure is now 10%]

Posted on

Quality Education

Last year, I remember hearing the Minister of Education of the Province of Ontario say, on the radio, that her department was dedicated to providing every student in Ontario with a “quality education”.

Am I the only one who finds it irritating, oftentimes, when people misuse words and sentences? “Quality education”? What quality? She doesn’t say. The quality of mercy? Not in these quarters.

I’m not a language snob. Sometimes language changes for the better, becomes enriched, more flexible, and sharper. “Cyberpunk” is a great new word. So is “internet” and “wired” (in the sense of “wired world”).

Sometimes, however, people are just too lazy to formulate a complete sentence. “Quality”, like “oftentimes”, seems more the result of mental passivity than activity. What the Minister of Education probably really meant to say was that her department would try to ensure that the good quality of education in Ontario would not be endangered by her government’s stupid policies towards the teachers’ unions.

Posted on

David Irving Holocaust Denier

Who is David Irving?

My nephew wrote an essay on the fire-bombing of Dresden by British forces during World War II and he cited David Irving as one of his sources. The name rang a bell, so I did quick search on the Internet. Sure enough–

David Irving believes that the Anne Frank Diary might be a forgery. He believes that the ovens at Auschwitz were built by the Poles after the war as a tourist attraction. His web site is filled with articles on “How Many Jews were in the KGB” and “How I Single-handedly Discovered the Goebbels Diaries”. He believes that Hitler didn’t know about the extermination of the Jews until 1943 (though he recently admitted he might have to revise that estimate in the light of Goebbels’ diaries).

Irving has been criticized for many people for holding rather extreme Holocaust revisionist views. Whenever these people try to prevent or discourage publication of his articles or books, he screams hysterically about free speech and how people are trying to destroy him politically rather than address “the truth”. Then he turns around and sues people who claim that he stinks as a historian.

It reminds me of people who say that tolerant people are just as intolerant as intolerant people because they are intolerant of intolerance. Seriously. I’ve heard Christians say this about liberals and libertarians.

The argument, of course, is sophistry at it’s lowest. It’s semantics. Actually, it’s just plain stupid. It perfectly consistent for a liberal to be intolerant of intolerance because that’s exactly the point. If you believe in tolerance, of course you’re going to oppose those who wish to advocate political or social actions that have the effect of persecuting people for their religious, moral, or political beliefs.

It reminds me of when people used to argue that you couldn’t fight for justice for the poor unless you personally renounced all your possessions. No, that’s not the point. The point is to fight for an economic system that distributes wealth more fairly, not for a system that distributes poverty more fairly.

The point is not to make everyone poor, but to make everyone moderately rich.

Anyway, David Irving is a strange bird. He does have a reputation for good basic historical research, but he holds some of the most absurd beliefs about history you can imagine. Reading his website, on the holocaust, is like entering an altered consciousness.

You have to be somewhat fearless about coming back out and reclaiming your own common sense. In terms of historical judgment, it doesn’t really matter a great deal if Hitler killed 5 million, 6 million, or 3 million. Why does Irving think the important thing is to “balance” our views of Nazi Germany. Does he think there are some redemptive elements there?

The point is that exterminating people is at the heart of Nazism and all evil ideologies, and the important thing about David Irving is that he has dedicated the latter part of his life to trying to persuade you and I to think more kindly of Adolph Hitler. Why? Because, I suspect, he believes that the real evil is communism and moral relativism.

Posted on

Gorilla Bars

When the children of Toronto came to school this September, a little surprise was waiting for them. In their playgrounds, instead of monkey bars, slides, and jungle gyms, they found… nothing.

Yes, the Toronto School Board decided to rip out 172 sets of playground equipment and take them away. Are they buying new equipment? No. They don’t have enough money to do that. It will cost about $27 million to replace them. That’s right: $27 MILLION.

What happened? Did a lot of parents complain about children getting injured on the equipment? No. Did someone die? No. Did the insurance premiums suddenly go up? No.

What happened was this. An inspector from Ottawa had created a report that laid out some guidelines for new playground equipment, with the laudable goal of ensuring that they would be as safe as possible. The new guidelines were better than the old guidelines, of course. Some clever people have found ways to build playground equipment that is safer than ever before.

The Toronto School Board, having received their new guidelines, hired an inspector from a private service to check all of their playground equipment to see if they conformed with the new guidelines. They did not, of course. The old playground equipment is, well, old.

As it turns out, the old playground equipment was not very bad at all. Out of the hundreds of thousands of children who had played on them, no one had ever been killed, nor, apparently, were there many serious injuries. In fact, more children are injured on the paved areas of the playground and the yard than on the playground equipment.

Still, no cost is too high when it comes to children’s safety. Except for the cost of common sense and rationality. The Toronto School Board ordered 172 sets of old playground equipment removed, on the off chance that someone, some day, might get hurt really bad. Not including the children who now play on the paved areas of the playground.

The head of the school board defends this decision. “No cost is too high.” Well, then, why not hire individual bodyguards to follow every child around all day to make sure the child never gets hurt? But that would be ridiculous. Why would it be ridiculous? Because it would cost too much. It would be too expensive. It would be unreasonable. The cost would be too high. There you go.

The head of the school board is a liar.

Now the School Board is going to go to the parents– whose opinions about removing the equipment they did not seek– and ask for donations to pay for new equipment.

The irony is that the man who was in charge of the Toronto School Board’s equipment originally has stated that the old equipment was fine. But of course, they didn’t hire him to do the inspections– they hired a consultant. From an outside firm. Just so someone on the school board could cover her ass.

He even said that when it was first installed, the number of reportable “incidents” went down, because, with the jungle-gyms to occupy them, fewer children got into trouble rough-housing or fighting in the school yard.

Sounds like the guy has some sense.