Wheat from the Chaff Blog -

Albert O. Hirschman’s The Passions and the Interests

April 26, 2014 | Author: C. Welch

Albert O. Hirschman’s The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph is an essay as insightful and thought-provoking as it is elegant. Hirschman’s Passions is a timeless classic that gracefully explores the intersection of economic, social and political thought, and provides a perceptive understanding of the Western world’s intellectual accommodation and acceptance of capitalism.

Hirschman’s central thesis is that, at the dawn of the modern era, there was an emerging belief that the pursuit of economic interests would stimulate the “benign human proclivities at the expense of some malignant ones” (66). Of course, before the dawn of capitalism, the pursuit of economic interests was considered one of the worst passions; avarice was always a foe of the Platonic conception of Reason and the Christian view of the Truth. Nevertheless, with the decline of feudalism and the rise of absolutist monarchies, the great concern of thinkers like Hobbes was the rising power of the state and the passions that led monarchs into ruinous external and civil wars. In this context, the pursuit of wealth was transformed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries into the pursuit of material interest. And money-making – now defined as interest – became a sort of mid-way mode of thought and motivation that, since it was “exempt from the destructiveness of passion and the ineffectuality of reason”, provided “a message of hope” (43-44). Positioned half-way between passion and reason, in other words, interest had the politically salutary effect of restraining the more destructive vices of “ambition, lust for power”:

[M]oney-making activities were approved in themselves [because] they kept the men engaged in them “out of mischief,” as it were, and had, more specifically, the virtue of imposing restraints on princely caprice, arbitrary government, and adventurous foreign policies” (130).

Two eighteen century thinkers at the center of this argument were Montesquieu and Sir James Steuart. The former proposed that a laissez-faire economy softened and refined the passionate and violent excesses of man: “It is almost a general rule that wherever the ways of man are gentle (moeurs douces) there is commerce; and whenever there is commerce, there the ways of men are gentle” (60). The pursuit of wealth, Hirschman argues, was thus rehabilitated into a “calm desire” that “acts with calculation and rationality” (65). Steuart built upon Montesquieu’s insights and provided an argument that made the connection between a capitalist economy and a temperate state. “Monied interests” are mobile and less tied to land; as such, rulers who seek to arbitrarily seize the wealth of their lands or debase the currency will find such moves difficult to achieve and self-defeating if they do. As Hirschman summarizes, for “Steuart, it is the overall complexity and vulnerability of the ‘modern oeconomy’ that makes arbitrary decisions and interferences unthinkable – that is, exorbitantly costly and disruptive” (87). Overall, the pursuit of individual interest was therefore assigned the role of a mid-way countervailing force, a force that contained the passions of humanity, and particularly the passions of political leaders.

However, by the end of the eighteenth century, the “Montesquieu-Steuart vision” disappeared, and new lines of thinking emerged. The “idea that men pursuing their interests would be forever harmless” increasingly appeared to have “an air of unreality about it” (126). Adam Smith, at the dawn of industrial capitalism, was disturbed by the psychological implications of the division of labor, in which, according to Smith, “the heroic spirit is almost utterly extinguished” (107). [Thereafter, the Romantics and Marxists of the following century, albeit in different directions, would expand upon the view that the pursuit of material interest was now the primary scourge of human existence.] Adam Smith, as we all know, is still considered a proponent of capitalism, but he turned the “Montesquieu-Steuart vision” on its head. The pursuit of wealth lost its moderating role; it was once again considered a passion – indeed, all passions were collapsed into the “augmentation of fortune” – but now this passion worked like an “invisible hand” to meet the needs of society (108). Put another way, making money was no longer considered a purposeful bulwark against excess, but an ironic and unseen force of social stability and peacefulness.

In the end, Hirschman provides a salutary lesson for the history of ideas: it’s not enough to recognize the unintended consequences of intended outcomes. If we are to better understand our past, and escape Santayana’s warning about repeating history, we must also remember that sometimes the intended consequences succeed, but in ways we don’t appreciate. Thus, Hirschman contends that “capitalism was supposed to accomplish exactly what was soon to be denounced as its worst feature” (132). Let us finish with Hirschman’s own elegant conclusion:

For as soon as capitalism was triumphant and “passion” seemed indeed to be restrained and perhaps even extinguished in the comparatively peaceful, tranquil, and business-minded Europe of the period after the Congress of Vienna, the world suddenly appeared empty, petty, and boring, and the stage was set for the Romantic critique of the bourgeois order as incredibly impoverished in relation to earlier ages – the new world seemed to lack nobility, grandeur, mystery, and, above all, passion. Considerable traces of this nostalgic critique can be found in subsequent social thought from Fourier’s advocacy of passionate attraction to Marx’s theory of alienation as the price of progress to Weber’s concept of Entzauberung (progressive disintegration of the magical vision of the world). In all of these explicit or implicit critiques of capitalism there was little recognition that, to an earlier age, the world of the “full human personality,” replete with diverse passions, appeared as a menace that needed to be exorcized to the greatest possible extent (132-133).

Hirschman, in other words, is a voice for moderation and mindfulness. Instead of simply oscillating between one extreme and the other, we should recognize that our current discontent may in fact be the result of attempts to resolve older problems, and that by abandoning current policies we may unwittingly return to an older but nevertheless still unsatisfactory paradigm. [One wonders, for example, if critics of “New Deal” reform capitalism really understand what existed before.] Hirschman, in the end, reminds us that the continuities from the past still have implications for the future.

The Phoniness of BC’s Teacher “Surplus” [Updated]

April 24, 2014 | Author: C. Welch

By 2008, an anticipated shortage of teachers in BC had disappeared. In a National Post article, the change seemed almost inexplicable:

“My sense is that there are more teachers than we need in a couple of subject areas,” said Marie Crowther, registrar for the B.C. College of Teachers. “Overall the anticipated shortage hasn’t materialized and from my perspective, I don’t think it will materialize.”

So what happened? Why does BC now face a teacher surplus?

Much has been made of this surplus. Indeed, it’s become a favourite topic amongst the right-wing corporate apologists who dominate BC’s media landscape. According to these pundits, the law of supply and demand should impose a significant degree of discipline on future contract negotiations; the BCTF ought to stop comparing its members to other Canadian jurisdictions and face the realities of classical economics. To put it simply, BC teachers must embrace the government narrative and accept lower salaries.

But let’s be clear: the BC Liberals have engineered a teacher surplus. Since 2002, when there were dark rumours that the Liberals were going to fix a looming teacher shortage, BC’s pupil-teacher ratio has steadily climbed, and according to Statistics Canada we are the only jurisdiction in the country (2006-2011) where the PTR has become worse rather than better, despite similar demographic trends across the country. And overall, BC’s PTR is now the worst in Canada.

According to SFU education professor Peter Grimmett, there is a direct correlation between higher pupil-teacher ratios and lower demand for teachers. He argues that “every one-point increase in the pupil-teacher ratio [means] 2,500 fewer teachers”. Facing a teacher shortage? Jam more kids into existing classrooms and suddenly you don’t need as many teachers. Voila, problem solved.

I’m sure many will argue that PTR doesn’t matter, but try telling that to our coddled private schools. Since the Liberals eliminated most Grade 12 provincial exams, small class size has been a prime selling feature in private school advertising. Don’t believe me? Look it up here or here or here.

Of course, our corporate media could fall back on another BC Liberal press release and argue that our “outcomes” are excellent, so why should we worry? [Fellow media hack Sean Leslie was ranting about this last weekend on another right-wing bastion, CKNW.] The outcomes angle might be comforting if the PISA scores that the Liberals like to trumpet weren’t actually going down (see below), or our graduation rates weren’t based on steadily declining standards like lowered grad requirements and a less rigorous exam system.

$math (2)$
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Wouldn’t it be nice if our media commentators didn’t sound like the agitprop department of the sitting government?

When is debt not debt? When it belongs to your friends.

February 21, 2014 | Author: C. Welch

Though Vaughn Palmer is not as obnoxious or snide as others in BC’s Senate-track press corp, his refusal to be honest about our debt is maddening. The central problem is that the BC Liberals have gone on a spending binge since 2005, but most of it is not counted as debt. The Liberals have been able to keep tens of billions of dollars in P3 developments and BC Hydro contractual obligations off the official books, even though we as taxpayers are ultimately responsible for this spending. By some estimates, the hidden P3/Hydro debt is over 100 billion dollars, and makes a mockery of the claim that the Liberals are competent economic managers. Here are two articles that nicely explain the problem:

http://coldstreamernews.blogspot.ca/2011/10/gabriel-yiu-gordon-campbells-100.html

http://commonsensecanadian.ca/bc-budget-hides-100-billion-liabilities-leaves-citizens-shoulder-debt-burden/

So where is BC’s corporate press in all of this? If the NDP were in power we would no doubt hear howls of outrage about phony fudge-it budgets. But what do we currently get? Well, we get timid, mealy-mouthed phrases like “debt promises far from being delivered”. Or, even worse, “mission accomplished“. Nothing about contractual obligations and nothing about P3 accounting tricks. In fact, we don’t even hear that the official debt has grown much more under the Liberals compared to the NDP, even without all the hidden debt. No wonder so many people in BC believe that Glen Clark, rather than Gordon Campbell, was the premier convicted of a crime.

The False Argument of Equivalence

February 2, 2014 | Author: C. Welch

Mike Smyth’s Sunday editorial [Ed. The link is no longer available.] is a classic example of BC’s mainstream corporate media once again spinning the narrative of equivalence with regard to BC’s education system. We’ve seen it for years from mainstream commentators like Keith Baldrey, Jon Ferry and Tom Fletcher. [Les Leyne of the Times-Colonist is a recent and significant exception.] The spin basically says that both sides – the government and the union – have been equally intransigent in our so-called “education wars”.* As a result, any government malfeasance is entirely excusable, and perhaps even banal. It’s the rhetorical equivalent of “move along here; there’s nothing to see”.

Except Judge Griffin doesn’t see it that way. She lays blame on one side: the government. No matter how you slice it, what the BCTF has been saying for years is true. The government has had no interest in good-faith bargaining, and much interest in creating havoc with our kids to advance an ideological agenda. That’s not spin or interpretation; it’s what the BC Supreme Court has ruled.

But let’s get back to Michael Smyth. His snideness is matched only by his laughable bias. In the editorial mentioned above, he argues that the NDP gave the BCTF a sweetheart deal in 1998. He conveniently forgets to mention that the deal (as well as previous provincial and local deals) came at a tremendous cost to teachers’ salary and benefits. It was a negotiated deal that worked well for kids but not for the pocket books of teachers. And when the BC Liberals illegally broke that contract [according to Justice Griffin], teachers lost class size and composition language and their foregone salary and benefits.

Even worse, Smyth implies that a government negotiates with both the teachers and the school boards. This allows him to argue that the Liberals were taking away one bad faith deal with another.

… What did the NDP government do with a tentative union contract opposed by the teachers’ employers? They rammed it through the legislature and forced it into law over the objection of school districts.

In other words, the Liberals have now been found guilty of bad-faith bargaining for removing contract provisions that were arguably imposed through bad-faith bargaining by the NDP.

Equivalence, right? Nonsense. It simply doesn’t work that way. A government will consult with school boards, but it doesn’t “bargain” with them. The role of a school board, as lousy as it might seem, is to implement government policy, not negotiate with the government. So, nice try, Mike, but it’s another false equivalence.

In the end, Smyth’s rhetorical efforts help explain how a right-wing, Senate track journalistic corp works to blunt and minimize the political effects of a stinging judicial rebuke against a cynical, union-busting Liberal government.

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* We also see the deployment of the “equivalence” argument in defense of corporate funding of the BC Liberals.

An elected Canadian Senate is, by itself, a democratic disaster

January 3, 2014 | Author: C. Welch

Update (Dec. 6, 2015): It now appears, in the face of Justin Trudeau’s modest Senate reform efforts, that Christy Clark is aware of the same issues I discuss below. Good lord: Christy and I agree!
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The title seem paradoxical. How could electing the Canadian Senate – arguably a den of patronage and corruption – be a democratic disaster? The answer, in short, is that without a change to its current seat configuration, the current Senate is actually preferable to Stephen Harper’s long-standing goal of a Senate that is elected, given term limits, but is not redistributed in terms of seats.

The problem lies in how the Canadian Senate seats are allotted. Ostensibly designed to represent Canadian regions, the Senate apportions an “equal” number of seats to the West, Ontario, Quebec, and the Maritimes (with a handful of seats for the North). But in reality the seats are distributed per province, and the chart below shows how profoundly undemocratic that distribution is:

Province or Territory	Number of Senators	Population per Senator (April 2013)
British Columbia	6	775,001
Alberta	6	660,890
Ontario	24	565,988
Quebec	24	337,462
Manitoba	6	212,890
Saskatchewan	6	182,313
Nova Scotia	10	94,502
NFLD and Labrador	6	85,595
New Brunswick	10	75,404
Northwest Territories	1	43,349
Prince Edward Island	4	36,441
Yukon	1	36,418
Nunavut	1	34,023
Total/Average	105	334,681

British Columbia’s and Alberta’s interests are clearly under-represented in the current Senate. The province of Prince Edward Island, with a population less than Kelowna, still has two-thirds of the representation of BC (and the other three western provinces, as well). New Brunswick has two-thirds more power in the Senate than BC, and almost 10 times the influence per resident. Even Ontario and Quebec have proportionally much more power than BC and Alberta. While this might have made sense in 1867, it now utterly contravenes a basic principle of representative democracy: representation by population. The idea of representation by region is a red herring – Senators are designated according to the province they represent (except, perhaps, Pamela Wallin) and limited by the number of Senators for each province; as a result, the proportional representation of a province must be central to any argument about Senate reform.

Of course, up to now, the Senate has been a proverbial rubber stamp, so Senate seat distribution has been relatively unimportant. But that would change if Prime Minister Harper succeeds in creating an elected Senate. If that were to happen, the Senate would now have the sheen of democratic legitimacy. And that is problematic because the Senate has, according to the Constitution Acts of 1867 and 1982, virtually the same powers as the House of Commons. While it can’t introduce money bills nor permanently block constitutional amendments, it can do virtually anything else the House can, including vetoing House legislation. Only the lack of electoral legitimacy has held the Senate back from exercising its considerable powers (though even with issues like abortion, the Senate has occasionally intervened with a veto). So giving the Senate democratic legitimacy would empower a branch of government that is heavily weighted against British Columbian and Albertan interests. It would have disastrous implications for the political interests of the two westernmost provinces and for democratic legitimacy across the country. B.C. and/or Alberta would be permanently and unfairly disadvantaged, without even the hope that population shifts could alter the balance of power, like it might in the House of Commons. No wonder it’s so vexing and disturbing to see certain British Columbian politicians support such a politically disastrous policy.

At this point, the Harper government awaits a Supreme Court “reference” judgment on whether he can proceed unilaterally without the provinces’ support. Given the problems above, the best outcome is that Harper cannot proceed, or that abolition – long the policy of the Official Opposition – is permissible. Either option is preferable to a legitimate and empowered but maldistributed Canadian Senate.

A Review of Tom Bennett’s Teacher Proof

July 10, 2013 | Author: C. Welch

[D]on’t let the fashions crush you. And so many of them are so, so very bad. The thrill of innovation, the desire for simple answers, and the mistaken belief that educational research will shine a guiding light to a smarter, more efficient system, has proven the undoing of us, and will undermine us further if we let it. So we mustn’t let it. (217)

Rarely in my 20 years of teaching have I read a book that is actually written by a teacher, for teachers and in defence of teachers. Tom Bennett’s Teacher Proof is an invigorating breath of fresh air that deftly counter-attacks the onslaught of dubious educational “research” that bedevils our profession, and places pedagogical leadership back into the hands of those who understand education best: the front-line classroom teacher. Teacher Proof is a witty, defiant, thought-provoking and practical call-to-arms. As a result, it’s a book that new teachers will likely never be assigned in teachers’ training programs, even though every teacher ought to be compelled to read it by threat of a good horsewhipping.

To outsiders, especially in North America, educational politics are characterized by struggles over testing, labour contracts and government cutbacks. However, there is another struggle within the profession that pits teachers against teachers, and teachers against education “experts”. This struggle is over pedagogy, which we can define as the skills and theories of good teaching practice. Bennett’s book focuses largely on this struggle, from the point of view of an active British educator. His central thesis is that “educational science” is a problematic field of academic research, and its application to everyday teaching practice should be viewed with a great deal of skepticism. Instead of relying on people who are unfamiliar with the classroom to show teachers how to teach, front-line educators should look to themselves for professional improvement:

My opinion is this: there are few things that educational science has brought to the classroom that could not already have been discerned by a competent teacher intent on teaching well after a few years of practice. (64)

Bennett begins in an unexpected manner: he doesn’t really talk about education, but about the scientific method. Given my own training in social science and the philosophy of science, I think Bennett’s summary is clear and pithy, and simplifies the field for non-experts without being overly simplistic. Of course, readers may wonder why they are reading about biased agendas, “cargo cult” science, small sample sizes, lack of control groups, the Hawthorne effect, the appeal to novelty, and confirmation bias, but it becomes clear that these concepts are central to his analysis of educational research. For those who feel the urge to skip this section, I recommend paying attention to the first chapters; they are invaluable to his critique.

And the critique begins in earnest with an assault on Multiple Intelligences, which postulates that there are many types of intelligence (interpersonal; bodily kinaesthetic; spiritual; moral) that exist beyond the traditional measurement of IQ. Like so many of the theories that follow, MI posits a theory of intelligence that is largely untestable and deeply value laden. As a result, MI really has no scientific basis. Even Howard Gardner, according to Bennett, has admitted to the dubious scientific basis of the theory that Gardner has championed: “‘At present it must be admitted that the selection (or rejection) of a candidate’s intelligence is reminiscent more of an artistic judgement than of a scientific assessment.’ So just to be clear, he [Gardner] admits that this is an aesthetic taxonomy, not an objective definition and guide. Some would describe that as ‘opinion’” (73).

From there, Bennett sets his sights on a series of theories that are pillars of modern educational theory: Brain Gym, group work, Emotional Intelligence, 21^st century skills, the digital classroom, multiple learning styles, gamification, learning to learn, school uniforms and De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats. All of these are reviewed with a skeptical eye, and bludgeoned with highly critical meta-studies, their own lack of substantive scientific evidence, and/or Bennett’s keen Humean suspicion. Cooperative learning, as an example, is examined through the filter of Bennett’s own experience:

Loads of kids really really do like working in groups – witness the phenomenon when you have a group of agreeable, biddable kids who get on with each other and want to show what a great bunch of pals they are by making the best poster. I’ve seen it happen a lot. But this appears to put the strategy benefit before the horse; the point of group work is that it is supposed to develop and encourage these skills of interactivity and motivation. But in the examples where it seems to work best, these qualities and skills have to pre-exist the activity. Which seems to make the whole thing pointless. (85)

In terms of multiple learning styles, the major research in favour of this theory (by Dunn) is based on preferences rather than replicable and measurable data: “The problem with the Dunn research is that they mistook expressed preferences for learning, for real modalities. Just because someone claims they learn better one way, means very little” (159). And after reviewing the literature on learning to learn (L2L), Bennett finds that, so far, “we have precious little research to suggest that children actually can improve their learning by learning about learning, or even that conceptually, such a thing might exist” (176). Bennett thus makes the following conclusion: “Wishy-washy pseudoscience has infected the everyday idiom of educational discourse, so that even the language we use is based on the Orwellian absurdities and inanities of the quacks and hucksters trying to hustle the latest fad and fashion” (210).

In the final section, Bennett offers us common sense advice that is instantly recognizable to anyone who has spent significant time in the classroom. I won’t go into too much detail, but he discusses such basics as attendance, punctuality, behavior, feedback, solid subject knowledge and classroom experience (much akin to Aristotle’s conception of phronesis, or practical wisdom). Bennett also encourages teachers to exercise autonomy and integrity: “Up to a point, you have autonomy. You don’t always have to use the latest technique or fad, even if the school recommends it. In fact, I would wait until the school demands you do something specifically before you follow the fashion” (216). If you have to “feed the beast” to temporarily satisfy the so-called experts, then so be it, but then “completely ignore it for the other 99.5 per cent of your career” (ibid).

I come away satisfied though not completely without concern. Bennett’s Humean skepticism parallels my own worldview, so I wonder if I’m a victim of confirmation bias (which Bennett discusses so effectively) and if I agree with Bennett simply because of the shock of recognition and the realization of kinship. I also wonder if his critiques, particularly of theories without critical meta-studies, are thorough enough to convince the Believers. As Hume might ask, has Bennett supplied enough inductive evidence to be persuasive? To be honest, while I completely agree with Bennett’s criticisms of cooperative learning and 21^st century learning, I don’t think he offers the strongest arguments against these trends. (I’ve discussed these movements in a modest way on my own blog, in posts such as Questioning Progressive Education’s Sacred Cows and Same Coin, Two Sides: Resurrecting the Liberal Arts Ideal.) And I suppose my own academic training unfairly discriminates against a writer whose caustic humour belies the serious nature of the topic.

Nevertheless, Bennett manages to cover a lot of ground with insight and courage; Teacher Proof is, on the whole, a well-argued jeremiad that effectively responds to the tsunami-like waves of dubious innovation that continually buffet the teaching profession.

Please feel free to read my other posts on education.

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And here are more quotes from Tom Bennett’s Teacher Proof:

‘That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.’

[T]he generation of teachers working today (or trained in the last ten years) are barely taught anything other than the latest dogma and cant. Newer teachers I talk to are astounded by any presumption that these paradigms might be questionable.

What’s important is that we (and by we, I mean anyone in the teaching profession) are aware of how easy it is for a value or hunch to become a hypothesis that, untouched by credible testing, can escape the laboratory and run amok in the real world.

But even more important than all that is the experience of teachers, the great collective ocean of understanding that is treated as mere anecdote by many in the research industry, which is ironic when you consider how much is published that simply reflects intuition and personal prejudice dressed up in 10,000 words with references. That ocean of experience is hard to access, however; while most teachers are trained in the context of in-school tutors and mentors, the rot has set in so firmly in some schools and training institutions that dogma is often quoted as solutions to specific problems when what is required is personal experience, transmitted by expert professionals, one to the other.

Here’s what I believe; this informs everything I have learned in teaching after a decade: Experience trumps theory every time.

Bluntly, in a group, lazy kids get a chance to really spread their lazy-ass wings and reach heights of doing absolutely nothing.

[On 21st century learning] [T]his appeal to the terrifying unfamiliarity of the future is a sham nestled in a half-truth.

For a start, it generates the myth that what we teach children (content, facts, etc.) is less relevant, because everything’s changing so frightfully fast; so why bother teaching them anything? This leads to the second danger: the idea that if content is irrelevant (we can Google it after all) then what we should be teaching children is versatility, the ability to think on their feet, the ability to think creatively and adapt to the chaotic culture and fluid job market that our children will enter. Why, it’ll be barely recognisable! Who needs history or formulae when the inheritors of tomorrow will need all their wits about them just to inhabit the cybersphere?

The suggestion that the contemporary curriculum is somehow the death-knell of creativity is nonsense. It’s a bona fide saviour: millions of children exposed to a spectrum of art and opportunity that our grandparents would have drooled over.

But I tire of someone who has never been a classroom teacher telling me what classroom teaching is like, or how children should be taught. If I can paraphrase – I suspect – Christopher Hitchens, being told how to teach by a non-teacher with a PhD in education is a bit like being told by a virgin how to get laid. His good intentions and intuitions can’t replace the real experience of teaching children. Well-meant aphorisms about arming children to engage with the new learning society are easy to find inspirational, but they’re empty. It’s far harder to inspire someone with concrete and practical ideas. And abstracts, though they sound beautiful, are harder to both prove and disprove.

We learn through content; any skills of manipulating that content can only come about through familiarity with the content.

[On educational research] Enthusiasm trumps evidence.

Good teaching relies on things that have been around for millennia: good subject knowledge; good classroom control; good communication skills; heart and guts. You don’t need anything else. Maybe a pen, if you’re feeling profligate. Everything else is chaff. Everything else obscures the teacher. I don’t need a damn thing other than my voice and a room full of kids. The rest is bull, dressed up as Buck Rogers.

The push for digital literacy is simply a push for conventional literacies using new delivery mechanisms, and don’t rely on anything ground shaking. In essence digital literacy is simply regular, ready-salted literacy with a funny hat.

There’s another trap for teachers here, beyond the obvious ones of falling for yet another faddish piece of educational moronism: the trap of exhaustion, self-blame and guilt. We work hard enough as it is to try to make the lesson accessible to everyone, brainiac or blunt instrument. The added requirement that we tailor things for every individual learning style really is too much. You can hear teachers cracking from the effort.

As Stahl mentions, after a year, most people who attend courses on VARK usually end up, within a year, not using it.

What I’m very prickly about are spurious claims about the efficacy of a project without any evidence to back it up. This article seems to me to be a piece of advocacy and speculation, and that’s absolutely fine. What I don’t think it is, is proof of any kind, and I’m sure the authors didn’t intend it to be either.

What every paper cited seems to do is to draw useful links between the way they believe people learn, and the features of video games, or games in general that could either correlate or support them. Which is very interesting – genuinely. But none of this points to anything other than speculation.

We simply have no credible data to suggest in what ways gamification could help us in the classroom.

I suspect that children learn when they are told stuff, and forced in some way to remember it, and practise it.

The idea that a child, left alone, would teach itself language, poetry, art and music is palpable guano.

This paragraph is essential:

Even the earliest days ‘in the field’ convinced us that this was too simplistic. Schools, particularly at this time, are experiencing such a plethora of initiatives that isolating ‘our’ interventions would be extremely difficult.

In other words, we realised quickly that we couldn’t just see if it was our project that was having an effect, or other projects. Aren’t humans just frustratingly complicated?

The researchers make these findings:
Pupils’ measured academic performance varied between project schools. These results need to be treated with caution as possible outcomes of the project.

The four-year project found that L2L wasn’t a discrete skill, but ‘a family of learning practices that enable learning to happen’. So it isn’t a thing. It’s a bundle of things. I could probably have told you that diligence, liking your subject, dedication, effort and focus were good ways to behave as a learner, but apparently we need millions of pounds to tell us the obvious.

Reference was made to the Halo effect, where our judgement of someone is influenced by our overall opinion of someone – so for example we might not believe someone is lying because we find them attractive, or we believe school uniform helps students with behaviour because we remember seeing well-behaved students in uniform.

As I have been at pains to mention, this is not an all-out assault on all educational research. This is an assault on bad research, because it is not carbon neutral; it does not exist in a vacuum. Make no mistake: it hurts us. It makes my job more difficult, and it makes children’s lives harder.

One of the things that repels me at times is that the author is telling the reader to do things their way, when doing things their way is only achievable for … well, them. That’s why I don’t try to flog anyone the Tom Bennett Teaching Tool Kit; I only ever advise people to do things that I think the vast majority of people could do. I once got a kid to stop playing with a mobile phone by implying he was playing with himself. Job tightrope klaxon. But I got away with it because of the extremely good relationship I had with my class. I would never recommend it as a course of action for someone else.

It’s the economy, stupid

May 18, 2013 | Author: C. Welch

It’s the economy, stupid. Although the #bcliberals are terrible economic managers, #bcndp silence on economy concedes issue to opponents.

— Colin W. (@grapemanca) May 15, 2013

Probably the only positive outcome after the stunning BC election of May 14 was a petty sense of “I told you so”. Though I had predicted (like most people) a victory for the NDP, I had become disenchanted with the New Democrats’ performance because it was hard to distinguish the 2013 election from the failed election campaigns of 2001, 2005 and 2009. The central problem persisted: almost complete silence on economic policy.

I have argued for years that silence on this core issue concedes the topic to the Liberals, and makes the latter the de facto “party of the economy” (and thus the party of “prosperity”, “growth” and “jobs”). And without this issue, the NDP will probably never win. For example, in one of my first ever blog posts back in April 2009, I discussed the paucity of policy on economic issues by the provincial NDP, and how Carole James’s stubborn refusal to discuss the economy and the NDP’s economic record in the 1990’s would lead to failure in the upcoming 2009 election.

And now we come to another electoral failure, albeit one where the outcome was supposed to be different. There is no doubt that the NDP’s failure resulted from a constellation of forces. On an electoral level, it’s difficult to say with certainty if the Green vote prevented an NDP victory, but it was pretty clear that both NDP and Green voters viewed the other party as their second choice in the election. Tactically, the NDP realized only at the end that negative campaigning works. In the last few days, NDP advertising finally began to accentuate many of the Liberals’ failings, but by then it was too late.

Adrian Dix and his campaign team also tried to run a “light” campaign – a campaign long on optimism and short on commitments to difficult issues. And one of Dix’s rare policy pronouncements, his flip-flop on the southern Kinder Morgan pipeline, certainly didn’t help.

Nevertheless, in my opinion, all of this is prologue. The heart of NDP electoral failure, as I’ve stated above, is their relative silence on economic policy. All other issues are secondary or derive from the NDP economic vacuum. As James Carville insisted back in the early 90’s, it’s “the economy, stupid”.¹ For decades, most British Columbians made the economy their number one concern. Despite the failure of pollsters to accurately predict the May election, the preoccupation with the economy remained clear and consistent. And according to Angus Reid, the economy was the number one issue heading into election night.

Yet the NDP said little about the dismal Liberal record on the economy. They could have railed against Christy Clark’s BC Jobs Plan that failed to ignite private sector employment, and continues to saddle us with the worst unemployment record in western Canada. The Liberals also gave us an enormous debt load. As noted by Damien Gillis,

the Liberals have raised our real provincial debt from $34 Billion to $171 Billion since they came to power. The NDP, by contrast, raised it by $17 Billion over a similar period.

Much of this debt is in the form of “contractual obligations” to private power producers who will enjoy generous power contracts with the province for decades to come. Again, on this issue, the NDP was largely silent.

Where was the sustained attack on the tragic effects of the Liberals’ tax-cutting, trickle-down agenda? Inequality in this province remains a blight on our society and economy, but it was merely a tag line in a few advertisements near the end of the campaign:

And tax cuts have not led to an increase in productivity as its proponents have promised. As the Institute of Chartered Accountants of BC noted in 2010, despite

the infusion of investment and human capital in the past five years, BC’s labour force productivity stagnated. All of Canada suffers from a labour productivity gap with the US, but BC’s productivity has remained below the national average for many years. To a large degree, poor productivity explains the lower real wage in BC…

Arguments regarding productivity and competitiveness would have damaged the Liberals on their “home turf”, but not a word was heard from their opponents.

Furthermore, the NDP could have hammered the Liberals over their appalling record on child poverty, but the NDP only referred to it briefly in a few advertisements:

Finally, how about the Liberals’ poor record on investing in education in BC? Aside from “skills training”, the NDP ignored the issue of education underfunding and the serious consequences it has engendered.

Without a critique of BC Liberal economic policy, the NDP concedes the issue to the BC Liberals. Yet the NDP simply can’t afford to surrender this territory. It is the only real place to grow their support beyond the traditional base. Put another way, without a split in the right-wing vote, they need to appeal to new voters who (as we’ve seen above) care deeply about economic performance. As I’ve noted before, the right-wing coalition normally polls about 5-10% above the NDP, so if anyone needs to blaze new paths, it’s the NDP, not the Liberals. [To put things in perspective, the 2013 NDP earned just 1.2% less of the popular vote than in their big win of 1991.] This means tackling the economy and taking away, or at least minimizing, the major perceived strength of the “party of the economy”. As Gillis has argued, echoing Karl Rove, “You don’t attack your opponent’s weakness; you attack their greatest strength, because if you take that leg out from under them, they have nothing left to stand on.”

The NDP has also failed to articulate any coherent alternative vision for a growing, prosperous economy. A critique may be necessary, but it’s not sufficient. In the absence of pipelines, for example, what is the NDP approach to developing the economy? Let’s return to Damien Gillis; he talks about a positive and sustainable way of growing the economy:

By contrast, [the NDP] could have offered a bold vision of a stronger, greener economic future for BC – one built on innovation, clean technology, public transit, rebuilding local, value-added manufacturing, supporting our vital film industry and creative sectors, harnessing the true potential of “Super, Natural BC”… Alas, they did some of these things, but in piecemeal fashion – detached from any central narrative. And they failed to distinguish clearly their own record and vision from those of their opponents.

I would add to this a need to re-purpose the economy and address the central issue of inequality. Robert Reich and others have warned that inequality is not only morally offensive, but it’s devastating for the economy, too. Given the role of consumer spending in the economies of Canada and the United States, squeezing the poor and middle classes can only damage the economic system – rich included. With this in mind, I have argued in an earlier post that a progressive economic agenda should include a commitment co-operative capitalism. In brief, supporting an economic system of economic competition within a framework of broader ownership reduces inequality and labour strife and, from that, stabilizes and sustains the economy.

In the end, what I want is a New Democratic Party that offers something to look forward to. It’s not enough to conserve social programs and the environment; those alone strike an ironically conservative tone. What people want is to know is that they and their families will be economically secure and better off in the future. The NDP has the tools to do this, but it will need to find the courage to capture ground it has all too easily yielded.

¹ Stephanopoulos, George. All too human: a political education. Boston: Little, Brown, 1999. Print. (p. 88)

Union support for the BC NDP is not the same as corporate support for the BC Liberals

April 27, 2013 | Author: C. Welch

A sore point for supporters of the right-wing BC Liberals is that their party seems so financially beholden to corporations. An immediate retort is that the NDP is equally beholden to unions. The NDP, in other words, is just as bad, so let’s move on. The problem with this response is that, in British Columbia, the two major political parties are not equally indebted to their largest sponsors. More precisely, the leading right-wing party is much more beholden to corporations than the leading left-wing party is to unions. Thus, an argument of equivalence – a false equivalence in which both sides are equally obligated to outside masters, so both are excused – simply doesn’t hold up to examination.

A case in point is a recent five-day analysis of campaign donations conducted by the long-standing corporate media icon, The Vancouver Sun.* Through the use of parallelism, the newspaper asserts a position of equivalence:

It’s well-known that unions are big supporters of the NDP, just as corporations bankroll the B.C. Liberals. (The Vancouver Sun, April 24, 2013, A4)

However, when we start examining the numbers closely, something startling appears from the statistics provided by the The Vancouver Sun itself – statistics which go largely unexamined in the newspaper’s analysis.

From the numbers above** we can make the following calculations:

Corporate donations to the BC Liberals are five times greater than that of union donations to the BC NDP.
Corporate contributions make up 61% of BC Liberal donations, whereas union contributions are only 23% of BC NDP donations.

These calculations are never mentioned in the text of the newspaper’s five-day series.

Equivalence indeed.

———————-

*April 23, 2013 to April 27, 2013

**I could not find this particular chart online, so I scanned the original paper version. (The Vancouver Sun, April 23, 2013, A8)

Windows 8 can be fixed (and made better than Windows 7) for a mere $10

April 6, 2013 | Author: C. Welch

In an earlier post, I discussed my initial skepticism regarding Windows 8, but I decided to reserve judgment until I had a reasonable amount of time to play with the much-maligned new operating system. So, after five months, I’ve come to this general conclusion: the “under the hood” changes are excellent, but the default user interface (UI) is terrible. Happily, the awful UI experience can be completely altered for a mere $10.

The underlying improvements to Windows 8 are usually ignored by the screaming masses, but they are very impressive. The new OS loads onto my desktop computer in about half the time Windows 7 used to start in my current rig, and Windows 8 closes in less than a third of the time of its predecessor. The regular operation of programs is smoother and snappier, and I encounter very few of the “Not Responding” slowdowns that I used to face in Windows 7. The integrated Task Manager is by far the best version I’ve ever seen in a Windows OS, and networking is even simpler and more intuitive than before. I’ve not had a single driver issue either, something that could not be said for Vista or 7. Overall, the underlying functions of Windows 8 are superb, and justify the $40 upgrade I undertook last November.

But now for the bad news: the default user interface is absolutely dreadful, particularly for the hundreds of millions of people who prefer to multitask with multiple windows, a mouse, and a large monitor (or two… or three). The new Start Screen – a full window that replaces the old fold-out Start Menu – is where you begin navigating to your applications. This is the core of Microsoft’s new “Modern” UI.

Immediately you see how the old desktop paradigm has been lost, and that many of the customary efficiencies are not readily available. After playing with this new Start Menu for five months, here is a summary of the problems I face with the default UI in Windows 8:

Windows 8 is optimized for a touch interface, but I do not have a touch interface and will never want one. I currently have two large monitors run by a fairly beefy video card and a mouse. The idea of reaching up, over to and across my monitors all day strikes me (and others) as absurd, as I can move around my monitors with just a few inches of movement from my mouse. The ergonomics of touch make no sense in a large, complex computing environment. If you want to single task on a small hand-held device, like I do with my Nokia 920, then touch is wonderful paradigm, but then the ergonomics are obviously very different.
When you boot up your computer, you are faced with two hurdles: (1) a lock screen that makes sense on a phone but not on a desktop, and (2) the new Start Screen. You can get to the traditional desktop, but you have to click on one of the tiles on the Start Screen to access the desktop. I know this is only one click, but it’s one more click than I had before to get to the same place. By definition, this is a step backward.
The Start Screen wastes an extraordinary amount of screen space on the top and bottom, which seems extravagant and wasteful to those of us who want to maximize usable space.
The Modern Start Screen supposedly replaces the old Start Menu, but, because it’s full screen, the Start Screen looks more like a desktop replacement. Unfortunately, the Modern UI breaks my initial workflow: the first thing I usually do on a desktop is click on a document (Word or Powerpoint), rather than an application. However, it is difficult to pin a document to the Start Screen. There are workarounds, of course, but a workaround is by definition a step backward, particularly when it involves a registry hack.
When programs are opened, they open full screen. I can’t properly express to you how annoying this is. It’s a major deal-breaker, to say the least. I hardly ever run a window full screen, as I like to run at least two or three overlapping programs at one time on each monitor, an approach that allows me to quickly and intuitively switch between windows. [The full screen approach has given rise to the ironic meme of “Window 8”.]
Navigation tools are, get this, hidden! A graphical user interface that expects people to visually navigate an OS with tools that can’t be seen is almost Orwellian. Many critical system tools are hidden in the Charm Bar to the right (which makes a secondary monitor on the right a hassle), and even the taskbar is hidden to the left. Apparently, saving space is important for a tablet, so you need to navigate around the edges to activate the navigation tools. [But if space is so important, why do we face the problem in #3 above?] For average users, it can lead to a frustrating – and OS-killing – experience, like we see below:
“But,” Win8 apologists will cry, “you can always memorize dozens of keyboard commands!” Memorize keyboard commands? Hmmm… why does that sound familiar? Hmmm… er…uhm… oh, I know! I used to do that in DOS on my Zenith computer! 25 years ago! And I hated it! Navigating an OS with a keyboard is the ultimate in “legacy app”.
Finally, Microsoft is deliberately forsaking the desktop user because it wants to get a share of the tablet market. Aside from the possibility that the tablet may well go the way of the netbook, the treatment of desktop users as second-class consumers is simply irksome. Why can’t we get a bevy of upgrades, too? Why are our dollars less important than those of tablet users? And, will there ever come a time when the desktop disappears and we are forced into the vexing walled garden of the Windows App Store? All I can say is this: given my complaints above, I will not continue with Windows if the long term plan is to eliminate the desktop.

**************

However, not all is doom and gloom. Until the desktop is taken away, there are two simple fixes that make Windows 8 the best desktop OS that Windows has ever produced. Oddly, Windows 8 is salvaged not by Microsoft, but by a company called Stardock. As a I reported earlier, the $5 Start8 program allows the computer user to boot directly into the desktop, and completely bypass the Start Screen. [Because of this, I’m not really bothered by the switching back and forth between desktop and Start Screen modes; I simply ignore the latter unless I want to browse the App Store.] Start8 will also allow you to insert and customize a Start Button and Start Menu. The latter remains an important option when you have hundreds of programs that won’t fit easily onto the Modern UI’s Start Screen, or even onto the desktop or taskbar. Recently, Stardock introduced ModernMix, another $5 program which allows users, for the first time, to use Modern apps in scalable windows inside the traditional desktop, and pin these apps to the taskbar. Though there are very few killer apps in the Windows App Store, it’s nice to have the option of accessing these apps when desired. App Radio, for example, is the one Modern UI app I use on the desktop, and it makes me feel like a first class consumer once again. Together, these two programs give me Windows 8 speed and stability with a Windows 7 interface.

As a result, I now consider Windows 8 an excellent operating system in spite of Microsoft. Who knew that $10 could turn Windows 8 from a frog into a king?

A Review of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

March 17, 2013 | Author: C. Welch

I have a rather equivocal opinion of The Road. On one hand, it’s a beautifully phrased novel, full of powerful images and rich language. On the other hand, the plot is rather pedestrian, and the author’s defiance of writing conventions is tiresome.

There’s no doubt that McCarthy is a gifted writer. Many passages are profoundly beautiful and show McCarthy’s daunting command of language. He is a fabulous painter of words. The son, for example, is described in a wonderfully figurative manner: “Knobby spine-bones. The razarous shoulder blades sawing under the pale skin” (p. 218). Quite often, individual words surprise and enrich: “rasping”, “viscera”, “dentil”, “macadam”, and so on. In an age of anti-intellectualism, where so-called “big words” expose a person to abuse like glasses do in a Khmer Rouge nightmare, McCarthy’s breadth of vocabulary is impressive, perhaps even inspiring. Finally, the relationship between father and son seems genuine and real, and moves beyond the easy nihilism for which McCarthy is often accused.

Nevertheless, many aspects disappoint. The plot is predictable and surprisingly repetitive: look down at a town or house; search town or house for food; discover amazingly well-preserved food stores just in time to avoid starvation; avoid cannibals where necessary; climb to the top of the next hill and consider the depravity of man (or at least flat caricatures of depraved beasts); repeat sequence at least four times. Indeed, the plot seems awfully amenable to a screen play, almost as if The Road was written as a novelization of a movie. McCarthy’s well-known aversion to grammar rules also grates, and I personally think it overwhelms the linguistic and emotional side of the book. I don’t really care about the lack of apostrophes or quotation marks; I get the rather bludgeoned symbolism about the artificiality (and thus fragility) of society. But the apparently random use of sentence fragments borders on the unbearable. I spent a lot of my time filling in the subject or the predicate, or both. Such undue effort eventually led me to skip-read much of the novel, only occasionally slowing down to savour an occasional passage. Are such rules of writing really so imposing? McCarthy seems to be saying yes, but it’s a bit like arguing that the colour scheme of traffic lights is fascistic, when such conventionality is really about moving on to more important things. In the end, the fragments and other broken rules seem like gimmicks, and convince me that McCarthy should have spent more time on plot development than the arbitrary rules of grammar.

So The Road leaves me perplexed: maybe it’s his Pulitzer Prize for the novel, and maybe it’s because other people lavish such praise on his book. If Oprah loves the novel, it must be good, right? Yet for me, it has the whiff of pretentiousness. McCarthy is a great writer, no doubt, but beating up sentences and punctuation does not replace good old fashioned story telling.

Wheat from the Chaff Blog

Albert O. Hirschman’s The Passions and the Interests

The Phoniness of BC’s Teacher “Surplus” [Updated]

When is debt not debt? When it belongs to your friends.

The False Argument of Equivalence

An elected Canadian Senate is, by itself, a democratic disaster

A Review of Tom Bennett’s Teacher Proof

It’s the economy, stupid

Union support for the BC NDP is not the same as corporate support for the BC Liberals

Windows 8 can be fixed (and made better than Windows 7) for a mere $10

A Review of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

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