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Thursday 10 November 2016

The Trump Vision for Education in America

Education is one of the Trump campaign's important positions

Until November 9, 2016, I never imagined there would be any reason to consider what Donald Trump had in mind for education in the USA. I was surprised to see that “Education” was one of sixteen important “positions” on the Trump campaign website which has now been dismantled in favour of  https://www.donaldjtrump.com (This post is updated from my original comments on November 10, 2016.)

The Trump plan has only one theme:  choice

The Trump vision for education has one theme:  “choice.”  I have to admit I find “choice” to be a very appealing notion in education, in particular because it necessarily implies variety. (Singular, silver-bullet solutions in education seem to inevitably produce more problems than solutions. See "Everything Works!") In the Trump plan, “choice” means “public or private schools,” “magnet schools and charter schools.”

What does "choice" mean in practice?

Each of these varieties of education carries its own particular baggage and connotation.  After he had spent three torturous and tedious years at a public high school which enjoyed an ambience somewhere between a gulag and maximum-security prison, my son finally agreed to transfer to a private school.  Private schools are incredibly expensive, but the best money I’ve ever spent on anything.  Short version, private schools = big money. “Magnet schools” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnet_school) are associated with the early days of desegregation and “busing”; meaning inner-city Afro-American kids being bused long distances out to the suburbs—a situation no-body liked apparently. Anyone with any inking about “charter schools” can predict exactly where the Trump plan is heading—the defunding and dismantling of public education.  When I googled “charter schools,” three of the first four hits to come up were ads for the CSUSA Corporation:  http://www.charterschoolsusa.com



K-12 education modeled on Trump University

The Trump vision is to turn K-12 education over to the for-profit business sector.  In other words, kindergartens, grade schools and high schools in the USA will become versions of the now-defunct Trump University which, post-election,was still on trial for defrauding students. The campaign web site provides a talking-points road map for how to get to for-profit education.

Are CEOs of charter school corporations about to get $20 billion richer?

Step one, sentence one, of the “Trump Vision”:  “Immediately add an additional federal investment of $20 billion towards school choice.” Kinda sounds good, if you don’t actually read the words.  The promise is not to add “$20 billion” to education, the money is going to “school choice” which sort of sounds like the money is going to end up in the pockets of the CEOs of the aforementioned corporations.

Is the plan to add $20 billion or cut $20 billion from education?

Where is the money coming from you might ask? Sentence two:  “This will be done by reprioritizing existing federal dollars.”  If you are familiar with how to read political bureaucratize, you will know to translate this sentence as “No-one knows”  or, more to the point, "We're not saying." Unfortunately, the most logical possibility is that the money will come out of existing education budgets.  Just in case you thought, as I did on first reading, that Trump would add $20 billion to the education budget, he is most likely (though no one knows for sure) promising to cut $20 billion from public education.

$24 billion cut from education for the poor and disabled?

On the other hand, it’s pretty hard to argue with Trump’s vision and his plan to “Establish the national goal of providing school choice to every one of the 11 million school aged [sic: school-aged] children living in poverty.”  Before we get too excited about Trump’s “vision” we should note that this is a rehash of a Republican plan presented in January, 2014.
Sens. Lamar Alexander (Tenn.), a former education secretary, and Tim Scott (S.C.), one of only two African Americans in the Senate, will propose far-reaching “choice” legislation on Tuesday that would take the $24 billion in federal money spent annually to help educate 11 million students in poverty or with disabilities and convert it into block grants to the states, among other changes. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/gop-measure-would-promote-school-choice-with-federal-funding/2014/01/27/7fd52e7e-8778-11e3-a5bd-844629433ba3_story.html
Oh, oh!  Could Trump’s reprioritized, “additional $20 billion,” actually be the money now being spent on the poor and the disabled?

Defunding and dismantling of public education--by the numbers

In case my description of the Trump plan as “defunding and dismantling of public education” sounds hyperbolic, consider the numbers.  The Trump plan calls upon the states to surrender “$110 billion of their own education budgets toward school choice.”  The total budget for K-12 education in the USA now is $620 billion.  Trump is proposing that roughly 18% of the public schools’ budgets be cut.  If you think public schools in the USA are struggling now, imagine what they will look like after losing close to one dollar in every five of their funding. At the same time, we will see the proliferation of  American kindergartens, grade schools and high schools modelled on Trump University. 

Should Canadians care about the decline of education in the USA?

Should we in Canada care?  I’m not sure.  Unless of course, somewhere down the line, we are told, in the process of renegotiating NAFTA, that funding a public education system gives us an unfair trade advantage, and we will have to stop it if we want to do business with our American neighbours.

Saturday 5 November 2016

Does Knowledge Require Truth?

The absolute truth

I spent a career telling university students that if they encountered someone who claimed to know “The Truth,” they should run in the opposite direction because what would follow was bound to be religious dogma or a schizophrenic rant based on an encounter with God—the kind of truth that could not be checked or verified or even questioned. The notion of absolute truth disappeared after Nietzsche announced that “God is dead” in 1882 and Einstein followed up with a “theory of relativity” in 1905.  Marx’s claim that “religion was the opiate of the people” made it plain, at least for we egg heads who occupied the universities, that the Twentieth Century was going to have to get by without “The Truth.”

The tree of knowledge

The problem I faced as a professor was that my job was to be the serpent in the garden, encouraging young people to take a bite out of the apple from the tree of knowledge (no, not that kind of Biblical, carnal knowledge, just ordinary knowing things).  How could I claim to be passing on knowledge without at the same time claiming that what I was teaching was true?  Luckily, for me, I taught literature which had already been described as “The lies which tell the truth.”  This paradox allowed me to evade the issue of “The Truth” and even “the truth,” but the question still dogged me.


The correspondence theory of truth

Every five-year-old knows the difference between the truth and a lie, but once you’ve got a university degree under your belt, chances are you’re not so sure anymore.  The five-year-old knows that if Mom asks “did you eat the cookie?” and you’ve still got crumbs falling from your lips, the truth is “yes, I did” and the lie is everything else . . . Martians, the imaginary friend, the dog and plain old “nope.”  This is known as the correspondence theory of truth, and it is the default theory, which means if you have never thought of this question before this is what you think.  A statement is true if it corresponds to “reality.”  Did I mention that right after Nietzsche killed God, Einstein killed reality? 


Relativity, skepticism and the absence of truth

The reason the correspondence theory of truth doesn’t really work is that for the last hundred years or so, since Einstein said “E=Mc2,” and physicists admitted they really don’t know what “matter” is, we’ve all been pretty uncertain about what is and isn’t reality.   Actually, for as long as human beings have been able to record their thoughts on the question, we have been uncertain about the nature of reality.  The Greek philosopher Pyrrho took his skepticism and disbelief in reality so far that, we are told, his disciples had to go before him moving objects out of his way so that he wouldn’t walk into them. Nowadays our disbelief in reality isn’t so much of the walking-into-walls variety, but our certainty that we are uncertain has become widespread.  The problem is that this uncertainty gets translated into a vague belief that there is no truth or the idea that truth really doesn’t matter anymore.  Truth, in the postmodern era, is the baby that has gotten thrown out with the bathwater.


Coherent truth

However, in the absence of absolute, God’s honest truth, and corresponds-to-reality truth, what is left to us is an imperfect form of truth known as “coherent truth.”  Something is true because it is coherent in relation to something else that is true because it is coherent in relation to something else that is true and so on.  Truth prevails as long as there is no break in the chain, no spot where something believed true upon which other truths depend is proven false, then the chain of truth must be reconstructed.  More frequently, as we follow the trail of coherent truths we arrive at a moment where we have to shrug and admit that we just don’t know.  This moment and gesture (the shrug) are known in rhetoric as “an aporia.” 


Truth only applies when there is meaning

Why would I accept such a seemingly weak form of truth?  In the first place, there is a limited category of things which we can call true or false.  Wandering in the forest, you would never stop before a tree and declare “this tree is true!”  Entering a room you would never find yourself saying “this chair is true.”  We only apply the question of truth to things which have a meaning.  Only when there is a meaning can we say that something is true or false.  It is impossible to say that something is incoherent yet true.  


Heuristic truth

In fact, there is a form of truth, that some people would consider an even weaker form of truth, which I accept.  I accept it as the only kind of truth that is available to us. It is called “heuristic truth.”  “Heuristic” is a tricky, and even dangerous, word.  It derives from the Greek for “find” or “discover.”  Heuristic truth is the kind of truth we discover through trial and error, though dialogue, though logic, through deductive and inductive reasoning, from experience and evidence and examples, because, in the simplest of terms, it makes sense; it is coherent.
If you google the word “heuristic” you will find definitions like “temporary” or “a short cut” to the truth.  Maybe, but human life and the history of our species are temporary relative to the time frame of our universe.  “Short cuts” are all we have time for.


Heuristic pedagogy

Heuristics is also a form of pedagogy.  It is how we learn, not just in the classroom but in life.  We keep adding new information, and adjusting what we believe to be true.  The only test available to us is that we keep trying to put it all together and if the result is coherent, it is the truth so far.



The Acropolis: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Plato and Aristotle

This is a picture of me standing on the Acropolis,  a few weeks ago, looking down on the theatre where the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides were first presented.  Here in Athens, this is where truth was first invented by Socrates and Plato and Aristotle.





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