Let’s Get Real with Education

                                      Let’s Get Real with Education

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 2/16/20

            When I heard the learned astronomer / When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me / When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them / When I, sitting, heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture room / How soon I became tired and sick / Till rising and gliding out I wandered off by myself in the mystical moist night air / And looked up in perfect silence at the stars.

             In other words, poet Walt Whitman just couldn’t take it anymore.  Acknowledging the value of astronomy, he still believed that looking up “in perfect silence at the stars” was more enlightening and inspiring than lectures on arcane academic knowledge.

   We appreciate teachers, scholars, and lecturers, but after a while we need to know the point of it all.  Learners need lessons and educational practices that keep them hinged to the real world, not wallowing forever in the abstract or the theoretical.  Visit the abstract and learn from it, but then get back to the valley of everyday life away from intellectual clouds.

            The field of education too often pitches its tent in the land of the abstract instead of the land of the living.  Instead of majoring on the tried and true (reading, writing, and arithmetic, anyone?), it more often than not chases the now and the new: the current educational fad, the ideas proposed by professors of education who haven’t taught children or teens for decades, or the “inclusion” topic of the month such as transgenderism.  Ignoring Cicero’s phrase, “the tyranny of the present,” modern education is quick to jump on a new trend and hold tightly.  The best example of this is the testing bandwagon onto which professors, editorial boards, and Department of Education bureaucrats latched themselves in 2002, though classroom teachers did not.

            The No Child Left Behind law – or NCLB – made standardized testing the main measure of school success.  Testing, of course, seems logical.  Teachers teach, then they test to see what was learned.  But testing per se wasn’t the problem.  It was the magnitude of it all.  The testing bandwagon was long. Perched upon it and waving jubilantly were elected officials and corporate CEO’s.  The testing movement had begun.  Its watchword was accountability.  Its strategy was “Test those boogers.”  Education finally had found its fix.  A business model it would be.

            Classroom teachers knew better.  But they kept on teaching, except they now had to deal with the time factor as well as the effect of all the testing.  Standardized testing took vast amounts of time from teaching, and the unfortunate effect was the impulse and often the necessity to teach toward the test, a killer of broad learning if there ever was one.

            NCLB had been preceded by the Clinton administration’s “Goals 2000” which provided the states with money to write their own academic standards, but President George W. Bush’s so-called Texas plan went further.  To stress accountability, schools would have to test more.  Bush’s strategy was to measure and then punish or reward.  Data became king and the states and individual school systems scurried to produce higher test scores.  Diane Ravitch, the respected education historian who first favored NCLB, stepped away from it saying that it was “all sticks and no carrots.”

            Thankfully, the testing craze has abated somewhat.  Locally, sensible voices like those of Cobb Superintendent Ragsdale and Marietta Superintendent Rivera are making a difference.  For the most part No Child Left Behind was left behind when Congress passed the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2017, a bill that retained most of the accountability requirements but meted out less punishment. The Trump administration has lifted even more accountability regulations.

            Our 18-year emphasis on testing points to two truths.  One is that over-regulation and over-testing kills the spirit, the joy, and the purpose of teaching and learning.  Teachers deal with human beings, not products or commodities.  NCLB fostered the idea that whatever can’t be measured doesn’t count.  What a horrid approach to such a human activity as teaching.

            Secondly, all of the history recounted above is proof that the 10^th amendment of the U.S. Constitution is being violated.   That amendment declares education to be a function of the states, yet for just over half a century the federal government has stomped its way into an activity that was intended for the states.

            Ask a veteran teacher why he or she teaches.  Their answer will put to scorn most of the educational fixes of the last half century.

Roger Hines

2/12/20

My Ten Years in Prison

                             My Ten Years in Prison

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 2/9/2020

            I’ve not told many people about my prison experience. I’m not hesitant to tell anybody.  It’s just that telling others about it affects me emotionally.

            It’s deeply saddening to think of the inmates whose backgrounds were quite unlike mine.   Many of them grew up poor as I did, but did not have the family stability I enjoyed.  Of my 16 brothers and sisters, only 9 were still at home while I was growing up.  The others were grown and even had families of their own.  All of us loved each other dearly, honored our parents, and laughed constantly while managing without running water and many other “conveniences.” 

            Most of the prison inmates I came to know were not so blessed.  Many never knew their fathers.  Many had to take care of themselves while they were children, enduring violence, neglect, loneliness, intellectual and spiritual emptiness, and emotional pain.  By the time they were teenagers, their paths were laid out.  Hopelessness reigned. 

Most of the inmates I talked with stated that, one way or another, their path to prison began with America’s pet drug, alcohol!  We call it whiskey, beer, wine, champagne and lots of other things but its destructiveness we refuse to acknowledge.  Americans simply keep sipping or gulping, building breweries, and looking down their noses at prisoners who couldn’t control alcohol. I wish every drinker of alcohol could have paid me a visit during my ten years.  They might have acknowledged alcohol’s power, but maybe not.

            Not all of the inmates I got to know in prison came from dire dysfunctionality.  A small minority was blessed with stable homes but had chosen lawlessness in spite of good parents.  During my ten years, I was in classes not only with inmates who had been down and out, but with lawyers, preachers, teachers, nurses, and successful manual laborers.

            Recently – in fact this past week – two things whirled my mind back to my ten years in prison and got me all emotional.  One was a news article in the Marietta Daily Journal; the other was, of all things, a Super Bowl commercial.

            The MDJ article told about Pastor 7.  Read the February 2 issue and you might weep unless you’re one who believes all prisoners are undeserving of a second chance.  Pastor 7, the director of a nondenominational Christian ministry in southeast Cobb, had a horrendous childhood and youth.  The MDJ article chronicles his path from age 10 when he ran away from home, to age 12 when he was first incarcerated, to age 16 by which time petty crime became a way of life, to four years in the Army, to further crime and federal imprisonment, and to the pages of a weathered King James Bible where his life began to change.  The MDJ article also describes Pastor 7’s transformed life and a recent serious challenge as well.

            The Super Bowl commercial that also got to me was about former convict Alice Johnson.   Johnson was freed from prison by the First Step Act, a bi-partisan bill that is part of the current administration’s criminal justice reform.  Having been sentenced to life in prison for a nonviolent drug offense, and having completed 21 years of incarceration, the African American Johnson expressed gratitude to President Trump for her freedom.  The commercial, a Trump 2020 campaign ad, was brief, moving, and effective.

            Although ten years in prison haven’t diminished my belief in capital punishment, they have shown me in bold type letters that not every crime is committed by hardened souls out to do evil.  Pastor 7’s childhood and youth primed him for a path of uncertainty and crime.  Alice Johnson’s story illustrates that there is such a thing as bad, over-reactive law.  I wish that I could have had both of them in my college freshman English classes at the two state prisons where I was teaching.  I also wish I could convince some fellow conservatives that not everyone who lands in prison is irredeemable.

            Nine years of my time in prison were at a state men’s prison. The tenth year which ended in December of 2019 was at a state women’s prison.  I am the richer.  I now have 87 more brothers and 16 more sisters whom I wouldn’t have, had I not taken up prison teaching.  I learned that spouses and children of inmates usually fade away, never to be heard from again, but not so with parents.  Moms and dads keep on writing.

            I now have a renewed fervor for strengthening America’s families.  Far too many future Pastor 7s and Alice Johnsons are yearning for a loving mom and dad while the culture re-defines and slays the family.

Roger Hines

2/5/20

Rudyard Kipling was Wrong

                           Rudyard Kipling was Wrong

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 2/2/20

            Oh, East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet.

             Kipling wrote these words in 1889 in his poem, “The Ballad of East and West.”  Born in India to distinguished British academics, Kipling was educated in England but returned to India to become a journalist.  Though a lover of Britain and a defender of the West, he considered himself an “Anglo-Indian.”

            Another Kipling poem, “The White Man’s Burden,” troubled many readers.  Was the poem a condescending justification of imperialistic European racism or a sincere call to Westerners to uplift the poverty-stricken, freedom-denied peoples of India and the entire East?

            A casual reading of Kipling’s classic children’s stories and incisive poems will show that Kipling was no racist.  He celebrated the lands of which he wrote; their people, that is, not their politics.  Winner of the 1907 Nobel Prize for Literature, Kipling believed that the West held values that the East needed.  At the end of his life, however, Kipling was convinced that because of poverty and political tyranny, all efforts to bring the East and West together would come to naught.

            But that was then (Kipling died in 1936); this is now.  Today the East is coming to the West, the opposite of what Kipling hoped for.  This doesn’t mean “the twain” have met or made peace.  It means the West is allowing the quiet invasion of Eastern values and systems, particularly centralized government.

            Today one of the leading candidates for the Presidency is an avowed “democratic” socialist. Sen. Bernie Sanders frequently attempts to explain what a “democratic” socialist is.  He need not.  Socialism, whatever adjective you attach to it, is the enemy – yea, the end – of individual liberty.  It extols the nebulous “village” to the detriment of every non-nebulous, breathing individual villager.  It’s an –ism that has oozed from afar into America for decades and is now heralded by at least two serious presidential candidates.  Illegal immigration has fueled this –ism.

Along with competitor Elizabeth Warren, Sanders would bring to America the central planning of the East such as that of China and Saudi Arabia.  Central planning for such things as free higher education, Medicare for all, the death of private insurance, gun confiscation, etc., requires central government power.  These two Robin Hood candidates are enjoying strong support from college students and other young adults, indicating that the ways of the East have already established a considerable foothold.

No, no.  Sanders and Warren favor Swedish socialism, their supporters claim.  Sweden is approximately the size of California.  Practically any system can function in a small nation.  For a continental nation like America, China-like controls are necessary for the socialistic measures now proposed by the nation’s left.

            What precisely is the difference between the East and the West?  The Greeks were the first Westerners.  Their fledgling democracy and love for beauty, philosophy, and debate were handed off to Rome, then to early modern Europe, then to early America, with liberty increasing every mile of the way. Contrast this path to that of Eastern nations where exultant freedom simply never took root.  While Herodotus, Cicero, Blackstone, and Jefferson preached freedom and its attendant progress, nations great and small east of the Mediterranean continued to dwell in tyrannical darkness.  With few exceptions such as India, the East has never championed democracy as has the Western world.  This is particularly true of the Middle Eastern Islamic-dominated nations.

            In Europe, Western values are dying.  According to Jonathan Steele in “The New Migration,” Europe’s aging population is a present reality.  This population gap is being filled, says Roger Cohen of the New York Times, and is best illustrated by Germany where 7 million of its 80 million people are Eastern-born and unschooled in free markets and representative government.

            As this column has asked before, if multiculturalism works, why since 1990 have the USSR, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia splintered into 21 nations?  Why the ongoing secessionist movements in Spain, Italy, and alas, the U.K?  Why the strife-ridden situation in London’s Muslim-dominated borough of Tower Hamlets where I visited recently and learned that Muslims and non-Muslims are so often in conflict?

The introduction above is incomplete. Kipling’s next line is “Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s Great Judgment Seat.”  But that’s why he’s wrong.  We are ahead of Kipling’s schedule.  If easternized Europe is a dead man walking, how long will it take for America to see that invasions must be resisted, that commonality of some kind is every civilization’s glue, and that every American should honor the Western values that have kept us free and fed?

Socialism is not one of those values.

Roger Hines

1/29/20