Rob Reich Leads Liberal Thought in Chains That Set Us Free
15 06 2007Calling Rob Reich, calling Rob Reich . . .
Self-driving cars?? Right there at Stanford University, whence emanate your advanced theories of controlling kids to set them free?
Homeschooling should not be banned, but regulated much more vigilantly.
Not to mention the intellectual cradle of your Stanford-educated colleague Kimberly Yuracko, who quotes your theories so um, liberally — or illiberally, both, neither? — as spitshine for her own Stanford-servile theory that home education is a public function from which government is required to protect all children. (Did you two go pub-crawling while she was a student, to swap collegial notes on these elaborate fantasy worlds you both had under construction, like CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien?)
It says right there in the news, “The idea of a self-driving car is a really big idea that will have a big impact on society.”
Only if society is asleep at the switch, and that’s where you come in, quick! There’s still time to cook up some kind of ethical servility theory to stop it. Maybe use your homeschool regulation screed as a template, here, we’ll help –
Society can’t ethically empower individual kids with such transformative innovations, especially not if they actually WORK! Parents letting kids go soft with automatic transmissions and power steering was quite indulgent enough, but this is worse than how calculators almost made a mockery of government math testing as social control. Self-driving cars could “theoretically” decouple government’s control of kids’ lives through control of their driver licensing. Stanford professors of all people, simply cannot be so enthusiastic and cavalier about the serious theoretical risks of outright liberty.
Rob Reich, your reputation is on the line. You know what you must do. Expose your scientific colleagues as ethical slavemongers against children, for conceiving of robot computers controlling helpless (one could even say servile?) passengers — no matter how well it works, “self-driving” is by definition unAmerican!
(damn kids need to take the city bus like we did, and support government services or all is lost . . .)
By JOHN MARKOFF
New York Times June 15, 2007. . . the scientists at Stanford said a new generation of technologies is on the horizon that will increasingly assist human drivers in operating their vehicles. “Why are we doing this? We all know automobiles are unsafe and inefficient,” said Sebastian Thrun, a Stanford faculty member who was one of the designers of the Volkswagen Touareg autonomous vehicle, named Stanley, that won the contest in 2005.
“The idea of a self-driving car is a really big idea that will have a big impact on society.”
What about walking to school in the snow, uphill both ways?
Nance
Let me explain again, Nance (weren’t you publicly schooled, why can’t you get this??) –
Walking in snow to school is good discipline but it’s much too self-reliant for modern socialism, um, I mean liberal education. OTOH government snowplows and taxpayer-provided school buses create jobs filled by unionized high school graduates, while inflicting on kids the highly prized character-building misery AND systemic dependence on public services! It’s a three-fer!
An exchange between Rob Reich, Scott Somerville and JJ contining this perennial debate in 2005, about who gets to exercise authority over kids’ thinking and learning–
Hi JJ,
Must be something in the air as it seems a few of us are posting on this general topic today. The point that I try to make is that people like Reich and Yuracko start with a premise (about harm done to children taught ancient mythology and pseudoscience as truth) that some of us may share; it’s just that they jump to the conclusion that regulation is the answer. Their arguments, though, seem pretty unthoughtful and easy to dismantle, I think - and there are so many good arguments, both philosophic and pragmatic, against regulation.
Examples:
1. The story about the Mennonite girl who “trashed her bedroom” and “was charged with vandalism.”
2. The assertion that children learn how to be autonomous by attending school.
Gosh, we don’t even need to remove our kid gloves for those kind of arguments.
Yours truly,
“Secular Suburbanite”
I see Professor Laden is continuing his regulate-homeschooling crusade into an outreach phase. It serves Professor Laden’s science education cause to put “homeschooling” itself on trial, on pain of government mind control in school or out, for the sins of fundamentalist wackos in PUBLIC education (??) or so he explains today See Rolfe’s today. (Good post, btw, much better reasoned than the comment it drew imo.)
The Stanford political science department would be so proud!
But Reich is a philosopher and Yuracko a lawyer whose foundation was like his, the philosophy of politics. Professional philosophy offers a certain freedom to indulge lofty theory that can never be proved or disproved, only debated endlessly, like belief, a smug and secure detachment from reality, a form of secular preaching seeking to save children’s souls through “government of the gaps” if you will. So the QOTD — how successfully can a hard scientist peddle political philosophy to advance the cause of hard science?
(The most illogical and entertaining part might be the Scientist ending his philosophy of politics speech at Rolfe’s with the words: GET REAL!)
Hi Lynn, thanks, that IS a good post! And definitely “real. . .”
I agree wholeheartedly about the difference between recognizing a real problem and regulating a phony solution. It happens all the time in education policy!
I tried to make the same point in that conversation with Rob Reich referenced above:
His response was basically that we already regulate parents because child abuse is illegal and preventing it is moral, so that’s a moot point and all well-meaning regulation to protect children from their parents is ethical. He just won’t discuss practical realities. He’s told us before that it is not the job of a political philosophy theorist to do that; his job is just the thought experiment.
So I’ve long agreed with Lynn’s practical point, about the philosophy (in either direction) not being the key when the solution being advocated in its name won’t WORK.
Which leaves us with the also-practical problem of what would work, if not regulation? Can we satisfy the rightly-rising concerns about religious fundamentalism in K-12 education of all kinds and under anyone’s authority or oversight, wherever it occurs, without corrupting our own laws, secular philosophy, knowledge and beliefs, and without forfeiting essential liberties? I found something else in that 2005 discussion that begins to at least open up this question about viable alternatives — it’s long, so I’ll make a new post of it.
Well, it figures. I just learned from all this cross-blog linking that Greg Laden and Rob Reich are ivy buds from way back, with a history of smearing other people’s politics and religion for sport. Wonder if they learned that in school?
ON FURTHER THOUGHT — what do you bet Laden has our former commander-in-chief’s Rob Reich confused with our homeschooling’s critic-in-chief Rob Reich? Shows just how nascent his own education is in the “case against homeschooling” then. Newbie mistake!
COD is still on the case . . .
it’s just that they jump to the conclusion that regulation is the answer.
***
Or that we even all agree on what the problem is or that there is a problem or that, in the case of science education, public school comes even close to doing a good job (as in, it doesn’t do a good enough job to override the belief the vast majority of Americans have in some sort of god).
I wonder what religion any of these folks are. Laden or Reich or Ywhatever. . . are they all atheists? If not, what kind of hell was their childhood!!!
Nance