When the Tea Party Goes to School. . .

Schools are under the microscope on every issue.

Snooking around that relates:
TEA-partying Is To Homeschooling . . .

SchoolHouse Rock Smarter Than TEA Party?

Tea & Crackers, or TEA-partying AS Crackers

Women of the TEA Party

Latest TEA Party Target: Methodists?

Buying In and Getting Sold Out By Church, State and Corporate Marketing

Update on Alaska as Reality Show Culture

Jailhouse Exclusive: Shooter Credits His “Schoolteacher” (Glenn Beck)

Why Is This GOP Candidate Dressed as a Nazi?

Capitol Hill Mad Hatters Show Up for More TEA-partying

What the Media Taught Our Teens About Torture

JJ almost five years ago:

I argue the political noise machine is actually an overlooked form of public education and imperils us all, schooling or not. . .

“Public” education results reported this week:

Teenagers Now Look Favorably On Torture
Because The Media Taught Them It Was Morally Acceptable

It’s the concept of “American exceptionalism” that transforms “torture” into “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

So sayeth our news media, anyway. As this new Red Cross report makes clear, older Americans who grew up at a time when this issue was tended to by the media with a distinct and consistent moral clarity have maintained that distinct and consistent moral clarity themselves.

American teenagers diverge at that point, but what can I say? This is learned behavior.

Logically enough then, The American Red Cross calls for more and better education in the Geneva Convention, and in classrooms, not the newspapers. So sayeth the Daily Beast anyway:

[T]he national conversation since the Bush administration claimed that today’s enemy was different from the ones we’ve fought in the past. . . “Over the past 10 years, they’ve been exposed to many new conflicts,” says Isabelle Daoust, who heads ARC’s humanitarian law unit. “But they haven’t been exposed to the rules.”

If You Heart Boobies, Can School Punish You?

“You look at it in context. It isn’t written on a bathroom wall. It’s a breast cancer awareness bracelet.”

Is Grayling’s “Good Book” What Crazed Churchfolk Will Want to Burn Next?

AC Grayling: ‘How can you be a militant atheist? It’s like sleeping furiously’
by Decca Aitkenhead, April 3

In his new book, The Good Book: A Secular Bible, the philosopher sets out his manifesto for rational thought. He talks about why religion angers him, the power of philosophy – and his mane of hair

In the unholy trinity of professional atheists, AC Grayling has always tended to be regarded as the good cop. . .
So he insists that his new book does not belong in the same canon as Dawkins’s The God Delusion and Hitchens’s God Is Not Great.

“No, because it’s not against religion. There’s not one occurrence of the word God, or afterlife, or anything like that. It doesn’t attack religion, it’s a positive book, there’s nothing negative in it. People may think it’s against religion – but it isn’t.”

But . . .Grayling is almost certainly going to upset a lot of Christians, for what he has written is a secular bible. . .
a “great treasury of insight and consolation and inspiration and uplift and understanding in the great non-religious traditions of the world”.

He has been working on his opus for several decades, and the result is an extravagantly erudite manifesto for rational thought . . .

“High Attainments in Liberal Scholarship”

Florida’s oldest chapter of Phi Beta Kappa (older than I am!) inducted Favorite Daughter this afternoon, followed by a reception at the President’s Residence. Her certificate sports the embossed gold Phi Beta Kappa key and recognizes her “high attainments in liberal scholarship.”

Desperate for Control? Abusive Parenting, Abusive Politics

As we talk more about morals and monsters in politics and schooling, check out this comment from discussion last year that might speak to Ben and others on how this all connects:

GOP = Authoritarian

Specifically, authoritarian parent!
That’s the finding of a researcher-author I heard interviewed driving kids around last night. The new car came with a free satellite radio trial and I was trying out some new channels.

“Authoritarian” equals order and control, tradition and therefore fear of and resistance to change such as women and minorities getting the vote, immigrants streaming across a border changing the economy and voting patterns, the competitive rise of other nations in world affairs, same-sex marriage rights, etc.

Hence any challenge to authorities that keep order and control is the ultimate offense.

GOP is increasingly authoritarian because it feels increasingly under threat, which causes emotion to take over cognition in the attempt to resolve those threats and restore “order.”

And apparently an increasingly accurate way to predict American political party by degree of authoritarianism, is to ask not about policy issues directly but about parenting priorities and attitudes. Right up Snook’s alley!

It makes sense then, that loving uniforms and clear hierarchy and rules and order whether military, police, gun-bearing militia (even zero tolerance in school discipline and dress codes) are predictably not Democratic.

And it makes sense that like parenting, politics too can turn coercive and even criminally abusive. When traditional Authority fears losing control, it does in fact lose control!

For parents who are desperate for control over their children, when spanking doesn’t work (and often, it will not), the relationship turns abusive, either physically or emotionally or both.

Their survey instrument was described as a series of forced choices between pairs of words such as curiosity or manners, kindness or obedience. The interviewees choose which they believe is more important

Serious T-Shirts, Hats and Saggy Pants All Trumped By My UTERUS!

Uterus.

Uterus, uterus, uterus!

Uteri aren’t just for Floridians anymore. Did you know half of all Americans carry concealed uteri with us everywhere we go, even [gasp!] in public policy debate?

“Uterus” has a Facebook page, Twitter hashtags and — because it’s politics — pink buttons.

But most important, Democrats looking for a unifying theme amid dour legislative prospects have found it in a single, unlikely word. House Democrats have started wearing pink buttons that say uterus in capital letters.

Saunders, the minority leader, warned members at a Wednesday caucus meeting not to wear the buttons on the House floor.

If I hear one more professional political operative of any

Old Ideas Won’t Win the Day

Ben, the problem you have is that JJ is smarter than you. She is miles smarter than you, me and the next six people combined. JJ develops ideas and new thinking about life and education as she experiences them. You fall back on shopworn phrases — being taxed is having your money stolen, there’s nothing wrong with vouchers going to religious schools, JJ’s tone is elitist, etc. And you hide behind religion and deny its importance as it supports your argument.

The sad part of all of this is that JJ is not the one being injured. She’s a strong woman, capable of thinking about what you write without getting upset about it.

The people being injured are those who are stuck on the treadmill with you, rehashing old ideas which were never very good and have soured with time.

And those liberals, like me, who agree with you. At least in part. I think, once I get past the tax bluster and the vehement anti-public school rhetoric, you have a few points to make. And they will never make it into anything like a productive discussion. They are weighed down to the point of sinking under the old notions, the ones that are all about taking the tack that ends up supporting your politics, right or wrong. These ideas are not about learning and changing and growth. They are about making sure the other political wing is demonized.

Me? I’m a bleeding-heart liberal born and raised to value unions and everything government does to help those in need. I vote Democratic.

And yet I have wondered why teachers weren’t protesting in the streets until their rights and income were on the line. Public school has sucked for a very long time. Teachers complain about it as much as anyone. And yet. . .

I don’t see the same fights you do. I don’t see people still not acknowledging that charter schools are public school. Just as I don’t see homeschoolers contending that virtual schools will be the end of homeschooling as we know it. Maybe I don’t move in the right circles.

What I see are very wealthy people manipulating our system of government to get their way. Over and over again. Among their preferences, like you, is that they pay as little in taxes as possible. Now, they don’t spout off about theft. They hide behind the old chestnut that tax money in their hands will trickle down and all will prosper.  And they have the lobbyists and the clout and our collective taxes decrease along with the government’s ability to function properly.

Maybe some of them hope to starve the beast. You know that line. The impression I get is that they just don’t care. It isn’t changing anything in their life if my child doesn’t have access to a quality public school. At least in the short run. And that’s as far as they seem to look. Or they feel they will be safe, no matter what. Let them eat cake!

Try really seeing that middle class people and working people and poor people are constantly set against one another and feeding into that fight is just as wrong as starting it in the first place. Urging people to vote against their own interests, to battle over scraps, to encourage anger instead of  “doing unto others” as JJ advises, this is only helping those wealthy members of our society who are happy to fund the fight and pick up all the pieces while everyone is distracted.

We can do better than this. It will be very hard work and we may even need some help from an “elitist” or two. But we can do better.

Monsters and Men in Morals of Money and School

“There’s nothin’ worse than a monster
who thinks he’s right with God.”

–Firefly captain Malcolm Reynolds, episode 13,
seen on Netflix last night with Young Son

Closing the computer down for the night later, I spotted this in my feed reader:

“I guess all I want at this point in the debate
is a little intellectual and moral honesty.”

–Conservative Christian homeschool dad Ben Bennett,
Admit It, Liberals, You Hate School Choice

And this morning the Sunday NYT business section has just given me Cornell economics professor Robert H. Frank’s thoughts on gauging the pain of the middle class with The Toil Index:

Context matters because the brain requires a frame of reference to make any evaluative judgment.

Yep, just like a frame of reference to define the difference between monster and man.

Rising inequality has shifted the context that governs. . . the cost of achieving basic goals, like sending one’s children to a good school. School quality is an inherently relative concept, too, and good schools tend to be in more expensive neighborhoods.

The toil index rests on the positive link between a neighborhood’s average housing price and the quality of the school that serves it.

This link implies that the median family must outbid 50 percent of all parents to avoid sending its children to a below-average school. Families that failed to rent or buy a house near the median of the local price range would have to send their children to below-average schools. The only alternative to seeing their children fall behind is