Notes from Evil Bender

Some mockery to get you through the next few days July 26, 2007

It’s going to be slow around here for a while,* so until August rolls around and I’m back to more regular posting, you should check out this site, via the always-enlightening Rev BigDumbChimp. It’s Don McLeroy, who will be running the Texas public schools now. Ouch. McLeroy would be a useful asset in many lines of work, no doubt, but education isn’t one of them. He’s a Creationist, doesn’t believe in environmentalism, and thinks medieval Christianity was a great gift to the world.

What is it about the development of the West that made it so remarkable and unique? Why in the West are all people important? What is the ultimate source of these ideals of freedom, equality and limited government? What was the defining ideological force that uniquely shaped the West’s political development, especially in its formative medieval period?

I believe the best and really only answer to all the above questions is the gradual assimilation of Judeo-Christianity in the West. By arguing that humankind is “made in the image of God”, medieval thinkers developed the idea of the dignity of the individual, not something arbitrary-man-given, but a reality, inherent in every person-God-given.

The usual right-wing idiocy that we need their particular belief system in order to be moral. Of course he ignores the great Western secular traditions out of which democracy sprang and which were largely responsible, on their reemergence, of bringing the light of reason to the dark ages. It’s important to note that he doesn’t have even a bit of a grasp on Western history, because of what he argues for:

Hy Ruchlis in Clear Thinking , 1962, makes the connection of facts to problem solving by observing “a body of facts accumulates and makes it possible for people to solve many more problems than they could ever hope to handle successfully solely by their own thinking processes.”

Filling the mind with knowledge and facts is, in fact, the special task given to education.

Nice 45-year-old citation. He’s clearly up on the scholarship. I have to wonder about the kind of person who thinks facts, not critical thinking, are the real subject of education. Facts are great, important things, but it is reason which allows us to make use of them. Filling kids’ heads with route memorization of facts if foolish and–ask anyone who’s spent hours diagramming sentences and memorizing multiplication tables–deadening to the intellectual process. We need facts presented to students in a context that challenges them to think about the facts. And we don’t need the uninformed–men like McLeroy who think the earth it 6,000 years old–to decide which “facts” they receive.

I’m reminded of the opening scene from Dicken’s Hard Times. The speaker is Thomas Gradgrind, a misguided educator whose family will fall apart around him:

“NOW, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!”

The scene was a plain, bare, monotonous vault of a schoolroom, and the speaker’s square forefinger emphasized his observations by underscoring every sentence with a line on the schoolmaster’s sleeve. The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s square wall of a forehead, which had his eyebrows for its base, while his eyes found commodious cellarage in two dark caves, overshadowed by the wall. The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s mouth, which was wide, thin, and hard set. The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s voice, which was inflexible, dry, and dictatorial. The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s hair, which bristled on the skirts of his bald head, a plantation of firs to keep the wind from its shining surface, all covered with knobs, like the crust of a plum pie, as if the head had scarcely warehouse-room for the hard facts stored inside. The speaker’s obstinate carriage, square coat, square legs, square shoulders, — nay, his very neckcloth, trained to take him by the throat with an unaccommodating grasp, like a stubborn fact, as it was, — all helped the emphasis.

“In this life, we want nothing but Facts, sir; nothing but Facts!”

The speaker, and the schoolmaster, and the third grown person present, all backed a little, and swept with their eyes the inclined plane of little vessels then and there arranged in order, ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the brim.

In the next chapter, Gradgrind will proceed to chastise children for using their imagination, for daring to think for themselves. It is exactly what McLeroy plans to do: destroy childen’s ability to think by stuffing them so full of “facts” that there is no room for real education.

As a Kansan, I’ve seen this battle play out in my home state, and I wish Texas well in combating this foolish doctrine.

*I’m moving! And I’m going to be teaching again! And I’ll have more time to blog!