How important is voting to you?

In response to How important is voting to you? by serenity27:

How important is voting to you?

• Extremely important

Very important

Not so important

Not at all important

I wish I could believe in voting, however I know the truth. Our votes (as the people) do not really count. It's our senetors votes that count. If the "people" vote in more towards Repulic, then the Electoral College goes Republic. I don't think it should go that way. I think it should actually go by the numbers and the senate should be counted as one as well.

The Electoral College does not determine who your Mayor, Town Councilperson or Village Ombudsperson is, nor does the Electoral College pick your Governor or district representative in your state legislature, nor who your state sends to the U.S. Senate, nor whether your county issues a bond to fund a major project.

Do not let the mechanics of filling one office determine your involvement in the political decision making of your own community. Voting starts at home.

More on Education

In response to Temper and Self-Confidence by Riverwind513:

Responding to some of the comments on this discussion:

Teaching and educating is hands-on by definition. Being "far removed" is not an admirable quality here. Indeed, by centralizing education at the federal level, we only remove parents and the community one step further from control of their schools. How does requiring parents to petition Washington to make improvements the school board is no longer empowered to pursue helping anyone?

Also, do we really need more comparisons of schools to figure out which ones are underperforming? Seriously? If we already know rich neighborhoods have better education than poor neighborhoods (as a rule of thumb), why then put further burden on all schools to compete for the "whose worst" ranking, just to get assistance?

This overhead only hurts performance. Already teachers, who would much rather be teaching, spend more of their time doing paperwork, reporting to bureaucrats at all levels of government, and preparing their students for standardized tests.

Notice I don't say "teaching to the test": indoctrinating students on how to meet some ominous anonymous testing board's expectations hardly meets the standard of education most teachers set for themselves when they started on their careers.

Today's standardized tests are not teaching tools, they are tools for sorting wheat from chaff, sociological threshers, first used on a mass scale by the U.S. Army to determine who would be a specialist and who would be cannon fodder. There was never any assumption that those who did poorly on standardized tests would do better for having taken them.

The first standardized test (setting aside ancient testing practices dating to the Han dynasty), Binet's IQ test, was designed to determine future educational intervention, not past educational performance. Which is admittedly useful, but only if we don't take away teachers ability to intervene for the benefit of students they can see are struggling without some test to confirm it for them.

Students that aren't learning to their best potential are recognizable without taking away valuable teaching time and educational flexibility to engage in further comparison ranking.

Calling for uniform education standards misses one very important fact: students aren't uniform. Learning is not mass produced like widgets, and educational strategies are not interchangeable like machine parts. Legislators in state and/or the federal capitol can't procure good test scores by submitting a purchase order for so many points of performance.

Teachers know this. When teachers are given the freedom to teach, to learn with their students, to engage a child's unique non-uniform motivations and leverage a pupil's individual multiple intelligences, they can work wonders.

Education is hands-on.

Funding is important. In economically disadvantaged neighborhoods without the property tax base to compete on a dollar per student basis with wealthier neighbors, funding is essential.

Funding is essential, if only to deal with all of the foundational needs from the lower rungs of Maslow's pyramid, needs that must be addressed in order to even begin to teach: Children who don't feel safe in their own homes and aren't getting basic nutrition aren't going to learn. We don't need a uniform education standard to figure this out.

The problem is confusing a standardized unit of measurement, the dollars tallied by accountants and partitioned by policy makers, with the students who sit in the class room. Students are not standardized. Children are not uniform. Classrooms are not homogenized. You can't milk performance out of a school by proclaiming requirements from afar.

Like filling the milk pail, education is hands-on. Being far removed from the problem is being far removed from a solution.

Response to Post on Education Reform

In response to Temper and Self-Confidence by Riverwind513:

So, at long last, here we are again. I have found a few minutes to sit and type up a discussion of one of those topics I mentioned a while ago. In fact, I chose this particular subject because it is the only one of the three for which I already have a reasonably well formed opinion handy. The subject for tonight is education, and education reform. [See original post for entire discussion.]

This is a very well thought out and cogent analysis. I'm especially impressed by the liberal interpretation of the "progress of science and useful arts" clause.

 That said, I would suggest that simply shifting the center of gravity of the education system doesn't really constitute "restructuring of the whole education system". As senorpicasso points out, top-down money-based education policy helps upper echelons of administration far more than it does the students we would teach.

To actually "restructure" the education system, we need to address the structure of how we organize, manage, facilitate, and orchestrate the process of educating young minds, not simply extend but otherwise retain the broken hierarchical governance and out-dated control mechanisms that constrain and limit that structure.

Unfortunately, local communities, especially poorer communities, have far less control over how their schools are run than the 17th century Bostonians had over the prototypical school of the early Massachusetts colony. Would schooling have been anywhere near as effective in colonial America if the King of England had taken an interest in the education of the colonists? I suspect not.

It is through local control that quality education arises. While leveling educational funding is a laudible goal, it needs to be done in a way that doesn't disempower local communities. Those who are getting the short end of the stick economically don't need to be rapped over the knuckles with the long end of the stick as well. Vesting even more power over education at the federal level only serves to lengthen the stick.

Patriotism

In response to Patriotism by kathrynknight:

I said the pledge of allegiance everyday before school when I was growing up. I have a picture that was taken of me when I was five saying the pledge in front of my grandparent's house on July 4th. I was standing with my grandfather with my hand over my heart looking up at the flag. I appreciate that other people in our town have their flags out as well during special holidays and events. I feel that parts of our country are either loosing their patriotism or refuse to participate all together. There are so many people that don't vote. I really feel that there is no excuse. If you don't vote, then your political opinion doesn't count for anything. All citizens should love their homeland and outwardly express their patriotism.... the very least of which is to vote.
* * * *

Unfortunately, patriotism is too often held ahead of civic involvement. People who expend more time and energy debating national elections, and then conducting rhetorical post-mortems of those elections for years after, than they do participating in local elections and community organizations, all out of patriotic love for their country--whether as conservative patriots who wave the flag or liberal patriots who use the flag in protest--have no excuse for the problems they would look to national figures to fix for them.

Patriotism is secondary to individual worth. Individuals who embrace their own worth don't expect people hundreds of miles away to fix problems for them. People who rely on their own value and power as human beings allow neither national allegiance nor social justice to overshadow engagement with one's neighbors and involvement in the political life of one's own community.

This is the ethic of barn raising, given expression today in neighborhood watch programs, parent-teacher associations, community planning meetings, and yes, voting in local elections. Before patriotism comes what Robert Pirsig calls gumption:

My personal feeling is that this is how any further improvement of the world will be done: by individuals making Quality decisions and that's all. God, I don't want to have any more enthusiasm for big programs full of social planning for big masses of people that leave individual Quality out. These can be left alone for a while. There's a place for them but they've got to be built on a foundation of Quality within the individuals involved. We've had that individual Quality in the past, exploited it as a natural resource without knowing it, and now it's just about depleted. Everyone's just about out of gumption. And I think it's about time to return to the rebuilding of this American resource--individual worth. There are political reactionaries who've been saying something close to this for years. I'm not one of them, but to the extent they're talking about real individual worth and not just an excuse for giving money to the rich, they're right. We do need a return to individual integrity, self-reliance, and old-fashioned gumption. We really do.

-- Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance (1974)

Patriotism without gumption, without engagement in governance of one's own community, is empty nationalism, that no speeches about social contracts or jingoistic saber-rattling can fill. Gumption, by contrast, is the characteristic Lao Tsu was speaking of when he wrote of leaders:

True leaders
are hardly known to their followers.
Next after them are the leaders
the people know and admire;
after them, those they fear;
after them, those they despise.
To give no trust
is to get no trust.
When the work's done right,
with no fuss or boasting,
ordinary people say,
Oh, we did it.

-- Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching (rendered by Ursula K. LeGuin)

Gumption, not patriotism, is the stuff of true leaders, of true patriots, those who at the end of the day heartily agree when their neighbors say, "Oh, we did it." This is the lesson taught by the three soldiers in the story of Stone Soup we all read as children. To be hardly known, yet contribute that which we each are best able to contribute, to trust and to do the work right. It is in this way that ordinary people build extraordinary nations, one community at a time.

Automatic Citizenship

In response to Automatic Citizenship by kathrynknight:

I am wondering if we should continue to allow automatic citizenship for those that are born here, but their parents are citizens of another country.

One thing to consider is that the United States--like most of the post-industrial nations of Europe--has a negative replacement rate*: if it were not for immigration (whether or not deemed "legal"), this country would rapidly (where rapidly is measured in generations) depopulate, as citizens by blood (born to U.S. citizens) do not have enough children to replace citizens who die. This is a natural consequence of affluence. There is an inverse relationship between class, as determined by relative wealth, and fecundity, as each generation of successively more economically successful parents tends to invest more resources into the welfare of fewer children. Also, with rising affluence, greater numbers of citizens may choose not to become parents, investing those resources in themsleves rather than progeny.

Unfortunately, in any country that has any sort of social security scheme (i.e., a system whereby the productivity of young adults subsidizes the needs of older, less vigorous citizens), a negative replacement rate means progressively fewer able workers supporting a steadily growing population of economically dependent neighbors. An unchecked negative replacement rate thus translates to economic collapse.

Also worth noting is that Germany, another country affected by a negative replacement rate, which previously had jus sanguinis (citizenship by blood) nationality laws, has as of 2000 modified their laws to confer citizenship per a variation of jus soli (citizenship by soil), thereby moving closer to the tradition of the United States and other countries in the Americas whose population has historically been driven by immigration. This may become the trend in Europe, as developed nations find themselves coping with declining replacement rates, growing senior populations, and rising immigration rates.

[*Some sources dispute this claim, arguing that blood-citizens in the more religious South have enough children to more than make up for the negative replacement rate in the secular North and urbanized coastal populations. However, this confounds the fact that these analyses credit religious fertility to the same region where the highest levels of just soli citizens are born. The population boom in the last decade--as evidenced by the hullabaloo about the "Population Clock" recently--is significantly driven by increased documented immigration quotas set by Congress as well as significantly reduced enforcement against undocumented immigrants.]

Ultimately, how one feels on issues like this comes down to one's opinion about what is right and what is wrong. Take the The Fairness Heuristics Test to delve deeper into how your sense of what is fair might influence your political opinions.

Reclaim the Night / Take Back the Night

In response to Reclaim the Night / Take Back the Night by betenoire:

Marching to Freedom (excerpts):

In 1977, when the first Reclaim the Night march was held in Leeds, I was just 15 and remember watching it on the news with a growing sense of excitement and political conviction. The Yorkshire Ripper was still terrorising the north of England and the police had been advising that, to avoid attack, women should stay inside after dark. The march responded directly to this warning (placards read "No curfew on women - curfew on men") and hundreds of women shouted about their anger at being kept off the streets - the supposedly public highways, after all - by the threat of male violence. Marches occurred simultaneously in 12 English locations, from Manchester to Soho. 

* * *

The latest incarnation of this (actually conceived 16 years prior to Reclaim the Night) is Jane Jacobs's "Eyes on the Street":

There must be eyes on the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street. The buildings on a street equipped to handle strangers and to insure the safety of both residents and strangers, must be oriented to the street. They cannot turn their backs or blank sides on it and leave it blind. The sidewalk must have users on it fairly continuously, both to add to the number of effective eyes on the street and to induce a sufficient number of people in buildings along the street to watch the sidewalks. [Emphasis added.]

http://www.cooltownstudios.com/mt/archives/000572.html

It is not enough to reserve one day a year to march in protest, and then spend the rest of the year hiding from our neighbors in back yards and buildings, shuttling from one enclosed structure to another in climate controlled automobiles. If we want safe streets, we need to be on those streets, own those streets, every night and every day, and design our neighborhoods and the architecture of those neighborhoods to promote such use of the streets.

The self-imposed, self-selected curfew, where citizens shackle themselves and their families with television, imprison themselves in automotive confinement, and sequester themselves in fenced-off back yards, creates the very conditions that breed unsafe streets. The night can only be successfully taken back if we each assert ownership of our own communities through consistent and continuous engagement with and participation in those communities.

Having 'Eyes on the Street' obviates the need to take back the night each and every year, for it will not have been ceded in the first place.

The Walking Enthusiast Test

If you could kill all the mosquitoes in the...?

In response to If you could kill all the mosqutoes in the...? by bitter_angel:

If you could kill all the mosqutoes in the world in an instant, would you do it?

• Yes!
• No
• I'm Not Sure

46% of people say 'yes'. That.. worries me far more than you could possibly imagine. Didn't they study that 'circle of life' thing???

This question put me in mind of Charles R. Pellegrino's Dust. Terrifying prospect.

 Unfortunately, we as a society learned nothing from Silent Spring. Most still see basic components of our ecosystem as the enemy. And those who don't are instead bowing at the altar of scientific omniscience, the very false certainty that Rachel Carson indicted four decades ago.

High Definition Under the Tree

Commercial was on in the background, for one of those electronics chains, Gift-mess theme, where the voiceover says "Every guy wants to go high-def..."

Really? Is that so? Okay, if you say so, then it must be true.

Seriously, all these advertisements to push high-definition televisions are so single-mindedly playing off of gender-type expectations. Even the "first high-def for women" thinamajig. Case study in Simon Baron-Cohen's systemizing / empathizing model.

Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, and then there are those of us from Gethen who would still listen to TV-band radio if only the non-cable antenna got reception in these parts.

Poem from 1998

My secret mind is but a guitar strum:
    All notes and chords, rich melody, poem
    Of lyric--heard by none but Mob of gloam.

My lonely heart is but a beating drum--
Lost as it is in noise of life's humdrum--
    The sound it makes does not stray, does not roam.

    My silent soul is but a metronome,
Keeping time for I--to all else `tis dumb--
        Speaks not, strikes not, makes not a single wave.

        Will no one hear, but just a single stave?

A Monster Lives Under My Bed

I wrote this children's story a few years ago for my God-daughter and nephew. A colleague recently asked me about it, and I figured I might as well share it here as well.