Daniels, Zinn, and Higher Education

You may have heard that some emails have surfaced from 2010 in which then Governor Daniels expressed his desire to make sure Howard Zinn was not part of Indiana University's training for secondary school teachers.  Certainly we are all allowed to think of various positions as excrement, and special care should be given to what is taught in public schools.

I've only read a couple chapters of Zinn's book, so I can't speak to its excremental qualities. But the situation is a good reminder about what a quality education and, indeed, what the pursuit of truth is really about.  Knowledge of facts is clearly an important element of education, but arguably the most significant element is learning how to think critically.

A quality education will present multiple perspectives and develop a student's ability to arbitrate between them. Quality colleges are not institutions of indoctrination, as if the truth needs us to hide the alternatives. Quality institutions of higher learning try their best to look at each interpretation of the evidence as objectively as possible, both for strong points and weak points.

So if a liberal professor were to disallow all perspectives but that of Zinn, that would be a bad education.  I imagine there is some of that going around here and there. Similarly, if Daniels in his new role were to try to keep Purdue professors from presenting Zinn, it would immediately disqualify him from his job. I don't imagine he will try that.

It is a reminder, though, that those who cry "truth" the loudest are often those least interested in it. God is not worried about the new atheists, because he knows he exists. Go ahead, present your case to the contrary.

If we are really interested in the truth, we are willing to listen as objectively as possible to varying and contrasting perspectives.  We are even willing to change our mind given a sufficient basis.  God would change his mind about his own existence if you could convince him :-)

Anger and militancy can actually be a sign of insecurity about what one believes, a kind of compensation for lack of substance.  Not always, but often.

Feel free to disagree...

How will Mitch Daniels do...

I personally like Mitch Daniels. He certainly did well for Indiana budgetarily and has managed not to get caught up too much in the shifting Republican scene of the last four years, the waves that ousted old school Republicans (Lugar, me frankly) or shifted you toward libertarianism to survive (Pence?). 

However, I have wondered how well he'll do as President of Purdue.  I saw a sign of someone at Purdue protesting his appointment.  It said something like, "What experience do you have for this job?"

Being a university President is very much about raising money.  Being a successful politician certainly gives a person a lot of experience in that area.  So Daniels may do very well at that piece of the puzzle.

Daniels has been involved heavily with WGU, the online university (from out of state ;-) that he has promoted on television.  One perk for IWU of his Purdue presidency is that we don't have the governor of the state promoting competition with us. ;-) Whether he will push online education at Purdue is an interesting question. The president of the University of Virginia went majorly cross-ways with her university over this issue.  Daniels is somewhat mild mannered, so it's hard for me to see him being heavy handed with this, although I can see him pushing Purdue in the MOOC direction.

I suspect that working with faculty in shared governance might be a bit like working with a legislature run by the opposition party.  An adversarial college president's days are numbered, but Daniels doesn't seem of that ilk.  These last few years of course he's had a Republican legislature, but he did have some strong resistance at points from the minority Democrats. That is the kind of experience that does prepare a person to be a college president.

Purdue is an engineering school. That might fit with Daniels.  I think in these shifting educational times, having a sense of utilitarianism in knowledge is necessary.  Will this subject help students get a job?  Here is where it will be interesting to see how Daniels does.

Part of a good university is also an element of truth for its own sake, the love of knowledge.  The university that will do well in the future, by contrast, is the one that focuses on truth that will get you a job.  But hopefully they will never abandon the liberal arts entirely.  My knee-jerk suspicion is that Daniels probably wasn't a big friend of the arts or other life-enriching-but not-essential elements as governor (I could be wrong but he racked up a surplus while cutting education significantly).

If he can keep the liberal arts healthy while focusing on the utilitarian subjects that are already Purdue's specialties, he might just do well as its university President.

Indiana Education Reform

Governor Mitch Daniels signed into law yesterday a bill that allows students to take the tax money appropriated for them in the public schools and use it toward private schools.  If I understand correctly, it mainly funds middle and lower income families, which I presume is what Governor Daniels meant by social justice.

First of all, I like Daniels.  I voted for Daniels.  I consider him an honorable man.  He would make a better Republican President than anyone else I know in the field.

I have two strong concerns about this particular program.

1. The first is that the public school system, when it functions properly, is meant to provide a neutral education zone that equips the public to be profitable and fully functioning members of society.  Private schools, on the other hand, like home schools, are often mechanisms for insulating children into tribal backwaters.

Let's say there was a city where most people were Schenckacrucians, a new religion that believes the earth is flat and that we should abolish the Constitution in favor of my Book of Schenck.  The redistribution of funds for public education will only add to the return to pre-modern tribalism that is well underway in America by allowing the loony parents of Cultsville to send their children to my private school.

2. The problem with the public schools--I say as someone with several children in them and very, very close friends who are on the ground in them--is not the teachers.  The problem are the kids who daily call their teachers obscenities in the middle of class that I can't even mention here (I'm talking elementary school).  These are the kids who have all manner of defiance disorders who, because of funding cuts, have nowhere to go but the public school classroom.  They flip desks, daily cause classrooms to be emptied of the good students so that whoever--sometimes funding cuts have reduced support staff almost to secretaries in the office--can talk them down.  School personnel are not allowed to touch them and are discouraged from calling the police.

These are the kids who are in class with your children who, if they were adults, would be locked up or be put in a mental health facility.  Funding cuts take away support systems like behaviorists and clinical social workers--four such jobs have been eliminated from the Marion Community Schools system already for next year.  And we criticize and hold accountable teachers who are not trained to do that level of psychotherapy and abnormal behavior management on a daily basis. These are not special ed issues--they are mental health issues beyond the competency of teacher training.

How can a school pass ISTEP when these students, and mentally challenged students, and students who have  massive attendance problems are part of the assessment?  And then we tell the teacher they will be penalized if their class as a whole doesn't improve?  We discourage them from taking on hard classes because their pay would be contingent on a no win situation.

My son takes Taekwondo and occasionally, the master will have them play a game where they compete to see who can pull a strip of cloth out from behind their opponent.  But he sometimes ties it so that, without the person knowing it, there's no real chance he or she can win.

That's what we've been doing to the public school system these last ten years.  We've set it up for failure and then treated our teachers like dirt when their students' test scores don't improve.  This new law, however well intentioned, is yet another example of hamstringing an incredibly important part of the American social contract... in my opinion.