Runnin' from Reality

This is why I love Thomas Sowell.


The dude tells it like it is.


You can't postpone reality forever. Us westerners, who have been conditioned by Tivo and a "I want my rights" culture to believe that we really control our existence, tend to forget that.

A Downfall of Experience-based Faith

"I had crises of faith...I thought you had to experience things if you want to know right from wrong. I'd go to Christian revivals and be moved by the Holy Spirit, and I'd go to rock concerts and feel the same fervor. Then I'd be told, 'That's the Devil's music! Don't partake in that!' I wanted to experience things religion said not to experience."

Calm down, ladies

By the time he entered college, Pitt had scuttled his fundamentalist beliefs. "When I got untethered from the comfort of religion, it wasn't a loss of faith for me, it was a discovery of self," he says. "I had faith that I'm capable enough to handle any situation. There's peace in understanding that I have only one life, here and now, and I'm responsible."

--Parade Magazine, Brad Pitt Interview

This just shows that experience, while certainly valuable, isn't all its cracked up to be. If that's what you base your faith/beliefs on, its pretty thin soup. Ya need more to base your faith and beliefs on. The good news is that more is out there; we don't just have blind belief or experience.

What do you think about what Pitt said?

HT: Brett Kunkle at Stand to Reason

Religion in the Political Arena: a Good Thing, Mostly

“Religion has always played a political role in America. The politicization of modern American religion began in the special circumstances of the 1950s, when the dynamics of the Cold War led many white Protestants and quite a few Catholics to become ardent supporters of the American status quo. But the most influential political movement with religious support was the Civil Rights Movement. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968), the most visible spokesman of that movement, drew his power, insights, rhetoric, and images from his black Baptist heritage combined with an appeal to the unrealized potential of American ideals. King’s ability to draw on sophisticated philosophy, the pacifist social theory of Mahatma Gandhi, a deep familiarity with Scripture, and the preaching traditions of African American churches made him an extraordinarily powerful force...The strongest supporters for the civil rights goals for which King strove were the black churches, which eventually also recruited a few notable allies from Catholic and mainline Protestant churches.”

--Mark Noll, The Old Religion in a New World: The History of North American Christianity

Many today decry the influence of religion in politics and the public sphere. “There’s a separation of church and state in this country, don’t you understand?!” they cry. They think stances like the pro-life view or traditional marriage view smack of religion and therefore should be off the debate table in politics. For example, as I posted on a few weeks ago, some are arguing that the Mormon church should have its tax exempt status revoked because it financially supported the “Yes on Prop 8” campaign. Though he’s probably no separation devotee, even Cal Thomas poo-poos the political action of religious adherents (Ed has a post on Thomas here). Some even go so far as to want religious points of view out of the public market place of ideas entirely. They forget that religious influence has always been legal under the constitution. Establishment is what violates the First Amendment. There's a big difference between the two.

If that’s you, I really hope you read that quote nice and slow, taking it all in. Do you apply your criteria consistently? You’d better thank your lucky stars that religion has played a role in America, for it (specifically, the Christian religion) has been the impetus for many of our greatest political and societal gains in the past. For instance, if you remove the polemics of William Wilberforce from British Parliament, abolition would have come about much, much slower on the continent. If you remove the influence and participation of the black churches during the Civil Rights Movement, that force would not have wielded the tremendous power it did. Do the “separation” fans really want the church out of the state in the way they define that often vague doctrine?

Though no doubt religious people have done great damage at times in the political arena, they have done much good as well. This should give the “separation” fans pause in advancing their arguments.

Public Education: Thoughts From a Rookie Teacher

The other day I read an essay by Joel Turtel in which he waxes eloquent on the problems with public education.

Frankly, the essay was cartoonish. It made ample use of exaggeration and stereotype, and therefore I didn't find it helpful at all. There was no in depth analysis. The only things I found in the essay were the typical characters; a bright, yet precocious child; the proud, protective father; and, of course, the idiotic, prideful teacher who talked about nothing but feelings.

Though no doubt characters like that do exist in reality, they were egregious straw men in the essay.

Even though the author had credentials and had "gotten around" in the education world, he sounded like just another blowhard pundit.

The essay got me thinking, though: there ARE many problems with public education. So many problems, that I am strongly thinking of home schooling my children when I start a family. Teaching in public school has really sealed the deal in that regard for me.

If the essay I read didn't pinpoint the problems, what are they?

I'm no expert. I've only been teaching for 3 years now, so what I have to offer is no expert opinion. I don’t have many hard stats, and I’m not going to analyze any hard-core research studies. I might be (no, I probably am) missing some perspective that those older and wiser than me possess. All that to say: this is just my hunch.

The biggest problem I see in public education is a complete lack of training in classical virtues. Of course, a school might have moral discussions in some classrooms, and we might extol the benefits of honesty and shun cheating, but the foundation that makes efforts and pronouncements like that productive is absent.

To see this, ask any high school student whether a moral statement is an objective or subjective statement. Actually, I take that back; most won’t understand that distinction. Instead, ask them whether a moral statement is a statement of fact/falsehood or a statement about personal taste/opinion. If I was a bettin’ man, I’d go all in that almost every student you ask (unless they’ve been explicitly and repeatedly taught otherwise by some reeeeaaaalll savy and aware parents) will give the latter answer.

I mean, duh, of course morality is just my personal taste.

That is the cultural milieu in both today’s culture and, by extension, today’s public schools. As secular institutions, our public schools have failed to combat that cultural poison. Instead, the powers that be have gone along with the flow. Now most in education assume that morality and religion are matters of feeling and personal taste, not knowledge. This naturalistic worldview completely undercuts any emphasis on virtue. Most teachers and administrators won’t even go near the subject.

Instead, practical matters, rather than virtue, reigns. Why are we surprised, then, when “our kids” cheat and backstab with such ease? To paraphrase C.S Lewis, we laugh at honor and then are shocked when we find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

If you combine this with the rampant fascination with empty, baseless self-esteem in our schools (which is another facet of the problem. Actually, it comes closer to narcissism. See Jean Twenge's book Generation Me), it is no wonder that according to a recent study by the Josephson Institute, 64% of students cheated on a test in the last year, 38% cheated twice or more, and 36% used the internet to plagiarize an assignment, yet 93% are satisfied with their personal ethics and character, while 77% said that "when it comes to doing what is right, I am better than most people I know."

Some educators attribute this not to a loss of character in our nation, but to the notion that students are facing more pressures today than in the past....Awwwww, po' babies. I think a case can be made that pressure to succeed is greater today than in the past, but to lay the primary blame at the foot of temptation is willful blindness. But that's for another discussion.

Relativistic and naturalistic inclinations is not the whole problem, though. An analysis that focuses on this alone is not complete.

The more I get into public education, the more I see that the institution is simply not fit to address the problems being foisted upon it. We are asking a very crowded (you try keeping a room full of 40 freshmen under control for two straight hours. Go get em, Tiger!), understaffed secular institution, with a million miles of red tape, encumbered by countless silly laws designed to avoid lawsuits (all too often these laws instead empower the rabble rousers), to address all the problems created by the breakdown of the family and the coarsening of culture. It is like demanding that a 80-year old geezer in a walker win the 100M dash in the Olympics.

When a boy has divorced parents, an absentee/distant father (or no father at all), no male role models that are men of virtue, watches a steady diet of MTV and VH1, and is constantly filling his ears with music that extols the manliness of treating women as smutty objects, that's a mess that the big, obese, slow-moving, clunky institution of public education can't clean up. Individuals within the system might be able to reach the boy (that's why I'm teaching, after all), but putting hope in the institution itself is a fool's bargain.

Another thing is that those that control the money don't know how to manage it. I know for a fact that most schools can spend their money better. I have stories that would perplex you. I won't tell them, because calling out a school in a public forum like this would be unprofessional. Just trust me. I have to shake my head when teacher's unions cluck about budget cuts. Of course we could use more money; but it's a hollow plea when I see the money we do have being managed so poorly. I see this all over the place.

I also marvel at the fact that people who LOOOOVEEE paperwork are all too plentiful in public ed. Like the Vogons in A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, they seem to be designed for paper pushing, and they slow things down considerably. They make even the simplest task very complicated.

A Vogon: I swear I see this guy everywhere

Last, but perhaps most damning, the adults in the institution suffer from a lack of backbone. Rather than buckling down and doing the hard but right thing--disciplining consistently--we instead take the path of
short-term ease and look the other way. We are weenie teachers, parents (we've all heard and seen the parent who insists that her little devil-of-a-child can do no wrong), administrators, and counselors.

As always, there are exceptions to the generalization above, but there are enough weenies to drag the whole system down.

In conclusion, no one issue is paramount, and these aren't the only issues that face public ed. But if you add them together, you have quite a problem.

Those are my thoughts, at any rate...what have you seen? Can you add anything?