Gotta Love Those Activist Judges

South Carolina's state supreme court is holding Gov. Sanford's feet to the fire and making him take the stimulus funds he swore he would refuse.

The state’s top court ruled unanimously Thursday that Gov. Mark Sanford must apply for the disputed $700 million in federal stimulus money.

The S.C. Supreme Court also took the rare step of issuing a writ of mandamus, which orders the governor to apply for the money.

Chief Justice Jean Toal and three of the four other justices — Donald Beatty, John Kittredge and John Waller — said a state law passed last month requires Sanford to apply for the money and doesn’t conflict with the federal law providing the stimulus funds.

“Under the constitution and laws of this State, the General Assembly is the sole entity with the power to appropriate funds, including federal funds,” the four justices wrote. “Therefore, the General Assembly has the authority to mandate that the Governor apply for federal funds which it has appropriated.”

In a separate concurring opinion, Justice Costa Pleicones said state lawmakers complied with an amendment of the federal law — proposed by U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn in response to Sanford’s refusal to accept the money — by adopting a concurrent resolution accepting the funds and passing a law designating how the money will be spent.

I do not understand how Sanford can sleep at night refusing dollars targeted for education, when his own state's system is in such disrepair according even to students like Casey Edwards (a plaintiff in the recent case) that it merited a documentary on the terrible conditions.

And since this is a South Carolina court, and presumably the product of GOP appointments, it'll be interesting to see how the RWNM tries to spin the decision.

H/T ThinkProgress - who have a similarly scathing take.

On Why We Need To Fund Education, Part Two

ThinkProgress has this little gem up for consideration:

Yesterday on the House floor, Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO) launched into a nonsensical tirade against legislation aimed at addressing global warming by reducing carbon emissions. Akin demonstrated his lack of understanding of climate issues by erroneously celebrating the seasonal change from winter to spring as “good climate change” and confused “weather” with “climate.” He dismissed the threat of global warming as a “comedy” and wondered who would “want to put politicians in charge of the weather anyways.”

Who, indeed, if they know this much little about the subject.

On Educating People Who Don't Want To Think

Two recent stories circling the 'blogosphere achieved synchronicity in my mind this morning.

The first is the brouhaha over the "Gathering Storm" ad campaign from National Organization for Marriage. Petulant at Shakesville eviscerated the ad, but there have been others who have torn it apart - sometimes with hilarity. Much of the criticism of the campaign - the part that actually checks the campaign's "facts" rather than simply denounce the outright bigotry or question why the campaign had to hire actors rather than produce the actual people cited - tears into the hyperbole and outright falsehood of the claims. Unfortunately, it takes research skills to actually identify the "oppressed" produced in the ad, since the ad doesn't name names or give the slightest specific for its test cases.

The second is a disturbing report on the uninformed nature of the US electorate. A recent study for the California Academy of Sciences highlights the relative ignorance of the populace on basic scientific knowledge. Relating to this, Space Cowboy (again at Shakesville) retells an anecdote from Southern California that, due to budget constraints, science education may actually be reduced.

There is something in the US psyche that encourages certainty. The US doesn't like ambiguity: it prefers the conviction of fact or belief. As a result, the complexity of the modern world is often suppressed in the public sphere and replaced with platitudes and simplistic statements which are frequently incorrect in part or in whole simply to assuage public angst. It is possible for an authority on a given subject to make an assertion that is demonstrably false and have it accepted simply from the certainty with which it is delivered.

Part of the CAA survey results can be explained by the pervasiveness of "young earth" philosophy in Conservative Xtianity. If, for example, one believes the Earth is 6,000 years old, then man and dinosaur would naturally exist at the same time - which would explain the 59% correct response rate for that question. The rest of the questions, however, point to an almost wilful ignorance of established science.

At the same time, the education system is increasingly focused on what policy defines as "essentials" - basic reading and mathematics. Such a narrow approach, dealing in essentially right/wrong dichotomies of calculation and syntax, while easily scored for evaluation, completely ignores the "gray area" fields of the social sciences and more complex natural sciences (chemistry, physics and biology), all of which are essential to a sound education.

I cannot posit a causality for the decreasing literacy in the US from these items. But the "Gathering Storm" campaign shines a bright spotlight on both the mindset that encourages it and the results of allowing that mindset to dictate education policy and public discourse. The more narrowly the US focuses its efforts to educate the populace, the more necessary disciplines become ignored, particularly disciplines where right and wrong are displaced by provable versus unprovable and where interpretation based on the observable becomes more integral to the subject. Equally, as the disciplines that do not encourage right/wrong dichotomies in their studied material are diminished in the education system, the notion that there are such absolutes in the natural world becomes more prevalent and acceptable.

A cultural artifact of the deemphasis on such modes of thinking is the increase in acceptance of unproven - even brazenly indefensible - positions making their way through public discourse. The "Gathering Storm" campaign is one such.

The problem with such phenomena in the scholastically challenged world of 21st century US culture is that debunking such patterns of thought require the kind of critical thinking that the US education system is increasingly unable to teach and that the US populace is seemingly increasingly disinclined to practice. Given this trend, the capacity of education to encourage critical thinking in any sense is diminished, and this decrease may be attributable in no small part to the disinclination of the public to think for itself.

Education is at once an obligation of any society and the specific privilege of the individual. Society, particularly democratic society, needs an informed populace to remain productive and functional. However, the level of education obtained is largely the choice of the individual citizen: how much or how little education an individual obtains is that individual's own option. These two conditions are largely at odds in modern US society and leave us with results such as are illustrated here.

The same society that values science in the abstract is woefully uneducated on scientific specifics as the CAA study shows, which implies that many more advanced disciplines of less perceived value are at least equally outside the grasp of those surveyed. At the same time, those disciplines, whose spheres encompass the realms of what is provable or defensible, are being held increasinly out of reach by an education system apparently unable or unwilling to present more than the absolutely but hardly exclusive essentials of basic arithmetic and everyday language. In turn, there is a predominance of public speech on increasingly complex subjects that is oversimplified to a point that it becomes substantially inaccurate, which is absorbed as accurate by a public increasinly discouraged from, and disinclined to, its own critical thinking and research.

The net result of these convergences is a populace uninformed on matters of vital import to the republic and the planet, who are unable or unwilling to expend the effort to explore beneath the surface of complex issues and sufficiently complacent with their condition to accept baldly inaccurate positions based solely on the conviction with which they are made. This might be curable with a more comprehensive approach to education, and a more rigorous and expansive curriculum at both the elementary and secondary levels, but again as indicated in the current discourse the US education system is in such dire economic straits and in such low domestic repute that the very coursework that could alleviate the problem is being sacrificed to the immediate budgetary constraints without apparent thought for the long-term consequences.

On Why We Need To Fund Education

Two news items of late reminded me yet again that we have a collective obligation to support education.

The first is the ongoing scuffle out of the Miami-Dade School District about an otherwise-harmless little book about Cuba. The New York Times rightly describes this as censorship, pointing out that the issue arose from the strong anti-Castro sentiment in the area and that "the omissions [which were cause for the original complaint] in A Visit to Cuba were appropriate in a book written for such a young audience." Just as social science texts for elementary schools describe World War II without going into detail on the concentration camps or the incarceration of Japanese-Americans, so too are the finer points of Cuban life (indeed life anywhere) not suitable for the "4-to-8 year old" bracket for which the book was written. Likewise, not talking about Cuba is hardly helpful, and since the only thing the anti-Castro can say that's fit for the 4-to-8 year old ear is "Castro is BAD" there's really not much they could contribute that would be different from the text that's been pulled.

On the other hand, we have another example of the genius (/sarcasm) of the Republicans. Representative Steve Austria (R-OH) has been busy rewriting history on the House floor:

"When (President Franklin) Roosevelt did this, he put our country into a Great Depression," Austria said. "He tried to borrow and spend, he tried to use the Keynesian approach, and our country ended up in a Great Depression. That's just history."

As a trained historian, who specialised in the Industrial Age, I simply have to take this one apart. The Great Depression was a nebulous affair with roots in the 1918 Treaty of Paris and the French occupation of the Ruhr in 1923 as well as the misguided policies of Harding and Coolidge. The Ottoman Empire and Hapsburg Empires had both collapsed by war's end, and the fledgling states of Turkey, Austria and Hungary were just climbing out of the wreckage. The other European states formed during the negotiations - Poland, Czechoslovakia, Jugoslavia etc - were each saddled with the unenviable jobs of constituting themselves and recovering from the fighting. The British economy, sapped by four years of fighting, recovered but little between wars. Burdened by Reparations, impeded by the French looking for their cut to pay their War Debt and taking whole German provinces when they couldn't get deutsche marks, and throughly torpedoed by the German continuation to pay salaries to German workers in French-held territory, the German economy collapsed into hyperinflation by 1924. The ripple effects spread globally, and by 1929 the effects, coupled with a decade's worth of lax fiscal oversight, shady banking practices and poor government policy, hit the US. Civil war in Spain effectively closed their market. France managed to stay relatively unaffected until 1934: however, when the Depression hit there, it did so with such force and longevity that France was essentially still in its grip when World War II broke out five years later. So unless you were living in Paris, the Depression hit you long before FDR took office in 1933. There are, in fact, arguments made that the Depression had its beginnings, not from any domestic fiscal policy, but from US insistence at the Paris negotiations that debts owed by the (victorious but cash-strapped) Allies be repaid immediately: with no means of paying themselves, they assessed the War Debt on the sole surviving Central Power (Germany) which was in no condition to protest.

I learned the basics of the Depression in middle school, and can recall four semesters' worth of undergrad study that paid no small attention to it. The dates are especially clear. Yet Rep. Austria seems oblivious to such things, preferring an ideological stance over actual verifiable dates.

I'm of an age group that has watched the education debate move from the generic "practical" through "relevant" in the 70s and 80s to "marketable" from the 90s onward. Increasingly, the importance of education to the public is seen, not as a means to learn or think critically, but as a tool to achieve some lucrative career. In the process, many subjects that would lend scope to such goals are neglected or abandoned: music, social sciences, literature and mathematics spring to mind immediately. The "fixes" applied heretofore, while of some debatable use in the primary and secondary school curricula, are ill-suited to the higher education that is increasingly a requirement for anything more complex than cashiering at McDonald's.

All the while, our own students continue to fall behind their peers around the globe. Foreign students are at least bilingual by the time they start university; ours can't seem to match those numbers by the time they've finished. They have at graduation a better grasp of their own histories than we do of ours, and they have about as good an understanding of the US as we do. Not being an educator I will not speculate here as to why, but everything I have encountered as a student, traveller and professional tells me our own system is deeply flawed and needs more attention, not less.

All of this leads me back to the two stories of the day. It is dangerous for any school district to get into the business of banning books for children based solely on a political agenda. If freedom of speech is at all valuable it is precisely because the free flow of ideas and information - of all kinds - yields a better society. Students should be (at the appropriate ages and stages) exposed to such things, and if that means reading the Declaration des Droits de l'Homme et du Citoyen, Das Kapital, Mein Kampf, The Making of the English Working Class and other works besides the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, Tom Sawyer, The Great Gatsby and Of Mice and Men, so much the better. The results of failing to do so include a government staffed by clods such as Rep. Austria, who don't know their own history well enough not to repeat it.

Quote of the Day

"Why should I be a party to the miseducation of the American people?"

- Antonin Scalia (on cameras in the courtroom).

This from a related story about how Mr. Justice Congeniality slammed a college student for asking a "nasty, impolite question" of one of the nastiest, least polite Supreme Court Justices of recent memory. More on this incident here and here.

I'm darkly amused at his choice of words - particularly given the increasing uneducation available in the US.

H/T to Mustang Bobby at Bark Bark Woof Woof for the take.