Echoes in Eternity

Yesterday was the 113th birthday of the late great RG LeTourneau, the founder of my alma mater, LeTourneau University. In honor of the man, Donald Miller wrote a short post on his blog. I thought I would add some other interesting information about RG. For one, he holds more U.S. patents (mostly in heavy construction and earthmoving technology) than anyone except Thomas Edison. His equipment served as 70% of the U.S. Army's road-making equipment during WWII. He also took his technology over to Africa and made hundreds of roads into central Africa. He worked closely with several presidents, including George H.W. Bush. He also is credited with revolutionizing heavy equipment, including the invention of mobile offshore drilling platforms (a model of which can be seen in the museum on the LeTourneau campus). But probably the most astounding fact about the man is that he lived on only 10% of his income and gave the rest away to missions around the world. An amazing man!

I watched the new documentary Waiting for "Superman" tonight. Wow. Directed and narrated by union-loving liberal Davis Guggenheim (who also directed An Inconvenient Truth), one would think that a documentary about the problems in America's public school system would end up centering on the topic of budget cuts and underpaid teachers. And Guggenheim admitted that he went in expecting to find those issues to be the source of the problem. But the script got flipped when he saw the facts, and to his credit, he was honest enough to still tell the story. And what a story it is. The film follows the lives of five young students from around the country, four of whom are from inner city neighborhoods, as their families attempt to find a good education for them. The most heart-rending child is Bianca, a Hispanic girl from Los Angeles. She wants to be a veterinarian, but when one considers that just a small percentage of the children in the middle school she is destined to attend next year will even graduate high school, much less attend college, one can see how dim Bianca's dream probably is.

By the end of the movie, you realize that the only way that the public school system (in the inner city, suburbs, and rural communities) will ever begin to improve is if the teachers' unions lose a significant amount of power, by eliminating collective bargaining and stripping them of many of their current contractual rights. I'd go one step further than Guggenheim and say that teacher unions don't need to just be weakened, they need to be destroyed. While we're at it, I'd love to see all schools privatized. But one step at a time.

Watch this brilliant film and tell your friends about it. This has the potential (along with The Cartel, a documentary specifically focused on teachers' unions) to be a film that will help cause a seismic shift in how education is done in this country.

This study of college students shows just how destructive the self-esteem cult has become in this country. These students were raised by teachers and parents who believed that the most important thing is to make kids feel good about themselves, to the point of lavishly praising them for doing nothing, giving participation awards and grades instead of alphabetical ones, and generally making them feel like they are the center of their own universes. As a result, they've grown up to believe their own hype and are addicted to the sound of their own praise. Another case where Christians haven't done a very good job of being counter-cultural.

This list of the worst (or best, depending on your point of view) analogies ever encountered by high school teachers is awesome! Read them all.

It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.

More intolerance in our universities...

I noticed that Obama is calling for a longer school year. Yes, because we want to hand our kids over to the brainwashing control of the State for even more time than it already has... right. It's no surprise that a nanny state enthusiast like Obama would pose a solution that involves more government intrusion in the lives of Americans. His mind is so twisted in that direction that he cannot consider other much more viable options. Like privatizing the entire educational system... GASP! I think some teacher's union lobbyist just fell over dead. I promise you, free market forces would dramatically overhaul all of the waste and intellectual degradation that has occurred on the State's watch over the last few decades. That would probably be one of the best (and most important) things this country could do for its future.

Wilson has a good post on parental responsibility with regards to education choice.

One of the optical illusions created by the decision to home school or to have your children in a private Christian school is a significant one. It is this. The temptation is to think that in the home school, success or failure is fundamentally a parental matter while in the private school, success or failure is fundamentally a school matter. In truth, it is always a parental matter.

School teachers are supposed to be servants, and servants can be utilized wisely or poorly. You can have good servants and poor ones, and when you have good ones, they can still be utilized poorly. But the fundamental responsibility always rests with the one who employs the servants.

"Culture trumps politics."

This guy has a brilliant(!!!) piece on how to view the coming election and politics in general.

How do those who love limited government, and believe in the values of our nation’s founding, reconcile themselves to the past, present, and future Republican party?

The issue of the 2000-2008 GOP is an easy one: You don’t reconcile yourself to it. It was an atrocity. On a Presidential level, it should not be too difficult to thank God for John Roberts and Samuel Alito, and call it a day. Congressionally, there is virtually nothing to be thankful for (even the tax reductions of 2001 and 2003 lacked the political will to actually be made permanent, despite the existence of the votes to do so, creating this 2010 debacle that will be the largest tax increase in history). But the present GOP is a different story, and I am not sure what the benefit is in denying it. Not a single House Republican voted for the stimulus bill. The Pelosi-House had to insult heaven and hell to get the ObamaCare perversion passed. And both House and Senate leadership have done a wonderful job (within the political context they presently find themselves in – a problem of their own making) in holding this Obama-Pelosi-Reid disaster in check. For the most part, Republicans always seem to be more Republican when they don’t have any power, and that is most unfortunate.
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It is not as complicated for me as many are making it. I believe this is a matter of managing expectations. I have already said what I want to about the recent past as well as the present. But when it comes to what can be expected of a future GOP presence in the House and the Senate, I can not imagine why we would expect them to be anything less than an extremely effective thorn in the side of the aforementioned Obama-Pelosi-Reid unholy trinity, and anything more than that same effective thorn. They will not restore the Constitution to its rightful place. And a GOP House majority will not come close to solving all of America’s problems. In the here and now, though, it is the unambiguous superior choice. When I refer to managing expectations, I have to wonder what people are expecting when they vote, and who the real statists are among us. I do not expect the politicians I support to do anything more than try to keep the disaster from getting worse. It is incurable in Washington D.C. The disaster I refer to is an idolatrous culture that has worshiped at the feet of the state {emphasis added}. This is not a political problem, and it is not the fault of politicians (either on the Republican side, or the Democratic side). The culture is in a state of disaster both morally and ideologically. I can understand why the Republican-haters take the position that they do if the expectation were that the Republicans were going to save the culture. But they are not going to, and they couldn’t do so if they wanted to.

More or less we are in a very long-term paradigm where both political parties go back and forth doing much of the same thing. The Republican party is far less likely to accelerate the slide into Euro-socialism, but both parties are still light years away from the limited government world of personal responsibility our founders envisioned. And based on what I observe of cultural responsibility, perhaps this is to be expected. I hope for a Congress that can pass some good legislation in the decades I have left on planet earth. Much more importantly, I hope for a Congress that can block all kinds of atrocious legislation that is sure to be presented in the years and decades to come. And that is pretty much it. The transcendental improvement I work for and pray for in this great country is going to be a cause of political change, but not an effect of it. We have our chicken and egg all mixed up, and it is time we get it straight. Culture trumps politics, and it always will. The present conflict begs for us to be politically involved, to force our leaders to quit redistributing wealth, to seek less burdensome tax policy, and to beg Washington D.C. to get out of the way. We should all do that, and my personal conviction is that for the most part this is best done with Republican options at this point in time.

But the progress we ought to be looking for in a multi-generational context is not going to come from this GOP party. Some of the better congressional Republicans are going to do really good things, and some of the worst ones may end up disappointing. All of it is fleeting. A society that yearns for freedom is the need of the hour; not merely politicians that sometimes have a sort of okay idea of what it is. We have spent 100 years in a love affair with a school system that has almost choked off any semblance of what freedom means. If I could hand-select every single elected official in the Congress tomorrow, OR I could wave a wand and see a private school system become the predominant means of educating our children, I would not even hesitate for a split second to choose the latter over the former. (As an aside, I have often said that I can sort of cope when Christians put their kids in the public school system; it is when conservative Christians do it that I get a bit mystified; but I digress).

My point is not to say that a better educational system is the last best hope, and a Republican Congress is not. My point is that no one single thing represents the remedy to culture’s woes – especially a change in the partisan affiliation of our Congressional representation... Just don’t set your expectation so high that you set yourself up for disappointment. The battle for the hearts and souls of men is not going to be won this November. This is a temporary deal that requires some temporary wisdom. The long term battle is anything but temporary, though, and it requires solutions far more important than any political party has ever been able to offer.

“The people wanted a King”, I Samuel says. For those of us who want a freedom that reflects the unalienable rights of men, a leadership that acknowledges its authority as coming from the consent of the governed, and even a voting population that has some idea what I just said, be patient. And be vigilant.

Whew, July was a slow blogging month, but I have an excuse. :)

Doug Wilson wrote an excellent post on the problems facing parents who either unwittingly want their kids to be in the world and of it and those who desire that their kids be out of the world and not even thinking of it. As Wilson says, in both ditches lies spiritual death.

One trap that parents fall into is the trap of not wanting sin around their kids. But I suppose this requres some explanation.

The mistake arises because there are a bunch of sins that parents should keep away from their kids -- kidnappers, for starters, and cocaine dealers, and pornographers, and seducers, and Cartesian dualists. One of the accusations leveled against private Christian education is that conservative parents are sheltering their kids. What next?! Parents sheltering children! We feed them too.

But here is where the mistake come in. There is a question of degree here. We are not supposed to keep our children away from the presence of all sin whatever. And that's a good thing, too, because it is impossible. There is a type of sin, common to the human condition, that your children will encounter (on a daily basis) on the playground of the finest Christian school imaginable. If you don't send your kids to that school (because of all the sin there), they will encounter even more of it at church, in their relationships with their siblings, in their bedroom all alone, and in the midst of all the dirty thoughts between their ears. The task of parents in this is not to avoid this kind of sin, but rather to teach their children how to battle it. You cannot learn to battle something if you are constantly endeavoring to stay away from it.

In short, with this kind of sin, there are two errors -- equally bad. One is to accommodate yourself to the presence of this kind of room temperature sin, in such a way as to assume room temperature yourself. That is the way of spiritual death. The other is to pretend to yourself that the choices you have made have somehow successfully distanced you from all that icky stuff. But it is as close to you now as it ever was, but is now invisible because you have daubed your eyes with a special Pharisee salve. This is another way of spiritual death.
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Suppose your child is in the classroom of a fine Christian school, one with a great reputation. You know the teachers and administrators, and they really love the Lord. But you know for a fact that two/thirds of the kids in your son's class are all hot about the latest skanky movie. Just last night, after the youth group get together, they all went to see Skanky Movie III, one that has set records for both kinds of box office gross. What will your temptation be? Your temptation will be to think that however well-intentioned the folks running the school might be, the "tone" of the school is not nearly "high enough," and that all these families clearly have poor standards. You regret having to do this, but you are considering pulling your son, wrapping him up in cotton batting for two final semesters of Mom School.

You think the problem is low entertainment standards, when the actual problem is that no Christian parents -- including you -- are teaching their kids what moral leadership looks like. About a third of the kids who went to that movie didn't really want to, and wouldn't have gone if someone in the class -- I am thinking of your son in particular -- had done more than simply studied his shoelaces when the subject came up. You are tempted to think that the others have low entertainment standards, when the real lesson is that your son is not a moral leader. The response ought not to be to do something that will make him even less of one.

Dalrymple has an absolutely brilliant piece on the hazards of excessive sympathy for the poor, particularly when applied to politics.

To sympathize with those who are less fortunate is honorable and decent. A man able to commiserate only with himself would surely be neither admirable nor attractive. But every virtue can become deformed by excess, insincerity, or loose thinking into an opposing vice. Sympathy, when excessive, moves toward sentimental condescension and eventually disdain; when insincere, it becomes unctuously hypocritical; and when associated with loose thinking, it is a bad guide to policy and frequently has disastrous results. It is possible, of course, to combine all three errors.

No subject provokes the deformations of sympathy more than poverty. I recalled this recently when asked to speak on a panel about child poverty in Britain in the wake of the economic and financial crisis. I said that the crisis had not affected the problem of child poverty in any fundamental way. Britain remained what it had long been—one of the worst countries in the Western world in which to grow up.
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My remarks were poorly received by the audience, which consisted of professional alleviators of the effects of social pathology, such as social workers and child psychologists. One fellow panelist ... dismissed my comments as nonsense. For her, poverty was simply the “maldistribution of resources”; we could thus distribute it away. And in her own terms, she was right, for her charity stipulated that one was poor if one had an income of less than 60 percent of the median national income.

This definition, of course, has odd logical consequences: for example, that in a society of billionaires, multimillionaires would be poor. A society in which every single person grew richer could also be one in which poverty became more widespread than before; and one in which everybody grew poorer might be one in which there was less poverty than before. More important, however, is that the redistributionist way of thinking denies agency to the poor. By destroying people’s self-reliance, it encourages dependency and corruption—not only in Britain, but everywhere in the world where it is held.
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The British state is today as much a monopoly provider of education to the population as it is of health care. The monopoly is maintained because the government and the bureaucratic caste believe, first, that parents would otherwise be too feckless or impoverished to educate their children from their own means; and second, that public education equalizes the chances of children in an otherwise unequal society and is thus a means of engineering social justice.
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As in Tanzania, the state-dominated system became self-reinforcing. Because of the high taxation necessary to run it, it reduced the capacity and inclination of people to pay for their own choices—and eventually the habit of making such choices. The British state now decides the important things for British citizens when it comes to education and much else.
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The only time I ever saw [President] Nyerere in person was in Dodoma, the dusty town designated to become Tanzania’s new capital. He was expected to drive by, and by the side of the road sat a praise singer—a woman employed to sing the praises of important people. She was singing songs in praise of Nyerere, of which there were many, with words such as: “Father Nyerere, build and spread socialism throughout the country and eliminate all parasites.”

The great man drove past in a yellow Mercedes. The praise singer was covered in dust and started to cough.

This is an interesting post on the huge disparity between college degrees by gender.

Here's an interesting piece on higher education and its possibly imminent demise.

For 400 years, higher education in the US has been on a roll. From Harvard asking Galileo to be a guest professor in the 1600s to millions tuning in to watch a team of unpaid athletes play another team of unpaid athletes in some college sporting event, the amount of time and money and prestige in the college world has been climbing.

I'm afraid that's about to crash and burn. Here's how I'm looking at it.

1. Most colleges are organized to give an average education to average students.
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By emphasizing mass and sameness and rankings, colleges have changed their mission.

This works great in an industrial economy where we can't churn out standardized students fast enough and where the demand is huge because the premium earned by a college grad dwarfs the cost. But...

2. College has gotten expensive far faster than wages have gone up.

As a result, there are millions of people in very serious debt, debt so big it might take decades to repay. Word gets around. Won't get fooled again...
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3. The definition of 'best' is under siege.

Why do colleges send millions (!) of undifferentiated pieces of junk mail to high school students now? We will waive the admission fee! We have a one page application! Apply! This is some of the most amateur and bland direct mail I've ever seen. Why do it?

Biggest reason: So the schools can reject more applicants. The more applicants they reject, the higher they rank in US News and other rankings. And thus the rush to game the rankings continues, which is a sign that the marketers in question (the colleges) are getting desperate for more than their fair share. Why bother making your education more useful if you can more easily make it appear to be more useful?

4. The correlation between a typical college degree and success is suspect.

College wasn't originally designed to merely be a continuation of high school (but with more binge drinking). In many places, though, that's what it has become. The data I'm seeing shows that a degree (from one of those famous schools, with or without a football team) doesn't translate into significantly better career opportunities, a better job or more happiness than a degree from a cheaper institution.

5. Accreditation isn't the solution, it's the problem.

A lot of these ills are the result of uniform accreditation programs that have pushed high-cost, low-reward policies on institutions and rewarded schools that churn out young wanna-be professors instead of experiences that turn out leaders and problem-solvers.

Just as we're watching the disintegration of old-school marketers with mass market products, I think we're about to see significant cracks in old-school schools with mass market degrees.
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The solutions are obvious... there are tons of ways to get a cheap, liberal education, one that exposes you to the world, permits you to have significant interactions with people who matter and to learn to make a difference. Most of these ways, though, aren't heavily marketed nor do they involve going to a tradition-steeped two-hundred-year old institution with a wrestling team. Things like gap years, research internships and entrepreneurial or social ventures after high school are opening doors for students who are eager to discover the new.

We have lived to see the second death of ancient learning. In our time something which was once the possession of all educated men has shrunk to being the technical accomplishment of a few specialists. ... If one were looking for a man who could not read Virgil though his father could, he might be found more easily in [this] century than in the fifth.
- C.S. Lewis

Mark Steyn wrote a discerning column this week on the dwindling amount of years people spend working even as life expectancies continue to increase, and how legislation like Obamacare only serves to further infantilize the populace. In short, Steyn points out that we are rapidly approaching an era where a person will fall into one of two categories. Either you are a child or a retired adult who needs to be quickly euthanized. Either way, everyone is a dependent and a constituent, but no one a citizen. The only people working will be bureaucrats. In such a world, freedom is a foreign concept.

Dalrymple also had a good essay in this month's New English Review on the problem of a culture of dependency, as it has shown itself in England.

Appropriately, I noticed this article today which mentions that nearly half of all Americans don't pay any federal taxes.

This is a good sign.

The Science Museum is revising the contents of its new climate science gallery to reflect the wave of scepticism that has engulfed the issue in recent months.

The decision by the 100-year-old London museum reveals how deeply scientific institutions have been shaken by the public’s reaction to revelations of malpractice by climate scientists.

The museum is abandoning its previous practice of trying to persuade visitors of the dangers of global warming. It is instead adopting a neutral position, acknowledging that there are legitimate doubts about the impact of man-made emissions on the climate.

Even the title of the £4 million gallery has been changed to reflect the museum’s more circumspect approach. The museum had intended to call it the Climate Change Gallery, but has decided to change this to Climate Science Gallery to avoid being accused of presuming that emissions would change the temperature.

This looks promising...

It is not what people can read; it is what they do read, and what they can be made, by any imaginable means, to learn from what they read, that determine the [value of education and literacy]... In a society where expression is free and popularity is rewarded they read mostly that which debauches them.

- Richard Weaver in Ideas Have Consequences

This is what happens when we cede moral and parental authority to the government.

If you want a glimpse at what today's college student is undergoing at universities across the country, check out Mindingthecampus.com. It's usually pretty sickening. This is just the latest:

I was having a casual conversation with a very high-ranking UC administrator about a proposal that he was developing to increase "diversity" at UC in a manner that would comply with the dictates of California's Constitution and the prohibition against race, gender and ethnic preferences.

As I listened to his proposal, I asked him why he considered it important to tinker with admissions instead of just letting the chips fall where they may. In an unguarded moment, he told me that unless the university took steps to "guide" admissions decisions, UC would be dominated by Asians. When I asked, "What would be wrong with that?" I got an answer that speaks volumes about the underlying philosophy at many universities with regard to Asian enrollment.

The UC administrator told me that Asians are "too dull - they study, study, study."
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It is a mistake to believe that all forms of discrimination flow from hate and inherently foul motives. Certainly, the desire to attract more black students to a campus that is lacking in blacks is not an evil aspiration; however, when it becomes necessary to reject those who "study, study, study" in order to admit those who study insufficiently, then the mission to include more blacks becomes a much more ominous one.

Since the passage of Proposition 209 in 1996, Asian enrollment at UC has skyrocketed... The overall percentage in the nine undergraduate UC campuses is over 40%, in a state where the Asian population is about 13%. Thus, Asians are excelling under policies that emphasize and reward academic achievement at a ratio that is over three times their actual statewide population. If you are a proponent of "diversity" and representation (essentially a de facto quota system), this outcome is your worst nightmare.
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In recent months, the UC Regents have deliberated about - and approved - a proposal that would significantly revise the admissions policies of the university. Beginning in 2012, UC will no longer automatically admit the top 12.5% of all students based on statewide performance, and will no longer rely so heavily on grades and test scores. Instead, the eligibility pool will be expanded by a projected 40% by eliminating the requirement for applicants to take the SAT subject matter tests. The net effect of these changes is that academic achievement will be less significant and UC admissions administrators will have the "flexibility" to discriminate against those "dull" Asians who "study, study, study" all the time without violating Proposition 209.
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There is one truth that is universally applicable in the era of "diversity," especially in American universities: an absolute unwillingness to accept the verdict of colorblind policies. Until that fact changes, UC and other American institutions will continue trying to fix that which is not broken, to achieve their arrogant version of "diversity," by discriminating against those "dull" Asians, such as two of my grandchildren whose mother is half-Vietnamese.

[HT: Steve M.]

The WaPo had an unintentionally depressing article last week on how today's school children are getting behind causes. Oh, for the days when kids learned about good character as the priority over cultural fads. We're circling the drain...

"Polystyrene trays are bad for the environment and they have a big carbon footprint and they're made out of oil, which is bad for the environment, because it makes global warming," said Margot Bloch, 8, a third-grader at the school. Her mother, a peace activist, is among the club's sponsors.

On a side note, I've been told that The Goode Family is especially adept at ripping into politically correct families. I'm going to check it out.