Sunday, February 12, 2006

The Education Monopoly and Intelligent Design

With the recent election results in Kansas and Delaware, the debate continues to intensify over teaching evolution and “Intelligent Design” in the public schools. There is much at stake, from scientific integrity to philosophical baggage. The stakes are greater than they ought to be because of the way our country delivers educational services.

Evolution refers to two different but related areas in science. On one hand, evolution is an observable mechanism by which life evolves in modest increments over time. This evolution is an indisputable scientific theory, supported on empirical grounds. On the other hand, evolution is also used to refer to a largely unobservable process by which today’s observable range of life supposedly developed from the earliest days on the earth. In this case, evolution is a hypothesis, proposing that the development of life is an unguided process.

“Intelligent Design” fully accepts evolution in the former sense. But it proposes an alternative hypothesis for the development of life: The development of life was a guided process, caused by an intelligent designer of some sort. This, too, is intuitively compelling. When one sees something complicated and meaningful (for example, Mount Rushmore), it is easy to infer that it was designed. As today’s most famous evolutionist, Richard Dawkins, has said: What we see today has “the appearance of being designed.” Is the apparent design real or an illusion?

Scientific considerations aside, this issue provokes such controversy because the dominant provider of education has such strong monopoly power, and most consumers have little ability to avoid its dictates. Let’s see why this is the overarching problem, and how we could avoid it.

Imagine that the government decides that food is important, so everyone can eat for free at the government-run restaurant in their neighborhood. A government bureaucracy, the manager of the restaurant and a local “Food Board” would determine the menu. And passionate constituents would try to influence their choices. Proponents of the Atkins diet would clamor for all meat, vegetarians would argue for all veggies and other people would want a range of options. This is a recipe for turmoil. For example, if the Atkins people were politically persuasive, the vegetarians would be deeply offended, and the others would not be wholly pleased, either.

The solution is as easy as the problem is silly. The government would allow different types of restaurants to compete, based on consumer preferences. Better yet, government would get out of the restaurant business, leaving that to the private sector, intervening only to help the needy afford food through vouchers or other subsidies to individuals.

The same is true with education. Leaving aside the question of moral obligations, if one group wants their children taught sex education with cucumbers and condoms in the fifth grade, that is their prerogative as parents. But that shouldn’t be forced on other people. Another contentious example is school prayer. Some parents want a prayer to Jesus Christ. Many parents want a prayer to the lukewarm deity of civil religion. Others want no prayer at all or prayer to other gods. By providing options, school choice deals with such issues in a far more effective manner than a government entity with significant monopoly power.

Who doesn’t want this freedom for others? Elitists and theocrats don’t. They wage battle within the monopoly, hoping to capture the process and force their view of truth down the throats of others. (Ironically, these two groups despise each other, but they’re more alike than they realize.) More important, the special-interest group that enjoys its monopoly power is not interested in such freedom. All producers prefer as little competition as possible; the market for education is no different.

For self-proclaimed liberals, this should be an easy decision, given their usual penchant for individual choice and support for the poor. Instead, they are often captive to the dominant interest group. Conservatives generally support competition and the private sector, but they are not passionate enough in this context to carry the day. Libertarians strongly favor breaking up government monopolies, but they are not yet numerous enough to make a difference.

Science, religion and politics. Real wars and now “culture wars” have been fought in their name. Let’s put down our weapons and give all Americans freedom to educate their children as they see fit.

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It Takes Government to Create a Reading Crisis

When Horace Mann and his colleagues launched the public-school movement some 175 years ago, they made extravagant promises. Turn the education of children over to enlightened altruistic experts working under government auspices, they said, and illiteracy, vice, and crime will become things of the past. I’m not kidding.

Most people don’t know about these promises, so they don’t know how badly the government’s schools have failed by their own standards. Apologists for state schooling often defend their abysmal record by saying that no one should expect the government’s teachers and administrators to efficiently educate children who bring all of society’s problems with them to the classroom. But that’s what the founders of what used to be called the “common school” pledged.

The broken promises continue. The schools have a hard time teaching reading. Consider the U.S. Department of Education’s latest literacy figures. The department’s press release began thus: “American adults can read a newspaper or magazine about as well as they could a decade ago, but have made significant strides in performing literacy tasks that involve computation, according to the first national study of adult literacy since 1992.” Of course, this raises the question of how well adults could read a newspaper or magazine a decade ago. Therein lies the tale.

The department defines literacy as “using printed and written information to function in society, to achieve one’s goals, and to develop one’s knowledge and potential.” Now let’s look at what percentage of high-school graduates, college graduates, and graduate-school students and degree-holders qualified as “proficient” in the three kinds of tasks used in the study. The three tasks are “prose,” able to perform tasks using continuous texts; “document,” able to perform tasks using noncontinuous texts in different formats; and “quantitative,” able to do computations with numbers embedded in printed material. “Proficiency” is defined as having the “skills necessary to perform more complex and challenging literacy activities.”

According to the study, in 1992, 5.3 percent of the high-school graduates tested were proficient in the three kinds of tasks. In the latest study (2003) this percentage dropped to 4.6. For college graduates the percentages were 36 in 1992 and 29 in 2003. For graduate students or holders of graduate degrees, the percentage went from 45 to 36. When the three kinds of tasks are broken down, we find no improvement in the ten years. The best that can be said is that in a couple of categories, the results were unchanged.

Results were slightly different for changes in the “intermediate” literacy category, defined as having skills to perform “moderately challenging literacy activities.” The percentage of high-school graduates in this category declined slightly from 44 to 42 in the ten years. For college graduates and graduate-level students, there were increases, from 48 to 53 for the former category and from 45 to 50 for the latter.

When you look at the percentages in the basic literacy and below-basic categories for high-school and college graduates and graduate-level students, the results are downright depressing. In many cases the ranks of these categories have grown; in others they improved a little or stayed the same.

This is hardly a ringing endorsement of government schooling. Despite what the state’s teachers and experts might imply, learning to read is not that difficult. Children used to teach themselves with only light guidance from a parent. It takes a government to create a national reading crisis.

These results will undoubtedly be used to justify more government spending on education. President Bush is proposing more than a $100 million to promote education in foreign languages — in the name of fighting terrorism. (Oh, please!) It is time we stopped being fooled by the people who are responsible for the education mess. As if we needed more evidence, this latest study shows that it’s time to separate school and state.

Source

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"


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