Education, Gifted Students and Politics

"...the Constitution does not authorize the Department of Education, and the founders never envisioned the federal government dictating those education policies." - Ron Paul

            Ron Paul is definitely not a good man. I have mentioned many times in class that I believe a necessary step to reform education in America is to attack it politically. If we, as a nation, are going to completely reform education in this country, we absolutely need leaders who are willing to fight tooth and nail for our children and their futures. I cannot even begin to comprehend voting for an individual whose end goal was to completely abolish the Department of Education and privatize the entire institution. That’s crazy, right? Please for the love of god, tell me that I’m not the only one who finds this appalling.

            I am a product of the public school system and I am immensely proud of it. I will admit that I was lucky in a few ways. My initial years of living, I was what I would refer to as privileged. I had two supportive parents, lived in an ok neighborhood, and went to an average school. I was tested in first or second grade and scored high enough to be labeled as gifted. This label helped me excel.

            Though it is a bit off topic, I briefly want to explain how the mere term “gifted” may have affected my entire life. In 1965, Rosenthal and Jacobson performed an interesting experiment on children labeled as academically gifted. The researchers approached teachers and informed that a few students from their class had performed exceedingly well on a test known as the Harvard Test of Inflected Acquisition. The test indicated which students were most likely to be academically gifted. High scorers were most likely to succeed in the classroom. In reality, the test never existed. The children that were labeled as gifted were actually chosen at random. At the end of the year, the researchers compared the grades of the “academically gifted” children in comparison to the normal children. Surprisingly enough, these students had significantly higher grades. It seems that the simple fact that the teacher of the class believed that these students were different changed how she interacted with them and pushed them harder than their classmates. (This has study seems to also imply that it works in the opposite direction. Labeling a student as academically disadvantaged may push them in the opposite direction.)

            I support public schools and I support teachers. Who would have ever thought that would be a party dividing statement? I mean seriously, if we’re going to look at potential presidential candidates, things are going to get scary. I have mentioned that Ron Paul is out of his mind trying to dismantle the department of education. However, I have not yet spoken about the other Republicans in the presidential primaries. Let’s look at the other candidates briefly. Nobody could be nearly as terrifying as Ron Paul, right?

            Newt Gingrich just took forty percent of the presidential primaries in the state of South Carolina. That’s a great sign for his campaign, but unfortunately, it’s a terrible sign for the state of education in America should he be elected. Let’s take a short gander at his views. Gingrich has been quoted as saying "education is the number one factor in our future prosperity, it's the number one factor in national security and it's the number one factor in [our] young people having a decent future. I agree with Al Sharpton, this is the number one civil right of the 21st century." Fantastic! Finally, there’s a presidential candidate that believes in our children. Oh, wait. Gingrich wants to drastically cut funding to the department of education. He has stated that he wishes to "…dramatically shrink the federal Department of Education, get rid of virtually all of its regulations." As if that’s not bad enough, in November, Gingrich proposed a revolutionary idea to help lower class schools. He wants to fire the unionized janitors and employ the school’s children as custodial staff. Come on! This guy cannot be serious! He’s the Republican front runner and he wants to destroy education in America!

            Alright, what about the other Republican candidates? Mitt Romney came in second with twenty-seven percent of the vote. Romney has been known as the moderate Republican candidate. In 1994, Mitt Romney, during his campaign for the US Senate, stated that he wanted to abolish the Department of Education. Recently Romney has recanted this position and instead believes that the best way to fix education in the United States was to “hold down the interests of the teachers' unions.” Did you know that teacher unions are evil? They’re constantly campaigning for higher wages. How greedy is that? Did you know that if you do the math, teachers get paid $1.42 an hour per student in the United States of America? How dare they ask for more money? Also, Romney has also stated that teacher unions are using overcrowded classrooms as a ploy to hire more teachers. Not to mention that Mitt Romney is a vocal advocate of No Child Left Behind. He has stated that “[standardized testing] allows us to get better schools.” This has to be a joke.

            These are the Republican leaders of our nation. These are potential presidents. These people have the power to be in charge of our entire country. How is everyone not completely outraged? Where is the anger from the parents of school children? Republicans don’t want to educate our children properly. In fact, many of them are campaigning against the interests of education in America. I am actually shocked at the statements made by these men. I refuse to support a candidate that does not support public education and the belief that every single child in this nation has the right to a fair, equal, and comprehensive education. If one were to consider just how important out presidential election is, our nation’s future is currently in the hands or the American public. Please for the love of God, don’t choose these guys.

Examined Life, Comedy, and Absurdism

 "We'll all be dead way longer than we'll be alive. We're all just a bunch of dead people who haven't died yet." - Louis CK

Talking about philosophy has always bothered me. I am not opposed to the idea of intellectual exchange about the nature of life; I'm opposed as to how people approach it. My biggest qualm with the documentary was the inaccessibility of it. The first few philosophers that spoke were lofty and borderline pretentious with the manner that they spoke about life. Philosophy, to me, has always been a genre of speaking that employs six dollar words that often obfuscate the real point. I generally agree with Einstein’s famous quote, “If you cannot explain it simply, you don’t understand it yourself.”

I don’t mean to belittle the individuals that spoke in the film; rather I believe that they could have devoted some more time to making the content of their monologues accessible to the average individual. If philosophy is the love of knowledge, and you wish to share this knowledge, you should make sure that your audience is willing and able to absorb it. Avital Ronell stated in her segment that she wasn’t sure “…where this film is going to land, who it’s going to wake up, shake up, freak out, or bore…” That is a very important point that she seems to ignore. She is correct; she had no idea who would end up parked in front of this documentary. Therefore, she should have made her monologue accessible to just about anyone.

After finishing this documentary, I found myself to be a bit angry. I listened to award winning intellectuals speak about meaning, ecology, and life for 90 minutes, yet I don’t feel like I have gained much. Maybe it’s the culture that these individuals have immersed themselves in, the culture of high academia, but I feel as if they have very little connection to real life. It’s very easy to sit in an ivory tower and survey existence from an elevated vista. It’s too academic. It’s too lofty. If one truly wants to examine existence, you must immerse yourself in living. Waxing on about the nature of life is absolutely pointless to me. The concept of seeking out a set of human universals makes me laugh. What an exercise in futility. Kurt Vonnegut once said “Life happens too fast for you ever to think about it. If you could just persuade people of this, but they insist on amassing information.” You could spend your entire life dedicated to the study of human nature and ethics, but when it comes down to it, we’re just a bunch of hungry animals with oversized brains. God bless our grey matter!

Speaking of grey matter and evolution, I want to raise an issue that I had with Peter Singer’s section of the documentary. I am familiar with his works as an animal rights activist. I generally agreed with everything he said in the documentary with the exception of his view of animals. I have a bit of a controversial opinion on animal rights, especially living in Asheville. I believe that we are animals and there is very little reason to stop us from acting like them. We developed incredibly complex brains and climbed to the top of the food chain pretty quickly. I believe that we have earned our place there. I believe that animals should be treated well; however I will never have an issue eating one. I have an issue with people stating that animals should have identical rights to people. Animal rights activists claim that a cow or a chicken has the same right to live as I do. I disagree. I am the peak of millions of years of evolution and that puts me on top of the food chain. I’m not about to step down.

I started this post with a quote by the comedian Louis CK and a complaint about the inaccessibility of the documentary. I believe that the comedian is the layman’s philosopher. Personally, I believe that a lot of standup comedy is a form of societal self-deprecating philosophy. Comedians take a look at life, how people actually work, and the pains of living and make it bearable to examine. A lot of comedy is little more than philosophy taken a step further. It takes a truly gifted person to examine and describe the human condition in a way that is not only truthful, but also comical. Louis CK gained a fair bit of popularity after his interview with Conan O’Brien went viral on youtube (I’ve posted it above). His basic premise is that we’re all far too entitled to be happy. We should really take a look at how goddamned lucky we are to exist in a world as magnificent as ours. In an interview recently, Louis CK stated “You should act in a way that if everyone acted that way, it would be all right.” I honestly believe that humor is the everyman’s philosophy and we should listen carefully to the individuals that create it.  

In my eyes, there’s absolutely no inherent meaning to life. If you were to take a gander at how infinitesimally small we are in comparison to our universe, you could begin to see just how lucky we are to exist. We’re the product of billions of years of stars and matter colliding. Lucky is a great word to describe our existence; it was absolute chance that we came to become human beings. There are a million things that could have interrupted our evolution and wiped us off the face of the universe. People tend to panic at the thought of meaninglessness. To me, it’s incredibly comforting. There’s no big bearded guy in the sky judging me for eating bacon wrapped shrimp. There’s no overarching theme to existence. There is no predestination. We’re creatures of free will and that can be absolutely terrifying. But once again, if you establish that we’re nothing more than hungry, horny mammals with culture, things get simpler. I’ll repeat what Louis CK stated, “You should act in a way that if everyone acted that way, it would be all right.” I honestly think that there’s nothing more important than that sentence. It sums up the ideal of human interactions pretty well. We’re animals that should do our best to make life better for ourselves, those around us, and those to come.