It wasn’t grand, but it was eloquent. It wasn’t passionate, but it was inspirational. It wasn’t rosy, but it wasn’t discouraging. It was lofty, while being remarkably frank. No speech in recent years has been anticipated with such high expectation. It will have doubtless left many people disappointed for what it did not do. But for what it needed to do, for the tone it needed to set for the days and years to come, the inaugural address by President Barack Hussein Obama was right on the mark. He claimed America’s greatness and scolded America’s laxness in the same voice. He was firm about our defense and our posture toward the world - friend and foe. He was firm about our collective failure to oversee the freedoms this country makes possible. He was resolute about our ability to recover, to go on, to rebuild, and to stand as proud as we ever have. He was inspiring in his call to get involved, to pay attention, to be part of the solutions to come. He invoked history in several ways, but maybe his most effective strategy was his closing: invoking the future. “Let it be said by our children’s children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back.” He told us we were the keepers of the dream, called on us to leave to our children’s children the dream that was passed on to us, to be able to look at them and tell them we didn’t not let the journey fail on our watch, that we preserved it and kept it alive for them. Tingly, that.

And it’s a remarkable thing about this event: I’d been grading papers all morning in my jammies, but when it came time for the actual swearing in ceremony, I felt the need to be dressed. And when the audience was asked to rise, I stood too. When the national anthem was sung, I was singing with it, all alone in my living room. I can, usually, sing the anthem. Except when I’m really emotional, which is most of the time when the anthem comes up. Like today. I wish I’d been in a crowd of other folks somewhere, sharing all that energy and enthusiasm and emotion. But I wasn’t, so I cherished the moments and hope to talk more about it with all of you later.

Earlier today, Michael Eric Dyson was commenting on the events of the day and about Mr. Obama. He said he didn’t want to see him lose his particular style. He referred to it as “black male style that has been disciplined by grace and elegance”. I really liked that.

Tell me what you thought. The pundits keep talking about the history of the moment, but every moment is historical. What is it about this one that we all seem to know is such a big deal?

I suppose it is the kind of question that will be debated endlessly and never resolved, this question of “needing” a college education. But this month’s issue of the AFT publication On Campus really pointed out the inherent contradiction I see in this quest for quality education and global competitiveness for our younger generations.

First, the issue contains a column summarizing remarks made by the AFT president, Randi Weingarten, at the National Press Club in November. She made reference to “smart investments” in preK-12 education. Among these were providing universal early childhood education and “high-quality educational choices within the public school system” (2). She recommended give a “boost” to “high-achieving students from low-income households” and establishing community schools that bring together a range of family services, and concluded with “offering every student a well-rounded education that would stand in stark contrast to the ’standardized test score competition’ that has resulted from NCLB” (2). Each of these are laudable goals, and that last one is a beautiful and idealistic vision of what the ancients might have recognized as a liberal arts curriculum - language and expression, a little science, a little math, perhaps music. But that’s really the rub when it comes to public education, isn’t it? Who gets to say what a “well-rounded” education includes? Who gets to determine which activities or courses fit, and which ones should be on the side? The only thing “universal” about education is that everyone has a different idea of what a good one includes.

So we move on, both through the pages of this issue and through the years of the child’s life, until we arrive at the institution of college, where we have placed the burden of righting all the wrongs of the public education system in four short years of voluntary participation in a range of work that includes specialty areas of knowledge alongside generalist courses (like writing) that are increasingly seen as “remedial”. Whether by design or default, the issue has two articles on facing pages that point up the conflict in higher education as the fix-all for the problems of global competitiveness. The first, on the left side, is called “Education on the Cheap: Academic staffing crisis takes a toll on learning.” The article summarizes three recent studies, each of which concluded that there is a negative correlation between the percentage of adjunct faculty at an institution and the success or students. This is not because adjuncts don’t teach as well - the studies are careful to make this point. Rather, it is because the “psychological contract” between the institution and faculty members of all ranks is “broken for faculty members who work at institutions with large numbers of part-time faculty” and this breakage has a negative effect on teaching commitment across the institution. One of the studies suggests that if working conditions are improved for contingent faculty, it might mitigate the negative correlation. Hmmm.

Okay, on the right page, the article is called “Colleges cope with rising demand for remedial courses.” It includes information from a report by Strong American Schools called “Diploma to Nowhere” that estimates the number of college students enrolled in remedial courses at 1.3 million, with an associated cost of “between $2.3 billion and $2.9 billion per year.” Now, right off the bat, my first question is why should we be spending that much on “remedial” instruction when we could be using it to improve the instruction at the point it is supposed to occur, and eliminate the remedial courses? Why on earth should college be about remedial instruction? After all the money, time, political capital and energy that has been wasted in developed test after standard after requirement after test, why should colleges be charged with the responsibility to re-mediate learning that was freely available prior to college?

The article poses the answer in responses by students surveyed for the report: Make high school classes “tougher so they would be better prepared for college” (5). The report goes on to suggest that stronger connections between K-12 education and higher education “that include[s] common goals and standards” would help too (5). I’m sure they would, which explains why there is already debate in some states of re-imagining the educational sequence as preK-16, making college the new high school.

See the sequence here? and the problem? High school courses should be more difficult to prepare students for college, but if high school courses are more difficult, then more students won’t be able to pass them, and that means children “left behind” which NCLB doesn’t allow so in order to meet the “standard” and remain a school, the courses must be tailored to allow all children to succeed at the test, which is not the same as preparing for college or life. But most importantly, nothing about the standardized test driven system emphasizes the need to create a self-educating population, either before, during, or after college. C. Wright Mills said, “The aim of the college for the individual student is to eliminate the need in his life for the college; the task is to help him become a self-educating man.”

Self-educating. The magic isn’t in the number of grades completed, or the number of tests taken, or the number of degrees held. The magic is in teaching students from the earliest years that they have the ability, the right, and the obligation to become self-educating all their lives. The information freely available to every student is astonishing, and there for the taking. What’s missing is the interest, the motivation for the student to do the seeking, the taking, the learning. The magic isn’t in the student sitting is a classroom and suffering out the 14 weeks of the semester, it is in the student recognizing the need to be accountable for the learning beyond that classroom, to add it to that which has been learned earlier to support and enhance that which will come later, to apply that knowledge across a full range of life experiences, from civic engagement to relationships to parenting to business, without waiting to be told exactly what to do and how to do it. The magic is in learning, not in teaching. And if we had that in our public school ethos, then we might be able to do away with this other blazing contradiction: “Students need a university degree in order to succeed in modern society and the global economy.”

I beg to differ. The university degree is a piece of paper that measures the number of days sitting in a seat in a room, the number of exams taken and papers written, but not at all the actual learning or applied knowledge the student has. The university degree is a key to success only insofar as it reflects the student’s ability to separate the information from the book or course it’s in and have it available in the mind to use to make decisions and life choices, which calls for judgment, which in turn calls for deliberation and sometimes debate. These are the things required for success. If every student has a university degree, what is the difference from every child having high school diploma? If everyone should have it, then the universal system already in place should be upgraded to provide the success tools needed for modern society and the global economy. To do anything else is to simply abandon the role of the first twelve years of public schooling and try to atone for it all in the four years of “university” education. Better to keep the student in the public school system long enough to have those tools as he or she enters adulthood, the society, and the economy. Better to re-mediate within the system already set up to accommodate the universal. Instead of Running Start or College in the High School, maybe we need Extended Stay and Success Education in the High School.

And what of the already existing problems revealed in this delegating upward educational push? As more students flood colleges, more campuses have higher percentages of contingent faculty to teach the classes, most claiming (rightfully) that they don’t have the resources to hire enough full-time tenure track faculty to handle the load. But the reports tell us that those higher percentages of contingent faculty have negative effects both on student success (degree completion or transfer) and on overall teaching commitment. University degrees are the answer, but the system isn’t designed for the university system to replace the public school system, nor to extend it, nor to take on its failures and try to make successes of them. And if we own up to that, and overhaul that system, then what is the next magic ticket to success? A foreign education? Graduate school? The latter is already happening, actually.

This contradiction, between the need for universal education and the desire for universal success at the level of the new information society and global economy, is enduring. But if it’s really going to be solved, it might help if we begin with clarifying the question. What is the role of public education in this country at this time? Is it to prepare well-rounded broadly education citizens of a free and democratic society? Or is it to prepare workers, whether for the knowledge economy, the global economy or the green revolution? I submit that you can have the second as a direct result of the first, but not the other way around.

Read this and share it with everyone. He’s right, and we all need to stand up and say “this time we, the consumers, won’t support this play.”

In the last three days, I’ve read two very eloquent endorsements of Barack Obama for president of the United States; one from the New York Times, and one from The New Yorker.  What interests me about these posts isn’t that they endorse the candidate I’ve known for months I have to vote for, it is the warmth and depth of the endorsements. I’ve read these kinds of supportive treatises all my life, from the earliest days the words were intelligible to me (roughly, the non-election of Gerald Ford). I have an entire essay to write on this subject, about the rhetorical agility of the words in play, about the brief and measured nod to the problem of the opponent, about the sorrow with which I must concede, as the editors do in their language, in their word choice, the grave distance between the man they (and I) once admired and the candidate who became the product of his political machine.

It is a sad year for me. I have had to divorce myself from the party of my youth, my father, my entire lifetime. I’ve had to look hard at what I believe and value while understanding that my opinion, my party allegiance, my vote, my participation in the process we call democracy influences no one. I not only cannot vote for McCain, I feel compelled to plead with anyone who finds this small but very public message to vote FOR Barack Obama, the Democratic candidate for the office of President of the United States of America. 

Please?

Thank you for your support.

No, really. I mean it. Let’s talk about it. With some real concrete and honest assessment and no polarizing, politicizing, inflaming rhetoric, and skip the whole crazy idea of privatization, and really get to the heart of the issue.

Game?

Okay, here goes. In the February 3 edition of the New York Times, one article and one advertisement stood out, in part for their proximity to each other, and in part for the contradiction they posed but could not address. The (full page, back of a section) advertisement was from Allstate. The question it asked? “How long a retirement should you plan for?” The subtitle, if you will, was this point:

Consider this: Hallmark sold 85,000 “Happy 100th Birthday!” cards last year.

Within the text of the message was this statement: “So, it’s easy to understand why workers today should plan for a 30-year retirement” (my emphasis).

Got that part? Okay, let’s go on to the article, written by N. Gregory Mankiw and titled: “My Birthday Wish: Not Burdening Our Children.”

continue reading "Let’s talk about the Social Security problem"

This in this morning, courtesy of rickydoc over at rootwork the rootsblog.

Yesterday, Caroline Kennedy, only surviving member of John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s marital family, endorsed Democratic candidate Barack Obama for the office her father died while holding. Today, Senator Edward Kennedy, only surviving brother in that Kennedy generation, was expected to do the same.

In an eloquent and somewhat poignant opinion column, Ms. Kennedy said that people were telling her that this candidate inspired in them the hope, the optimism, the potential, that her father had once inspired. That of all the available field, this man stood out, carried that same sort of sense that the world could be different, that we could make it different, that individual people with a concern could do something that had meaning in the larger scheme of things. So she endorsed him–anointing him in a way with the spirit of Camelot.

Barack Obama, a United States Senator from Illinois of mixed race heritage, won the Democratic primary in South Carolina.

Say that slowly. A black man won the Democratic party primary in the very Southern state of South Carolina, the home of Strom Thurmond, the home of a state defense of Confederate flag displays, the home of the Clarendon County School District, where an auto mechanic named Harry Briggs forfeited his livelihood and that of most of his family members to become the lead plaintiff in one of the cases that would make up the Brown decision. The Clarendon County that is probably today still segregated, though not officially, in a state that is still a harbinger of the deepest racial divides of America history.

Say it again, slowly.

A few months back, a reporter for the New York Times was interviewing black women in a hair salon in South Carolina. The question had to do with whether they would support Mr. Obama, the black man, or Hillary Clinton, the woman candidate. For those responding it was a dilemma. Both factions, and the party is dividing along these factions, unfortunately, were important to them. But you know what comment stood out for me the most?

The concern that if Barack Obama were elected president of this country, he would be assassinated.

Like Jack. Like Bobby. Like Martin.

These women are smart, even if they are not college educated, and even if they don’t tote around many theories about leadership and identity and presence. They understand the gritty fact that if you stand up and say those of us who are Americans are not just white, we are many colors and many faiths and the true meaning of being American is to embrace all of that in the context of the liberty proclaimed in our founding documents, that your life may be the price.

I’m told that next week, New York is part of that media circus that is variously know as Super Tuesday or Tsunami Tuesday, or whatever, when most of the delegates to the very outdated electoral college will be decided. And my problem with that day is that I can’t support the candidate I want to. Why? Because when I moved to the great State of New York, I registered, as I have always done, as a Republican.

My choices? Let’s not even go there.

My party has let me down for so many years on so many levels that it is impossible to justify my allegiance. So I won’t. I will only attempt to by saying that I consider myself a Lincoln Republican. More on that another time.

I ran across a quote by President Kennedy in my research today, about how the words we proclaim about democracy don’t override the discrimination diplomats experience when they come to this country. 1963. Yes, it was a long time ago. But it was also nearly 10 years after Brown. He felt the need to say it. and in the same speech, the speech he never got to give in Dallas that November day, he would have concluded:

We in this country, in this generation, are–by destiny rather than choice–the watchmen on the walls of world freedom. We ask, therefore, that we may be worthy of our power and responsibility, that we may exercise our strength with wisdom and restraint, and that we may achieve in our time and for all time the ancient vision of “peace on earth, good will toward men.” That must always be our goal, and the righteousness of our cause must always underlie our strength. For as was written long ago: “except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.”

He also promised in that speech that our nation’s power would never be used aggressively, but always for peace. My party has failed in that promise. The “Audacity of Hope” that Barak Obama brings makes me wish, like never before, that party politics were not what they are, and that I could go out a week from now and vote for the best shining light I’ve seen since I was a toddler.

Thank you, Caroline.

Update: There’s a great discussion on Obama’s victory over on Hungry Hungry Hippos. Check it out.

Madeleine Albright has a new book out, called Memo to the President-elect. In the short excerpt from Chapter 1, she quotes from John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address:

we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and success of liberty

I wonder about this now. In the same excerpt, Albright recalls the words of Colin Powell as he spoke to Congress as the new secretary of state:

It is a challenge of leadership. For it is not a dark and dangerous idological foe we confront, but the overwhelming power of millions of people who have tasted freedom. It is our own incredible success that we face.

The strength of commitment promised to the world by the young president of 1961 had achieved the survival and success he envisioned. Communism as practiced by the former Soviet Union and its iron curtain devotees was gone, capitalism had taken on global proportions and the world was at peace when Powell warned of the challenge that success brought us. We failed. We - all of us in this democratic nation - failed because we retained political leaders who had already proven they were not up to the challenge. So far distant is Powell’s challenge from this moment, from that cold January day when Kennedy’s words rang out, the Albright warns the new president “you will enter office with respect for American leadership lower than it has been in the memory of any living person.”

Jack Kennedy became president a little over two months before I was born. My young childhood was shaped by his vision of what America could be. I liked Kennedy. The older I got, and the more I learned about him, the more I liked him. And I’m not blind to his shortcomings. They were legion. But as a president of this country, as a national leader, he was the right man at the right time. I have wondered many times how our country might have been different if he had lived.

But this week it’s really been Jack’s dedicated younger brother, Robert, who has been on my mind. Reading about the violence in the South during the Civil Rights Movements, the records of Bobby’s efforts as head of the Justice Department to walk the fine line between states’ rights and citizen’s rights, to do what was right with an eye always focused on what would be best for his brother’s presidency, and eventually catching the belief that he could be president himself. In an article I read over this past weekend, the writer was comparing 1968 to 2008, and for the similarities there are these are not nearly those days. He recalled that period of Kennedy’s campaign as a wild 85-day adventure.

The article showed a picture of Robert Kennedy, that young idealist and presidential candidate standing in a moment of quiet sobriety, head bowed, in the moments before he told a crowd in Indianapolis that Martin Luther King had been shot and killed in Memphis. His speech that night is nothing short of amazing. Impromptu, his own thought, his own encouragement to those who would be filled with hatred to choose unity and understanding instead, quoting Aeschylus from memory. Martin Kettle called it the “bravest speech of that campaign”. In my lifetime, I have never seen another like it. Listen for yourself. It’s currently the “Top 100 Speech of the Moment” at American Rhetoric.

Maybe it was because I had been so absorbed in this history, the awful times that followed the Brown decision, maybe it was the photograph, maybe it was the knowledge that 2008 isn’t and can’t be 1968, but as I sat with that article, I did something I almost never do with any seriousness. I looked at the man in the photograph and asked him, with tears threatening and the knowledge that this project I have engaged is changing me in ways I am only just glimpsing, “how might my life have been different if you had lived?”

I would not have believed people believe such things, would not have believed people would write such things, and certainly not that they would put them in the public realm with names attached; would not , except that I read them in the local paper as letters to the editor. To wit:

Found over at Desparate Houseflies, from Ben Stein.

yeah - what he said.