Vital Remnants

Remember all the pious declarations from the Obama administration about how they were going to restore scientific integrity to the government decision-making process after it was supposedly threatened during the Bush administration? And remember the amens and halleluiahs that came from the anti-Intellectual Design crowd and people like P. Z. Myers? Turns out it was all a hoax, and all the healings of science policy that were supposed to happen have been exposed as fraudulent.

So says Victor Davis Hanson in a new article entitled, "The New War on Reason" Here's Hanson on the Obama administrations labor statistics trick:

Over the last nine months, the official government website Recovery.gov has informed us how the stimulus has saved jobs — even as hard data reflected the unpleasant truth of massive and spiraling job losses.

... Thus mythical congressional districts were posted on an official government website with more fanciful data of “jobs saved.” Just as creationists insist that the world was made 6,000 years ago, so too the Obamians believe that joblessness must show a decline because their messianic leader says it’s so — bothersome facts be damned. In this current Orwellian climate, a scientific document listing the latest unemployment figures is the equivalent of a stegosaurus footprint — an inconvenient truth for the upbeat employment gospel according to St. Barack.

Here's Hanson on CO2 emissions and the Obama administration's obsession with wind and solar energy and corresponding lack of interest in nuclear energy, which could help solve the problem:

These controversies could be adjudicated through substantive debate, but instead politically correct hysteria again has followed. “Good” informed people — like those who adhered to every doctrine of the medieval church — “know” the planet is heating up, thanks to the greed of carbon-based industry. “Bad” heretics challenge official environmental dogma and exegesis. In such an anti-empirical age, if the “truther” Van Jones had not been there, ready for Obama to tap as green czar, he would have had to be invented.

And finally Hanson on Al Gore's self-dealing on Global Warming, and various other assorted nonsense that threatens the integrity of science but that none of the people who regularly sermonize on the topic are interested in discussing:

In short, we are witnessing the rise of a new deductive, anti-scientific age.

Instead of Christian, southern-twanged fundamentalists, we see instead kinder, gentler federal bureaucrats, globetrotting Ph.D.s, liberal hucksters, and politically correct diversity officers.

All are committed to the medieval fallacy that exalted theoretical ends justify very real tawdry means.

The result is the triumph of superstition, and the dethronement of science.

Read more here.

HT: Cranach.

Labels: science, War on Reason

I have absolutely no interest in commenting on the Tiger Woods situation other than to wonder at what point in the past the press conference officially replaced the confession booth for famous people as the appropriate place to express contrition.

But you've got to tip your hat to the creative headline over at the American Spectator: "The Lady and the Tiger."

Oh, and one more thing. You know you have reached the bottom of the public humiliation barrel when you become the object of marital advice from experts who have never even met you.

Labels: headline of the week

One of the big disappointments in the debate over curriculum standards that has ensued as a result of a Montgomery County, Kentucky high school rejecting elementary-level texts from an accelerated college prep course has been the derision expressed by some toward classic works. Go to the comment section of some of the posts on this issue under the "censorship" label below and weep. I think Thomas, my co-conspirator here on this blog, nailed it: the problem with so many students being judged incapable of reading high quality literature is not a problem with students, but a problem with educators.

The chief problem is not students who can't handle high quality literature, but teachers who can't handle it.

Several posters talked about kids "falling asleep" reading classic books. Others just said they were just too hard. These are the kinds of comments that come from people who are not themselves learned and who are projecting their own ignorance onto students. Any teacher who cannot gain and hold the interest of his students by reading and discussing "The Lady and the Tiger," by Frank Stockton, "The Whirligig of Life" by O. Henry, "How to Build a Fire" by Jack London, and "The Children's Story" by James Clavell needs to find another line of work.

I mention these short stories partly because I regularly teach them myself, but mostly to make it clear to the spectators in this debate that when you are talking about teaching classic literature to students, you're not necessarily talking about forcing an unprepared high school student to read Hamlet. There are plenty of works between "Goodnight Moon" by Margaret Wise Brown (a classic children's picture book for very young students) and Moby Dick by Herman Melville. Classic, quality works can be found for every different age level, and if they put your students to sleep, well, it ain't the fault of the book.

As Mortimer Adler used to point out, when students don't learn, it is almost always the fault of the teacher. "You can't be uplifted," he pointed out, "by something that isn't above you." Unfortunately our current method of education is a process in which the blind lead the blind. It is, of course, in the teachers interest to place the blame elsewhere, like on a book.

I think that the people who are mapping their own lack of education onto modern students are genuinely convinced that classic books can't be read or appreciated by young people. But just so we can see what can be done, let me give you the reading list for my English IV class I am teaching this semester to high school students in my Online Classical Academy:

Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka
The Stranger, Albert Camus
"The Wall," Jean Paul Sartre
Notes from Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett
"A Clean Well-Lighted Place," Ernest Hemingway
"A Primer on Existentialism," Gordon Bigelow
"A Report for an Academy," Franz Kafka
"The Death of Ivan Ilych," Leo Tolstoy
The Violent Bear it Away, Flannery O'Connor
The Man Who Was Thursday, G. K. Chesterton
Jayber Crow, Wendell Berry
Cry, the Beloved Country, Alan Paton

And that's just for this semester. We just finished discussing Chesterton's book today and have two more to complete before the end of January. My students not only have read them all, but they understand them--and love them. And they can articulate why.

Now there are no prerequisites or other requirements for this class other than that you want to take it. It is not billed as an "advanced" class, although I admit that my students are extremely bright. I would not want to attempt these particular books in a normal public high school class. But there are other books--books that, by and large, my students have already read--that are classics also--that they could read and enjoy.

But the important thing is this: one of the reasons my students love these books is because I know them and love them myself. That's why I can teach them and inspire my students to love them too. I would submit that the educators who say classic works cannot be taught in today's classrooms say it because they do not themselves possess the knowledge and love of classical literature. And that's a shame.

The next time you hear one of the commenters on this blog running down some classic work and asserting that it would put a student to sleep, it's probably because it would put him to sleep, and therefore it can't but do the same for everyone else. Ask him about his own educational background, and I bet you will find that it was mostly devoid of classic literature and lacking in academic rigor. What you will find is a person who has not encountered these books himself and can't comprehend how others could have and have benefited from the experience.

I do not blame these people for not getting the kind of education they should have gotten. They are not at fault for being ill-educated. But they are at fault for contributing to the cultural illiteracy that now infects our schools and that will result in one more generation of badly educated people.

Labels: censorship, education, literature

I'm still rubbing my eyes in disbelief that a rural Kentucky school district is defending itself against its national detractors for setting its academic standards too high. The next time someone makes a disparaging remark about Kentucky being some kind of educational backwater, I'm going to remind them about the Montgomery County High School case in which a school district, in demanding that an accelerated college prep course use literature with higher than a 6th grade reading level, was accused by a mob of national critics of censorship.

Chris Crutcher, author of Deadline, one of the books taken out of the curriculum in an advanced course at Montgomery County High School, has, unfortunately, joined the barbarian hordes battering on schoolhouse doors demanding a lowering of academic standards. His reasons for supporting the Decline and Fall of Academic Standards are laid out in his remarks in the comment section of my previous post on this issue

Crutcher's first point is about Superintendent Daniel Freeman's remark that the books were for "reluctant readers":

I guess I'd like to comment on Superintendent Freeman's assertion that none of these books will help students when they go to college, that they are for "reluctant readers." For one thing, a lot of students going to college are also reluctant readers.

The issue, as I keep pointing out in this debate, is that this is an accelerated college preparatory course we are talking about. Why would there be reluctant readers in an advanced college preparatory course? If they are in it, there are only two possibilities: either they do not belong in the class, in which case they should be placed in another class on grounds that they're not ready for it, or they do belong in it, in which case they should replace the class on grounds that the class is not what it purports to be.

Freeman understand this, but Crutcher doesn't seem to, which makes Crutcher's accusation that Freeman is somehow lacking in awareness of the important issues here somewhat ironic. the second point was about what is appropriate for a college preparatory course in high school:

Also, the issues focused on in many of these books are issues kids will face in college. I challenge Dr. Freeman to become a bit more informed regarding what many college professors expect from their students. I speak at colleges and universities all the time and my books, including Deadline, are part of many curriculums.

The chief issue in college is how to handle higher level material. If Crutcher things that the best way to prepare students for higher level material is to familiarize them with lower level material, it is hard to know what to say except that his is a novel approach to college preparation. Maybe the football team at Montgomery County High School should start lowering the amount of weight the players are lifting in the gym to make their muscles bigger, huh?

Crutcher's own book is apparently written at a 6th grade reading level according to the lexile measurement. Now Crutcher maintains that those like Freeman who believe that books written at a 6th grade reading level (others of the books involve here score as low as 3rd grade reading level) aren't appropriate for a college prep course are unfamiliar with what colleges expect from their students.

Crutcher can be saying only two things here: either that his books are at a high enough intellectual level to qualify them for college prep reading or that college curricula are now in such a debased state that they are using young adult fiction in their curricula. We know the first isn't true because these books are written on an elementary reading level. So we are left with the second, a conclusion that can only be the cause of despair about the state of higher education.

As I asked in the comments section of the original post on this issue, which colleges are using young adult fiction in a serious college level course? I want the names of the colleges that are doing this so we can make sure prospective students know what they're getting for the $20-$30K that they are now being asked to fork over per year for a supposedly university level education.

Mr. Freeman's assertion about college bound kids and curriculum for college bound students is either disingenuous or misinformed. I ache for the old conservatism. My father was a World War II bomber pilot, a patriot and a conservative to his core. He was far better read than Dr. Freeman (for one thing, he read MY books) and there was nary a classic from which he couldn't quote. He was on the school board from the time my older brother started school until the time my younger sister graduated. And he would have run a nail through his eye before he would have allowed this kind of censorship. And it IS censorship. Agreed, Dr. Freeman did not BAN a book if the books are still available to all kids in the school library, but he did censor.

Does Crutcher really believe that taking actions to strengthen the academic level of a curriculum is censorship? If he does, then he has a very strange definition of censorship. If he really believes this, then his definition of censorship is so broad as to be meaningless. It means that any curricular decision that selects some books and reject others is an act of censorship, which in turn means that most of what curriculum staff in schools do is censorship.

This is not only silly, it is preposterous.

In the old days, conservatives invited ideas. They weren't afraid to discuss and debate issues that made them uncomfortable. They also heartily believed in the separation of church and state, for the good of the church AND the state.

In the old days liberals did accuse serious people making serious decisions about what belongs in a curriculum with censorship. They weren't afraid to discuss and debate issues without charging their detractors with the suppression of ideas either. And in regard to church and state...

... What does church and state have to do with debate? This has to be a textbook example of a red herring: a point that has nothing to do with the question at issue. The debate has absolutely nothing to do with church and state. If it does, Crutcher ought to explain why. Did Freeman quote the Bible or something? Was his church involved in this decision?

These kinds of debates are in one sense disappointing because they show that the people who are in charge of the much of the popular culture in our country--in and out of schools--are clearly not capable of making fundamental distinctions like that between popular culture and academic culture, between what does and does not constitute serious literature, and what is and isn't censorship.

Here's an alternative look at what is good for college bound kids: Read everything you can get your hands on.

No. Sorry. One of the worst problems we have is that there is a flood of literary junk out there. I spend a lot of time in bookstores and at book sales and I read and read about reading. The tide of poor quality literature is at close to epidemic proportions. The exact thing we shouldn't do is to have our children "read everything they can get their hands on."

The chief reading problem today is the lack of discrimination. Picking out books isn't like gorging yourself at a buffet; it's like panning for gold: most of what you pick up isn't worth much. You have find the stuff that is worth your trouble. And the nice thing about it is that much if it has already been done for you. In the case of older books, the vetting has already been done for you, otherwise they wouldn't still be around. In the case of new books, the problem of determining whether they're worth reading is more difficult.

In any case, the judgment about whether a book is good or not is not always the same as the question of whether it needs to be part of a curriclum, and the question of whether it should be part of a curriculum is not a matter of censorship.

Labels: censorship, education, literature

You can have a scandal reported in the media. You can have talk radio on your case. You can have the commentators dragging your name through the mud. You can survive all that. But if the comedians start coming after you, you're history:

Labels: global warming, Ministry of Fear, science

Lord Monckton with a good rundown of how what he calls a "small clique" of climate scientists at universities ran down the truth in return for millions of dollars in government grants:

• The Climate Research Unit at East Anglia had profited to the tune of at least $20 million in “research” grants from the Team’s activities.
• The Team had tampered with the complex, bureaucratic processes of the UN’s climate panel, the IPCC, so as to exclude inconvenient scientific results from its four Assessment Reports, and to influence the panel’s conclusions for political rather than scientific reasons.
• The Team had conspired in an attempt to redefine what is and is not peer-reviewed science for the sake of excluding results that did not fit what they and the politicians with whom they were closely linked wanted the UN’s climate panel to report.
• They had tampered with their own data so as to conceal inconsistencies and errors.
• They had emailed one another about using a “trick” for the sake of concealing a “decline” in temperatures in the paleoclimate.
• They had expressed dismay at the fact that, contrary to all of their predictions, global temperatures had not risen in any statistically-significant sense for 15 years, and had been falling for nine years. They had admitted that their inability to explain it was “a travesty”. This internal doubt was in contrast to their public statements that the present decade is the warmest ever, and that “global warming” science is settled.
• They had interfered with the process of peer-review itself by leaning on journals to get their friends rather than independent scientists to review their papers.
• They had successfully leaned on friendly journal editors to reject papers reporting results inconsistent with their political viewpoint.
• They had campaigned for the removal of a learned journal’s editor, solely because he did not share their willingness to debase and corrupt science for political purposes.
• They had mounted a venomous public campaign of disinformation and denigration of their scientific opponents via a website that they had expensively created.
• Contrary to all the rules of open, verifiable science, the Team had committed the criminal offense of conspiracy to conceal and then to destroy computer codes and data that had been legitimately requested by an external researcher who had very good reason to doubt that their “research” was either honest or competent.

Read the rest here.

HT: Watt's Up with That?

The AP is reporting that Phil Jones, one of the authors of controversial e-mails at the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia that suggested Global Warming advocates were playing fast and loose with data and suppressing dissent, is stepping down from his post:

Professor Phil Jones has today announced that he will stand aside as Director of the Climatic Research Unit until the completion of an independent Review resulting from allegations following the hacking and publication of emails from the Unit.

Professor Jones said: “What is most important is that CRU continues its world leading research with as little interruption and diversion as possible. After a good deal of consideration I have decided that the best way to achieve this is by stepping aside from the Director’s role during the course of the independent review and am grateful to the University for agreeing to this. The Review process will have my full support.”

Read the rest here.

Labels: Climategate, global warming, Ministry of Fear, science

Social scientist Charles Murray weighs in on Climategate, indicating, once again, that the people who give all those preachy lectures to the rest of us about respecting science don't respect it themselves:

I don’t know anything about global warming but I know a lot about quantitative data analysis. The little secret—not dirty, exactly, but akin to the reasons it’s best not to watch how sausage is made—is the number of judgments that have to occur during the course of data analysis.

... That brings me to Climategate. The thousands of temperature measurements used to prove long-term warming cannot be treated as-is (“60 degrees Fahrenheit at 6:30 AM, 15 May, 1895, Cotswold station”). That “60” has to be treated in the context of time, date, location, local effects on the background temperature—and on and on—when it is analyzed.

The people who made those adjustments are, we now know, desperately invested in proving the truth of man-made global warming. And they lost the data. That’s more damning than anything else in the emails. If you’re doing important work that you know will be controversial, you don’t lose the data. You document everything you did to the data. You make the data available to others. If you don’t do all of those things, people are right to ignore anything you have published about the data. And that’s what we should do with everything these men have published about man-made global warming.

Read the rest here.

Labels: Climategate, global warming, science

Well, to say that I have stirred up a hornet's nest would be an understatement. My last post on the so-called Montgomery County, Kentucky "censorship" case has received more hits than any post featured on this blog since its inception. It has also garnered quite a few comments. Rather than answer the hornets in the comments section of the earlier post (the buzzing there has gotten to be deafening), I'm going to answer them here, in separate posts, since I think the points are important enough to be featured on the main page.

I don't know, but it seems that the comments are of two main types: First, from First Amendment Fundamentalists (I'm detecting the presence of librarians who mistakenly think the First Amendment quite literally protects any form of expression), and secondly from public school English teachers with rather low standards of what constitutes good literature. I don't doubt the sincerity of either group, but, as I will indicate below, the arguments for their positions are lacking in a number of respects.

Let me take the first of these arguments today, and I'll address the other arguments as the week progresses:

"Excuse me, sir, but I fail to see how you can reasonably comment about books you've never read." (From Ellen Hopkins). That would depend on what my purpose was. Certainly I cannot offer any kind of exhaustive evaluation of the books if I haven't read them, and if I were actually reviewing the books, I would be obligated to do just that. But I'm not reviewing the books, I'm simply commenting on whether or not an action by a school district constitutes censorship, whether there is a valid line that can be drawn between books that deserve to be in an accelerated college preparatory curriculum, and whether parents who have read the books are in a position to take part in that judgment.

I said very clearly I had not read the books, indicating that I was giving only a tentative assessment of them--a skepticism, nothing more, about their worth. I based that skepticism on publishers comments and reviews of the books--as well as actual passages from the books. The argument that one is not allowed to have and express a tentative judgment of creative works is a rather strange position to try to defend. If one cannot glean a tentative opinion of a book from publishers' blurbs and reviews, then maybe Hopkins could tell me why they have such blurbs and reviews in the first place.

Are we really allowed no qualitative judgments about things that we have not actually experienced ourselves? If someone wanted to show "Debbie Does Dallas" in a high school classroom, would we really be required to view it ourselves in order to be justified in saying it was not appropriate? Are we supposed to refrain from warning our children not to take crack or meth because we haven't tried them ourselves? No one is arguing that these books are in the same class as these things, but the logic is the same.

We make tentative judgments like this all the time. In fact, a tentative judgment is required in order to decide whether to read a book (rather than do something else) in the first place. In fact, I wonder how many of the people criticizing me for expressing doubts over the merit if their paeans to teen angst have read the older and better works that the parents in Montgomery County would rather have in this accelerated curriculum.

In any case, unless you are a parent making a formal complaint, one isn't required to have read a book in order to express a vagrant opinion on a blog of whether or not parents who have read the books have the right to make the complaint. In this case the parents opposed including them in the curriculum because a) they did read the books and found them wanting and b) they did not consider them to contribute to the express purpose of the class, which is to prepare them for college at an advanced level.

Nor is one even required to know the specific literary qualities of a book to have an informed opinion of whether it belongs in a curriculum. For that, all that is necessary is to know what kind of book it is. And that's what, in spite of Hopkins opinion, makes my judgment so easy: Popular teen fiction doesn't belong in the curriculum of an accelerated high school college prep course.

Period.

Let me underscore this aspect of the Montgomery County case once again so we are very clear about it (Where's my megaphone?): THIS IS AN ACCELERATED COLLEGE PREPARATORY HIGH SCHOOL CLASS. Did we hear that?

A class like this is meant to challenge good students intellectually. If your students are challenged intellectually by these kinds of books, then they don't belong in this kind of class. There seems to be this assumption that students in an accelerated high school class are not capable of handling serious literature. If that's the case, then why are they in an accelerated high school class? And if you say that even kids in an accelerated college prep class can't handle classic books, then you have unwittingly acquiesced to the low appraisal that some of us regularly give to public schools.

And another thing. If you are going to make the argument that these kinds of books belong in that kind of class, then you are not an intellectually serious person. Sorry. That's not a moral judgment, just a statement of fact. If you don't like that judgment, then I'm afraid we're operating upon two completely different academic planets: mine, which is actually academic, and yours, which is not.

I fear that the real problem here is one I have drawn attention to on this blog over and over again: many of the people running our elementary and secondary educational institutions are not well-educated people. Well-educated people don't think that valuable academic time should be spent on popular teen books in advanced academic classes, the vast majority of which (the books I mean) will likely be forgotten in 20 years, if they last that long.

The argument is not whether these books are good books or not. I have expressed my skepticism that they are--no more than a literary hypothesis to be confirmed or not. The argument is over whether books that have proved themselves to have merit by standing the test of time, many of which are well within the grasp of moderately intelligent high school students, should be displaced by books that, whatever their worth, are unproven.

We are talking about students many of whom have not read Huckleberry Finn, the Grapes of Wrath, the Great Gatsby, and Crime and Punishment--and we're going to spend class time in a supposedly advanced high school class parsing the deepest darkest emotions of "Sophie" as she gets ready for her date with "smoky, sexy Dylan"?

Is this really what we've come to in our schools?

Labels: censorship, education, literature

This is the first of a series of articles by Thomas Cothran on Aristotle's Metaphysics. There are traditionally considered to be three branches of philosophy: First, logic is the branch of philosophy the provides the method by which the other two branches proceed. It is the study of reason as an instrument of truth. Second, practical philosophy is the branch of philosophy concerned with the knowledge of the first principles of the practical order, and includes the philosophy of art, the study of man's ability to create, and moral philosophy or ethics, the study of the absolute good of man. Finally, there is theoretical philosophy, the study of the being of things. This branch encompasses the philosophy of mathematics, the study of things according to quantity; the philosophy of nature, the study of things according to their sensible properties; and, finally, metaphysics or ontology, the study of being itself. The Metaphysics is obviously the last of these. It is "first philosophy," a study of being itself and the causes and principles of individual beings. --MC

In order to orient the inquiry of the Metaphysics, Aristotle begins with the traditional opinions about the causes of things as a whole, and draws out their inherent difficulties. This, in part, follows from his general dialectical method: he does not begin with first principles and deduce from them a universal philosophy, but begins with the traditional beliefs that he has inherited. In one sense, this method takes into account the "thrownness" of the philosopher; that is, the fact that the philosopher is always historically situated and does not have immediate access to objective truths from which he can begin his philosophy. To start in any other way covertly imports one's inescapable intellectual inheritance into the inquiry, and allows this inheritance to be acknowledged and addressed up front. This gives Aristotle's dialectic an advantage over any deductive metaphysics, in that his starting points need not be incontrovertible.

Aristotle examines the philosophy of those that went before him by drawing out their inherent tensions and contradictions. From these tensions, he establishes the problematic from which the Metaphysics will work. Aristotle must get some idea of what sort of thing metaphysics reveals; that is, of the nature of the metaphysical question. The immediate difficulty lies in the fact that one cannot know what metaphysics asks about without knowing the object of the metaphysical question. One must know the end before the beginning.

As an initial matter, the metaphysical question concerns the source of things. But is this source one or many? If there are irreducibly many sources of things (e.g., the four elements, or the four causes), then there is no metaphysical knowledge, but different kinds of knowledge for each kind of source. The sources can be irreducibly many either in kind or in number. If the sources are irreducibly many in kind, then thinghood is impossible, for thinghood implies a kind of unity which is grasped in thought when one grasps its cause. However, if the causes of the thing are multiple in kind, then no unity exists by which one might grasp the thing. Yet things present themselves to us in a kind of unity which we immediately and pre-reflectively grasp without trouble. Positing a multiplicity of sources different in kind is simply insufficient to explain everyday experience.

On the other hand, if the source of things are irreducibly many and differ in number, but not in kind (Aristotle calls these elements), then there will be nothing other than the elements. The sources would differ by virtue of their particularity alone (being this atom and not that one, for example), and if there were no causes higher than these elements, nothing could exist other than these elements. Syllabic sounds, for example, in order to come together and form words, have to take on the reality of a whole above and beyond the parts. This whole necessarily takes the form of an unified cause incompatible with an ontology that posits irreducibly many sources.

A multiplicity of causes precludes the unity that things possess, and fails as an explanation of ordinary experience. If, however, the cause of things is one (this would be called "oneness" or "being", and applies univocally to all things, the Parmenidean problem arises. To understand being in this way would be to understand being as a universal genus or category. "But", Aristotle says, "it is not possible for either oneness or being to be a single genus of things," for then there would be only one Being. Being, understood as a universal category, would rule out individual beings as illusions, because a species is differentiated within a genus by differentia outside the genus. "[I]t is not possible either to predicate the species within a genus of their own differentia, or to predicate the genus without its species of the differentia."

In the footnote to his translation, Joe Sachs explains it this way:

The characteristics that differentiate genus into species must be outside the genus, for if the differentia were within the genus, then those characteristics would belong solely to the species or to the genus as a whole. In the first case, if only pigeons were wild things, then the terms "wild things" would have no meaning or extension other than "pigeon", and differentiating doves by the characteristic of wildness is simply to differentiate doves by the character of being doves. If the differentia existed only within the species, the only way the species could be differentiated from the genus would be by tautology (essentially saying a dove is different from other pigeons because it is a dove). In the second case, no differentia would separate doves from other pigeons, collapsing the species into the genus.

Labels: Aristotelianism, philosophy

More revelations on the inner workings over at the Scientific Ministry of Fear, from the London Times:

SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.

It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.

The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.

The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.

Read the rest here.

HT: Michelle Malkin

Labels: global warming, Ministry of Fear, science

The civil liberties crowd is always looking for new things on which to slap the "censorship" label, but this time it has really outdone itself. It is now apparently considered censorship to push for higher educational content in schools.

In Montgomery County, Kentucky, several parents whose children are in an accelerated college preparatory class questioned several books a teacher had planned on using in the class because they don't adequately contribute to accelerated college preparation. The parents apparently had the crazy idea that putting their kids in an advanced college prep course meant that they would be reading academically challenging books instead of literary fluff.

This of course sent "anti-censorship" groups into paroxysms of indignation, all the more so because, in addition to the books being light on the intellectual side, they also contained some racy content, making them all the more worthy of inclusion in school curricula.

After the dust up, the Kid's Right to Read Project, a place where indignation sometimes gets in the way of common sense, fired off a letter to Montgomery County Superintendent Daniel Freeman:

But they picked a bad time to do it: right before "Banned Books Week."

The view of the parent who objects to the books is not shared by all, and she has no right to demand removal of the book. Public schools have the obligation to “administer school curricula responsive to the overall educational needs of the community and its children.” Leebaert v. Harrington, 332 F.3d 134, 141 (2d Cir. 2003).

Maybe in its next manifesto, the Kid's Right to Read Project could explain how the "overall education needs of the community and its children" are served by spending valuable time on literary cotton candy in a class that's supposed to be preparing students for the greater rigors of higher education.

You have to be careful what you do around the time of Banned Books Week because you might be unwillingly enrolled in the narrative that groups like the American Library Association propagate about conservatives running around the country censoring school books, a narrative that somehow always leaves out any coverage of the most banned book of all: the Bible.

The books in question in the Montgomery County case were these:

Twisted by Laurie Halse Anderson
Deadline by Chris Crutcher
Lessons from a Dead Girl by Jo Knowles
The Rapture of Canaan by Sheri Reynolds
What My Mother Doesn't Know by Sonya Sones
What My Girlfriend Doesn't Know by Sonya Sones

Now I haven't read these books, and, being an English instructor and a fairly well-read person, I've never, with one exception, even heard of them either. If they're on a list of great books somewhere, I've never encountered it. Maybe they're appropriate for a course on Early 21st Century Lightweight Pop Fiction for Bored Teenagers, but a college prep course? C'mon.

The only book that has any reputation at all is The Rapture of Canaan, a story with the not-very-original politically correct plot line about an evil fundamentalist church called "The Church of Fire and Brimstone and God's Almighty Baptizing Wind." There's realism for you. And it is a measure of its literary quality that it impressed Oprah, who made it a selection for her Book Club in 1997.

According to "teenreads.com," undoubtedly a bastion of discriminating literary taste, Knowles Lessons from a Dead Girl "does a credible job of exploring friendships, particularly those of girls, in all their complexity and depth." I bet.

These are books about self-obsessed teenagers with names like "Chip," "Lainey," "Rudy," and "Chaz" who are depressed because they didn't make the football team or are upset because they can't figure out what dress to wear for homecoming. Including books like these in a serious college prep course is a little like screening Beach Blanket Bingo at a classic film festival.

Minus the bad language, sexual themes, and the drug abuse, they might pass for some of the cheap fiction my friends and I used to read in school. If you would have told us at the time that books like this would be brought into a college prep class by teachers and taken seriously, we would have had a big laugh and thought that that would be pretty cool. But that's because we were ignorant teenagers who hadn't yet developed anything remotely resembling judgment.

As it turns out, some people never did--and many of them are apparently teachers.

The teacher in whose class such literary specimens were to be held up as examples of quality literature was Risha Mullins. While students in a serious class might be reading Shakespeare's Hamlet proclaiming "To be or not to be," Miss Mullins students are treated to characters soliloquys include lines like "I was a zit on the butt of the student body."

Impressive stuff, you'll have to admit.

Mullins apparently travels the country giving lectures to other teachers on promoting student reading. This, in and of itself, is a scary thought.

If merely trying to maintain some reasonable level of quality in the literature students read at school is now to be labeled censorship, then the odds of improving schools may have just become prohibitive.

In the Montgomery County case, all you had was parents challenging whether books deserved a place in the curriculum of a college prep course. They weren't removed from the school library or eliminated from the readings for the reading club there. They were adjudged unfit for a place alongside Beowulf and the Canterbury Tales.

Oh, and then there's Kentucky's state teachers union, which, with admirable consistency, almost always gets it wrong, rushing to the aid of the teacher, whose job they claim is in jeopardy despite that it's not. Action against the teacher hasn't even been considered. It's simply a question of deciding what gets taught in a class, a judgment that is made every day and gets that much more difficult when national groups whose only interest is making a few cheap headlines stick their bothersome noses in places they don't belong.

UPDATE: I have begun responding to some of the arguments made in the comments section of this post here. My first response addresses the question whether a person is justified in making certain assertions about books they have not themselves read. Other responses will be noted here as they are posted.

Labels: book banning, censorship, education