Imagine a Less Political Lennon

Daniel J. Flynn offers another perspective on John Lennon:

After stumbling through a haze of drugs and alcohol in the 1970s, a sober Lennon returned to wife Yoko Ono, finally succeeded in starting a family with her, and lived the quiet life of a "househusband" from 1975 to 1980. Fatherhood the first time around had eluded the essentially fatherless Lennon. Removed from Beatlemania hysteria, Lennon had been for son Sean what he hadn't been for son Julian: a dad.

His musical comeback owed as much to the comeback of his personal life as it had to his renewed focus on rock 'n' roll to the exclusion of politics and drugs. Politics, Lennon concluded, had "almost ruined" his music. "It became journalism and not poetry. And I basically feel that I'm a poet -- even if it does go ba-deeble, eedle, eedle, it, de-deedle, deedle, it." That politicized John Lennon -- holding bed-ins for peace, singing for marijuana offender John Sinclair, featuring activists Bobby Seale, Ralph Nader, and Jerry Rubin on The Mike Douglas Show during a guest-hosting stint -- coincided with the chemicalized John Lennon. The stringy-haired beardo rhapsodizing about imagining no religion was John Lennon. But so too was the leather-clad child of the fifties belting out a stripped-down cover of "Stand By Me."

http://spectator.org/archives/2010/12/08/imagine-a-less-political-lenno

From Ben Stein's Diary

Ben Stein's take on the coming result of our public education:

This condition -- not wanting to learn or even knowing how to learn -- is going to kill this country, or at least the idea of a fluid, meritocratic society. The poor will stay poor and the rich who are willing to learn will stay rich.

This will eventually drag down national productivity to the point where we truly become a Third World nation with a thin slice of first world on top of. The process will take a long time, but it will happen. It is already happening.

http://spectator.org/archives/2010/12/01/one-of-eight-billion/1

Imagine

Catholic writer Mark Shea has taken John Lennon's song "Imagine" to the woodshed:

How does it honor the dead to “Imagine there's no heaven”? How does it honor the firefighters who sacrificed their lives to mewl about “Nothing to…die for”? Indeed, it is sung by earnest churchgoers, even at Catholic Masses, who seem to perceive no particular contradiction between the liberating wonder of imagining there's no Heaven and the prayer which begins “Our Father who art in heaven.” It seems to be because the words of the song are more or less treated as sonorous replacements for singing “La La” to its pleasant tune.

Me, I pay attention to words. That is why I have always thought of it as a sort of anthem to Original Sin — fallen man's infinite capacity to believe he can create Heaven on earth if he's just permitted one more chance to get it right. Everything the song advocates and hopes for as a supreme good was the fountainhead of all the horrors of the 20th century. Imagine there's no countries? Hitler dreamt of a world without borders. Imagine there's no heaven? No religion too? Stalin and Mao sought to free us from religion and the burden of hoping for something more than this life. Imagine no possessions? Communism was all about freeing us from possessions (though multi-zillionaire Lennon seems to have honored this dream more in the breach than the observance). Imagine all the people living for today? You got it! A culture of brain-dead MTV-educated “fornicate-today-and-abort-tomorrow” zombies has accomplished the mission.

http://catholicexchange.com/2006/09/27/94446/

Good Rheedance

Much as I'd like to, I can't take credit for that clever title. It goes to Roger Kaplan, who wrote an excellent article regarding Michelle Rhee's timely exit from the Chancellorship of the D.C. Public School system. You can read the whole thing at The American Spectator: http://spectator.org/archives/2010/10/18/good-rheedance.

[P]ublic schools, like our nation, evolve, and indeed evolve in ways that parallel the larger society's. The most significant of these parallel trends is the surrender of local responsibility to government authorities, and the pretense of the latter to rely on "experts," a.k.a. technocrats, people parachuted into communities where they have no ties but whose problems they can solve . . . .

School reform has focused historically, one might almost say cyclically, on such scarecrows as "entrenched interests" and "out of date pedagogy." In plain English, reformers have tended to think they understand the problems and challenges of educating undisciplined if lovable savages (children and teenagers) better than the people whose job it is to do it, and furthermore that they have a system for teaching math and reading that will work better than any other. In both regards they are very much in the venerable American tradition of snake-oil salesmen, though the Ph.D.'s they often hold are authentic, compared to the "doctor" titles conferred upon themselves by your old-fashioned mountebanks. In terms of truth-in-packaging, the latter were probably more honest . . . .

The schools reflect our society, and being vitally, warmly, constantly interested in the immediate and crucial bond between our communities and our schools is part of the job of running them and working in them. This bond has been sundered by the massive infusion of federal money in our school systems. That is what is really wrong with them. It scarcely matters that teenage boys hate to read -- that would not be news. They should spend more time in shop then, or under the supervision of their coaches and their ROTC colonels. They will come to reading in their own good time. No superman is going to change that, and it is symptomatic of the narcissistic, rules-are-for-others types that they can think of nothing better than blaming teachers for a system that has lost its moorings and its compasses, including most pertinently its
moral compasses.

Doing Away with Recess

A recent column appearing in The American Spectator by Perry Glanzer suggests President Obama should "act like a good politician and tell children exactly what they want to hear" in his upcoming speech to the nation's schoolchildren. He should tell them, suggests Glanzer, that they need more recess. http://spectator.org/archives/2010/09/14/what-obama-should-tell-the-kid

Sadly, recess is dying by strangulation from other supposedly good things. Recently, I met my son's teacher and received a copy of my son's schedule. I saw lots of good things he needs to and should learn, but I also looked for what I always loved -- those precious times of recess.

Glanzer is right. In many schools, recess has all but been squeezed out. What remains is like a tiny patch of rainforest surrounded by pasture. One example is the East Providence School District, which recently announced its plans to scrape recess entirely - all 10 minutes of it. I wrote about it here: http://linestoabrasspot.blogspot.com/2010/09/enhanced-recess.html

There was an uproar, followed by the district's clarification that it was merely "enhancing" recess by, among other things, lengthening it from 10 to 15 minutes. On its website, the district boasted that recess, "would no longer be an afterthought squeezed in after a rushed lunch." At this point any parent who was paying attention would have been doubly upset and demanded to know, "Since when did you whittle recess down to a 10 minute afterthought?"

Glanzer remembers his recess breaks in school:

When I was in school, I had three of them. Fifteen minutes in the morning,thirty minutes after lunch and fifteen minutes in the afternoon. During those times I learned to create games with others, choose my own activities, get along, argue, and negotiate.

My own memory of recess is much the same. I wonder about those who would eliminate recess. I wonder how they remember their own recess breaks when they were in school. Have they forgotten, or did they just hate recess?

Far Out

How far out can you go? The folks at the Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP) at the University of Wisconsin at Madison go pretty far in their May 2010 article, "Promising antipoverty strategies for families."

"Difficult issues include determining how much child support can be expected from nonresident parents who are not working, and whether (and how) child support orders should change when nonresident parents suffer earnings losses or unemployment." http://www.irp.wisc.edu/publications/fastfocus/pdfs/FF6-2010.pdf

You probably thought it would be easy to know how much child support you can expect from a nonresident parent who isn't working. Unless you're far out too.

Waiting for Superman

Director Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth) has made a new documentary about public schools. "Waiting for Superman" opens soon and is expected to generate alot of attention. In a recent article in New York Magazine entitled, Schools: The Disaster Movie, John Heileman discusses the movie and its director, whom he refers to as, "an unrepentant liberal." http://nymag.com/news/features/67966/ That's a strange term. What liberal school policies is Guggenheim unrepentant about? Racial desegration? The free school lunch program? Special education services for the disabled? If so, more power to him. But if he's unrepentant about busing, open classrooms, full inclusion, whole language, values clarification, or other variously liberal policies I could mention, then I'm not so sure. Heileman is probably using the term loosely, though it is still very weird. But I am getting way off track. What I really wanted to comment on is the thrust of Heileman's movie review: that terrific teachers are THE KEY to student success.

According to Heileman, Guggenheim's position is that "no variable is more critical to the success of students than terrific teachers." That may be true to an extent. Within the school, teachers probably are the variable most important to student success. Most people would agree with that. But what is wrong with Heileman's and Guggenheim's assertion is what it leaves out, the parents.

In a larger sense, it is not terrific teachers but rather terrific parents that are of paramount importance to children's success in school and in life. Waiting for Superman might acknowledge this reality, but nothing in Heileman's review suggests that it does. Instead, it offers the modest proposal that we bring in a new breed of teacher, a teacher who graduated from the top third, doesn't mind working nights and weekends or expect summers off. Perhaps that is what is meant by the movie title, Waiting for Superman, which I'll remind you Heilemen called a disaster movie. So here's the scenario: our poor helpless schoolchildren are trapped in failing schools. And they're going to fail unless terrific teachers rescue them. There are teachers currently on the scene trying to help, but they can't because they're weak and ineffective (or crappy, as Heileman put it). So the children must wait for Superman, or super teachers, to arrive. But what can we do to make super teachers come to the rescue?

Heilemen has the answser. He cites a study that says super teachers could be attracted to the field for a starting salary of $65,000 and a top salary of $150,000. Will the new breed of super teachers arrive in time to save the trapped children from failing?

Don't touch that dial, movie fans.