Education

    The longer one spends in education the more new programs, state and nation wide initiatives, new curriculum, and new strategies you experience.  Moreover, each year teachers and prospective teachers have to take more classes and tests and evaluations to obtain and maintain their certification.  Yet, even after all of this effort society at large is still generally dissatisfied with the state of education.  You can hear and read reports about how America no longer leads the world in the education of its citizens.  The response to this state is the continual tweaking of the educational model in the hopes of finding the answer.  In reality, the root aim of these efforts is to increase the efficiency of the educator and the educational system.  Better teachers and better schools equal better students, it makes perfect sense right?  But it doesn't.  Even with the most scientifically awesome curriculum and several massive buckets of funding I believe that the gains would  ultimately be unsatisfactory.  However, we are assured that the new system will punch through the ceiling of student achievement.
    The problem is that a system can only become so efficient before the return in performance per dollar increase in funding would become minimal.  It would not be worth the expenditure.  The law of diminishing returns.  This though is not really a problem because education has never received tons of funding to begin with when compared to other government spending programs.  Yet, the politics of education demands that "something" is done so teachers have to continually prove and refine their proficiency or lose their job.  However, teacher proficiency suffers from the same law of diminishing returns.  No matter what we do we will never create the army of super teachers that can have an entire class of hard luck cases and petty criminals reading at grade level while paying wrapped attention, hanging on every word, running to class in order to start learning as soon as possible.  "But wait," you say, "I've seen _________ movie and read _________book where Mr/Mrs _________reaches those hard luck cases in the inner city, I cried, and we can all be teachers like that."  Bullshit.  These individual cases are the exceptions and not the rules.  It is a fallacy to believe these individual cases can ever become the norm.
    So the problem is that the politics of education works only one side of the teacher/student equation, the teacher side.  They work it and work it and wonder why the miracle never occurs.  Lets look at two schools (names removed to CYA).  School A is a school made up of mostly white middle class children who have no problem passing all state tests.  Using the logic of our system School A must have the best teachers.  Conversely, School B, made up of mostly poor Hispanic students, struggles to get their graduation rate over 50%.  Using our logic their teachers must be vastly inferior to the teachers at School A.  I think we all know what the real problem is.  It is the side of the equation that America is afraid to tackle, the place they dare not look.

Calls for Secession are crazy, and kinda sad...

    I have a couple of Facebook friends who are conservative, which is fine, but I really don't understand them.  I'm a member of a group that posts random liberal stuff, all of which is pretty funny, the conservative version, which I see through my friends shares, is kinda sad.  I'm conservative in many ways, so I try and find the humor and logic behind their memes but just can't.  One of the things going around nowadays is the whole states rights, 10th amendment, nullification and secession from the union.  Most of this comes from the fear that Obama's re-election is somehow ushering in the end times.  Additionally, people seem to believe that he is destroying America.  As an American historian I can officially declare these world views to be hilariously sad.
    First off, unless there is action taken in Washington DC, and were talking about mind-blowing crazy shifts in political thinking or vast shifts in American's political thinking and beliefs, the whole states rights, 10th amendment, nullification and secession issues were solved definitively YEARS ago.  Heart sick republicans sadly point to the secession petitions that have formed online.  What they fail to realize is that the thousands of people who signed those petitions are less than 1 percent of the states population and even less of the countries population.  Look at the election returns for the Libertarian party, for it to become the mainstream belief would take...something impossible...well at least something so unlikely as to be nearly impossible in our lifetimes.  For better or worse, our country is locked into the two party system, politics in this system is coordinated on a national level, states are not leaving.
    Second, you cannot destroy America with a single election. The America that these people point to has not existed in a very long time.  The America that these people want is not right for the world we live in today.  We tried the America they want and we decided against it.  That is the fundamental thing that people fail to understand.  The American experiment is ongoing, we change and adapt to the world around us, we cannot go back we can only go forward.  So yes the America that these people want, the White laissez faire America is being destroyed, slowly dieing, but that is not Obama's fault.  We have tried the unfettered capitalism model and we have communally selected against it.  Social programs did not cause the great depression or the dot.com bust or the housing bubble, nope.
    All that being said, I believe that the strength of the American system is that the dynamic between liberal and conservative elements have in the past balanced each other out, making consensus necessary.  This made change slow, measured and balanced.  I don't want to see a total liberal domination, I want to see a strong and vital conservative party.  Hopefully, they find their way back to reality.

Road Map (Will Update )

    I added a couple of links to things I might refer to in posts, the usual stuff.  If your an educator Yale's Avalon Project has tons of primary documents, check it out.  I also want to outline some future posts.  I plan on addressing my views on education. I want to read the book Real Education by Charles Murray, his views seem to align with mine.  I think most of my friends would be surprised by how conservative my views on education are, I'll go into it.  I also want to address some more philosophical concepts.  Of course I'll also talk a lot about religion, it won't all be negative.  Check back for more specifics.

Cultural Sensitivity/Political Correctness

    While I figure out how to make this pretty here is the first topic of discussion.  Cultural/Social/Political sensitivity.  Or the idea that I have to respect peoples' differences in culture, social status and political beliefs.  When this concept was created most peoples beliefs were not that different.  He likes Egg Salad and I like BLTs, that great I respect his opinion.  You could come together and work things out because you were both working from a common set of values, we both like sandwiches.
    I was watching Bill Maher the other day and he stated that he did not feel the need to respect a culture that oppresses women.  The Taliban oppresses women, you can't really deny it while examining the facts.  Most of this oppression is based on one religious interpretations of Islam, this is not the only interpretation mind you, just one of many.  Recently the Taliban shot a little girl in the head.  Her only crime was advocating for the education of women.  Maher points was that it is ok to believe that our culture, with all its flaws, is superior to the Taliban's culture.  We do not have to respect a culture that oppresses women.  I agree.  What purpose would cultural/religious sensitivity serve but to condone the oppression of women?  So the question is: do I have to respect the culture, the religious, the political views of Americans who believe it is ok to oppress women, homosexuals and immigrants?  Do I have to respect an American who say "you do not get to participate in the American Dream" to people who do not fit into their world view?  When in reality, letting those people experience the American Dream would take exactly nothing from the people who would withhold it?  I do not.  Moreover, I believe it is expressly counter to America's core beliefs.  You have the right to your beliefs, I would never take them from you or legislate against your life style, all I ask is for you to do the same.  You can believe that gay marriage is wrong all day long, but you have no right to keep it from somebody when it takes exactly nothing from you.  And while legislative avenues exist in our society to do just that, these processes were created to protect liberty, we should not use them as tools of oppression.