Competitively Cooperative

The modern mind has a strange compulsion for making side issues foundational. Early in this blog I discussed how unity is not foundational. Most people who are calling for unity usually have an enemy in mind that they wish to unite people against. The people calling for unity are actually trying to create an even greater division.

The hegemony argument is another example of people making a side issue foundational. Hegemony has value as a descriptor. But when you make achieving hegemony the primary concern of a system, you change the nature of the system.

Another example of the modern tendency to make side issues foundational is the over emphasis of the role of competition in the free market.

Freedom is the foundation of the free market. The ideal of the free market is that the individual has the ability to invest their time and resources as they see fit.

You can prove that competition is not foundational simply by looking at the way people behave when they have freedom. When people are free, they end up engaging in a mix of both cooperative and competitive activities.

Looking through the table of contents of The Wealth of Nations we see that Adam Smith spends most of his time talking about issues such as the division of labor, rents, the division of stock. All of these issues deal with mechanisms of cooperation in the free market.

Cooperation and competition are complementary forces. The terms serve as valuable descriptors, but people err when they say competition is the foundation of the free market.

The Market as Organized Cooperation

When you get down to the brass tacks, you will find that all financial transactions are cooperative in nature. When you hire on with an employer, you are not engaged in competition with the employer. You are actually making a contract to cooperate with the employer. When you buy food from the local market, you are engaged in a well orchestrated cooperative effort to bring food from the fields to your family.

In most cases, the primary factor in choosing a service is how well the service provider cooperates with you. Service providers compete by their willingness to cooperate.

The Opposite of What You Expect

When you create a system that overemphasizes one side of a complementary force, you often end up with the opposite effect than you intended. The street preacher agitating for unity against his foe causes greater division despite his illusion that he is a unifier. Peace activists who make unjust compromises in a short cut to peace might accidentally lay the foundations for a worse war. A warmonger might accidentally lay the foundation for peace when people listening to his agitations realize that they must address an issue or go to war. As we live in a fluid universe, it is not uncommon for actions to have the opposite effect than intended.

My observation is that systems that overemphasize competition tend to create less competition. When you overemphasize competition in the market, people develop the illusion that they must be big to compete. Look at the current marketplace. You will often see profitable businesses merging simply because their owners feel that they must be big to compete. I've seen many people fail to go into businesses simply because they felt that they weren't big enough or emotionally equipped to compete. When businesses merge, or people fail to enter the market, there is less competition.

Even worse, when people are driven by competition they are apt to undertake anti-market activities to undermine competitors. When you look at the dynamics small towns, you will often find a small number of leading merchants monopolizing main street.

Conversely, emphasizing cooperation has a strange habit of creating more competition.

Most successful small businesses are formed by people who wish to cooperate to achieve a specific end. Let's say a manufacturer needs a new and improved widget to go in their device. When the designers' thoughts are dominated by ideas of competition, they are likely to try and develop the widget internally. A designer who sees the market as inherently cooperative is more open to seeing the widget developed in cooperation with a third party.

The stock exchange is a good example of cooperation. In a stock exchange, people cooperate in forming a market to trade goods. The people in this market are keenly interested in having a diversity of stock to trade. Investors will actively seek out the creation of business so they have something to trade.

Affiliate marketing is an example of cooperation the internet. Affiliate marketing is a system where web sites form cooperative relations with merchants to sell products. Affiliate marketing has drawn a large number of small web sites and small merchants into the online market. Many of these companies would not have existed if not for the cooperative nature of affiliate marketing.

Crass Commercial Intrusion: My attempt at affiliate marketing makes about $200.00 a year. I understand that people who know what they are doing can make a living from the market. My problem is that I am more interested in things from a conceptual level than from an implementation level.

Sadly, people who are driven by competition feel that they must dominate the market and engage in activities specifically designed to undermine the affiliate market. I would not be surprised if affiliate marketing completely vanished in the next couple of years as the major players lock all of the small players out of the system.

Internalizing the Division of Labor

Adam Smith's observation is that the division of labor seems to happen naturally. People want to concentrate on one aspect of the market. A farmer might concentrate on the quality of his crop. The delivery driver would concentrate on the efficiency of his delivery operation. These people would form an informal cooperative network. This division of labor happens naturally.

When you overemphasize competition and de-emphasize cooperation, you end up creating these megacorporations that try to internalize the entire division of labor related to the production of a specific good. If our economic theorists and socio-economic structures were to emphasized cooperation, I think we would start seeing a break up of the mega-corporations as business leaders struggled to create nimbler business structures that were better suited for cooperating dynamic, multidimensional market.

Political Systems

You will notice that I used the word "might" and not "must" in the above sections. Cooperation and competition are simply complementary terms. A politician who takes steps to increase competition may or may not increase competition. Since there is a monopoly in education, it is likely that the Utah Voucher proposal would increase competition. Other subsidy programs designed to spur competition (e.g. farm subsidies) appear to simply give an economic edge to those farmers with the inside connections or the legal expertise to get the subsidies. These insiders use their competitive edge to drive the other farmers out of business, reducing competition.

Neither competition nor cooperation is foundational to the free market. Freedom is the foundation. Since neither cooperation or competition are foundational, politicians and economic theorist are ill advised to create policies that treat the issues as foundational.

Politicians who are interested in seeing the free market succeed should pay attention to how their policies affect the freedom of the people and not on peripheral issues. The disappearance of competition or cooperation in a market might be an indicator of an imbalanced market. Direct political efforts to spur competition are likely to created unintended consequences.

The Argument Fails in Both Directions

In the build up to the Patreus Report, terrorists in Iraq killed a large number of people in hopes of influencing the reaction to the report. I argued that the left would make a mistake if they cited the spike in casualties in their arguments for ending the war.

For that matter, I noticed that most Democrats recognized the trap and avoided citing the atrocities despite the fact the spike supported their case. I applaud those who showed sense and restraint.

When you push radical theory to its natural conclusion, killing people is nothing more than a statement in a propaganda war.

Predictably, there's been a slight drop off in casualty statistics after the report. I've heard several conservative pundits trying to say that this drop off in casualties is proof that the surge is working. This is also a mistake. If one ignores the spike, the baseline of unrest is still high.

The casualty spike occurred to influence the Patreus report. Using the down end of the spike to argue the surge worked is as much a fallacy as it was to argue the up end of the spike prived the surge worked.

All the spike tells us is that terrorists have bought into the world view that sees killing large numbers of people as a political statement in a class struggle.

It is this world view that is the enemy.

Hegemony in Education

Who can forget the inspiring figure of the Progressive, man-of-the-people, Hugo Chavez standing before the United Nations waving a copy of Noam Chomsky's latest diatribe to an adoring international audience? That diatribe was titled "Hegemony or Survival."

Unfortunately, to discuss the current state of education, it is necessary to bring out the six dollar word "hegemony." It is a word and concept that I find distasteful. I do not believe that hegemony is a foundational issue. The word serves a useful purpose as a descriptor. Sadly, when people build ideologies that demand they must gain hegemony to survive, then things start getting ugly.

Hegemony sits among a whole class of terms that, when used in moderation as descriptors, serve a useful purpose. When pushed to extremes the ideas swirling around the term turn nihilistic and ugly.

The reason that hegemony is important in a debate about education is that it appears that the far left has gained hegemony in the public school system with the hope that they could use that hegemony to gain political power. When you have a group that intentionally uses the education system to gain political power, you end up creating forces that undermine education.

A prime example of the detrimental effects of new think in education was the decision to rip logic out of the curriculum some 50 years ago. Another example was the decision to replace math with new math.

These decisions have had a detrimental effect on our ability to engage in affirmative discourse. Just look at the large number of logical fallacies, ad hominem attacks and low quality discourse going on in the blogosphere. Much of the friction we see was created by our education system.

While the problems started with the left. The low quality of education in the public school has affected both left and right.

It would be impossible to correct the problems in the public education system simply by changing the hegemony that controls the monopoly. I think we are at a point where the best solution is to create a competitive framework for the schools that would allow for the development of different curriculums. The natural tendency will be for parents to choose those schools that provide the best education.

Unfortunately, to make my argument, I fear I will have to employ the overwrought word "hegemony."

An Icky Topic that Noam Chomsky Loves

The term "hegemony" has been around since antiquity. It refers to a group that has dominance at a given time.

A common pattern is that one group will gain dominance. The people allied with the hegemonic power would prosper. Those not allied with the hegemony would be disenfranchised and fall into survival mode. Often the ideologies survive by moving to the fringes of society. The hegemonic power would generally grow arrogant and corrupt. The disenfranchised powers would eventually unite then overthrow the hegemonic force and create a new world order with a new hegemony.

You can write compelling histories with the word hegemony. For example, France and England were hegemonic powers in the eighteenth century. The American colonies rebelled against England. To do so, the colonies formed an alliance with the King of France against the English hegemony. This alliance turned sour for France. In their war against Britain, they had inadvertently allied themselves with revolutionary forces that would bring down their royalty.

The US founders were apparently aware of the dangers of the European hegemonies. They originally wanted a loose confederation of states. Fearing that the hegemonic powers of Europe would cause dissension between the independent states, the Founders decided to create a new Federation of States with an executive strong enough to stand up to the hegemonic powers of Europe.

The founders created a very interesting structure with a strong executive that could defend against foreign hegemonies. The government had a loose internal structure that allowed for the evolution of a free market and included democratically elected legislatures. This model created the first stable republic since antiquity.

I will refer to the political, socio-economic and intellectual structures created by the US Founders as Classical Liberalism.

Classical liberalism is based on classical notions of truth. There is a belief that there is a truth out there, but that humans always fall short of knowing that truth. We latch onto ideas that we see as virtues. Classical thinkers learned that each virtue pushed to its extreme becomes a vice. In classical literature the term "tragedy" specifically refers to cases where something bad happens as the result of a virtue.

The classical liberal ideal was to concentrate on giving people a broad, balanced education. Although such education does not get us to pure truth, it gets us closer.

The classical liberal was interested in pursuing this vague notion of truth with the thought that you should give the students the best quality of education to help them get closer to understanding truth. In my opinion, classical liberal educators make the best teachers as they are interested primarily in the quality of the education and are not so much interested in converting the political opinions of the student. In his work Radical Son, David Horowitz spoke in admiration of his classical liberal professors who, although they disagreed with his politics, actively worked to help him pursue his objectives of becoming a leftwing agitator.

The great American education system was built by classical liberals with a maniacal faith that, if you build the university, truth would come. Unfortunately, a new generation of scholars appeared on the scene, and this new breed of scholars was very much interested in hegemony and the effects of education on the body politic. So, I have to write about the history of this problem.

The Foundations of The Modern Age

A good place to begin the story of the modern age is with the eighteenth century German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant took to studying pure reason. In his studies he rediscovered the thing known since antiquity. He rediscovered that, if you push any idea to its extreme, it becomes paradoxical. Kant discovered that you can't derive perfect knowledge from a detailed study of one's naval.

The fact that Kant let loose with a cloud of empty grey fluff doesn't matter. He is adored as the greatest philosopher of all time.

Kant rediscovered that certain issues like the infinite or the nature of free will or even the nature of space will always involve paradox.

In the 19th century, a German philosopher named Hegel mastered the art of paradox and had all sorts of schemes for proving that freedom is slavery and slavery is freedom. Hegel used his skills to create a compelling Philosophy of History that presented history as a world stage. The hegemonic powers were actors on this world stage.

Intellectuals loved the Hegelian structure as it allowed them to talk about different ideas battling for supremacy in the world. Intellectuals of the 19th and 20th century were fond of slapping the suffix "ism" on words associated with ideas. Each of these isms pushed the basic idea to its paradoxical extreme. Scholars could babble about these paradoxical ideologies battling for hegemony.

Karl Marx pushed this type of thinking to a new level of absurd with a thing called the Material Dialectics. Marx claimed his dialectical materialism to be a science. Since it is a science, it must be true. While Hegel was prone to talk about nations battling for supremacy on the world stage, Marx gave the world a fantastical history with peoples of the world locked in class struggles.

Marx claimed that he could scientifically predict the future. In Marx's future, the corrupt merchant class (which he called bourgeoisie) would gain hegemonic power through monopolistic commerce. The disenfranchised workers (the proletariat) would form an alliance with the intelligentsia in a worldwide revolution. The revolution would so complete that a new world order--a workers paradise-- would sprout from the killing fields. There would be paradise on earth, and no religion too.

Educators are naturally drawn to an ideology where the intelligentsia forms alliances with disenfranchised groups and rises to power. Such ideologies makes the educator altruistic and the primary actor on the world stage at the same time.

The fanciful thinking about hegemonic powers struggling on the world stage led to an extremely violent century. During the twentieth century, Hegelian/Marxist thought had gained hegemony in the world. For a period, most of this planet had fallen under the sway of various forms of Marxism or Fascism (a Hegelian style reaction to Marxism). Sadly for mankind, the action on Hegel's world stage proved quite bloody.

Ironically, the classical liberal system of the US (that initially only sought survival) created a system that led to widespread domestic prosperity. As it happened the classical liberal United States was pulled into both world wars. The prosperity of the classical liberal system was decisive in both wars.

The United States that had created a strong centralized presidency to survive against the intrigues of the hegemons of Europe had itself become a hegemonic power.

This was really problematic for intellectuals who had given their faith the various isms of the modern world. While the Hegelian/Marxist view had hegemony in the middle of the century, when the Berlin Wall was torn down, people ran West and not East. The intelligentsia was stunned at the turn of events. The system that they were united against did more for the poor people than their fanciful totalitarian dreams.

Unfortunately, another sad twist occurred during the century. While the classical liberal United States was gaining hegemony in the world, the leftwing had retreated into the American education for survival. So while the classical liberal system created by the US founders triumphed, it won't be able to survive as the left has control of education.

So, we finally get back to talking about hegemony in the school.

Back to School

The American primary and university school systems were built by classical liberal educators who saw quality education as the path to a prosperous future.

Unfortunately, scholars in the US were as enchanted with new think as were the scholars of Europe. Folks like John Dewey made bizarre American versions of the Hegelian new think. Dewey was clever and saw that Americans really did not like the ideologies abroad; so he created a version of Hegelian that transformed the distaste for ideology into an ideology. This paradoxical non-ideology ideology was called "pragmatism." In this non-ideology ideology, you gain hegemony by railing against ideals. You then do whatever is most expedient to gain power.

The classical liberals fell for it. The weak spot of classical liberalism is that its adherents really are open to new ideas. New think provided a compelling new array of new ideas and seemingly possible paths for these new ideas to improve society. Unfortunately the paradoxical nature of the extreme ideologies of new think had a way of classical liberal system of moderated ideas.

In the middle of the last century we saw the word "liberalism" transform from something that saw the freedom of the individual as a good thing to won that held the Hegelian paradox that freedom is slavery and slavery freedom.

Drafting off the notion that any idea pushed to extremes leads to paradox, the modern liberal gradually pushed classical liberal ideas to the side.

The first thing to go, of course, was the study of logic. Kant, after all, had discovered what every logician knew. Pushing any ideal to an extreme produces paradox. Therefore logic is corrupt.

A person who falls into the hegemonic world view will reject the idea that truth or even logic exists. Everything is simply propaganda in the struggles of powers. Logic, after all, was nothing more than a tool used by the corrupt bourgeoisie to suppress the proletariat who were prone to do illogical things with their cash.

The first step was to remove logic from the curriculum. There then was an effort to replace math with new math. In my opinion, this all was to the detriment of education. Driving the classical liberal from the schools has created a world where math scores drop each year and we get more and more complaints from groups like Students for Academic Freedom that say modern professors are more interested in indocrinating students into an ideology than in teaching a subject.

So, while the classical liberal United States was gaining hegemony, we saw the bizarre situation where modern thought and its preoccupation with hegemony had taken root in the American schools. The classical liberal United States can't survive all that long in a world where no one learns classical liberal values. I suspect that the loss of our classical liberal education system will prove extremely damaging if not fatal for America.

(NOTE, George Bush received a modern education from left leaning schools. The result was that he could not figure out that invading Iraq was a bad idea.)

Personal Experience

Most of the talk I've heard about gaining hegemony in the school has come from leftist thinkers. On occasion, you will find reactionary thinkers like Horowitz on the issue. Reacting to a conversation of others is different from making an issue foundational.

During my fiasco in the education department at the U, I found myself engaged in numerous conversations about how the left needed to regroup in education and needed to radicalize the classroom. Professors actually taught us propaganda techniques as we read a slew of unbalanced literature from Chomsky, Friere and others. I was taught that the goal of an activist educator was to raise social consciousness and recruit student activists, etc.,

The department had a single focus on political issues, and was not providing me much information on the subject I really wanted to learn: How does one teach math to kids!!!

The people who I think would have been good at teaching math to kids were driven away from the public school systems by a system that was more interested in the political outcome of the education than in the quality of education.

Hegemony as a Descriptor

This post is too long, and you will notice that it really doesn't have a conclusion.

I thought I would re-emphasize that I see nothing wrong with the use of hegemony as a descriptor. For example, it is valid to say that the Ptolemaic view of astronomy had hegemony in the Renaissance and Copernican view of skies took hold after the Copernican revolution.

Problems occur when people start making "hegemony or survival" a fundamental part of their world view. When one holds the need to dominate or survive in their world view, they start doing destructive things to the people around them.

Chomsky claims that the neocons chose to invade Iraq because they wanted to expand American hegemony, and that they used propagandist techniques to mislead the American public. I had direct experience with leftist professors using negative techniques to gain hegemony in education.

Simply noting that the left has hegemony in school is not in and of itself bad. If they are using the school system to indoctrinate students or if they are misusing their position in teaching schools to weed out people based on politics, then they are doing something detrimental to the students.

I really don't have an answer on how to handle a political hegemony in the public school monopoly. The fact that we have a monopoly in education is a bit problematic. Having a monopoly means that political groups will want to gain power by controlling the monopoly.

Simply replacing public with private schools may not be the answer as private schools often have their own agendas that they hope to advance over education.

The long term solution would be to create a much more open market system for education where no one group has total control over the education of a single student. The voucher idea where students have a financial resource that follows them as they move between schools might work to help students broaden their education. The teaching company idea that creates some separation of the administration of the school from the teaching of the class might also break monopolistic forces.

Regardless, I do not think hegemonic thinking will ever result in improved education. If one group has too much power in the education system, we should point it out, but I do not think we can improve education by efforts like NCLB that simply added more politics to schooling. After all, educations should be about impowering the individual student with the knowledge they need to thrive.

Housing Prices

I thought I would take a quick second to disagree with the following quote from the Newshour:

HENRY PAULSON, U.S. Treasury Secretary: The longer housing prices remain stagnant or fall, the greater the penalty to our future economic growth.

In recent years, housing prices have grown way out of sync with the economy at large and with workers' wages. A fall in housing prices is not bad news as it means that people after the correction won't have to struggle as hard to get into a house.

We don't need a bailout. Let banks with bad lending practices fail, and housing prices drop.

One thing I really dislike about our little politicized economic system is that it makes irrational decisions. As the housing prices were peaking in these last few years, there appears to have been a push to get low income folks into the market before they were financially ready for home ownership. There also seems to have been a push to encourage people into speculative real estate development (flip this house). It might be my imagination, but crashes are often preceded by hyped up efforts to bring unsophisticated buyers into the market.

The next big story on the Newshour was about a spike of in the price of oil caused by the increased tension between the US and Turkey (Thank you Tom Lantos). The Newshour reports that the price of heating oil is expected to surge this winter.

It seems to me that the primary reason for the surge the price of heating oil is that we have too friggin' many houses!!!! All of these massive half-filled houses cost a grundle to heat. Waste. Waste. Waste. Waste. I know of too many situation where a single person lives in a big house. It is ludicrous.

This game where we heat more house than we need contributes to global warming. It does so big time. It probably is worse than the problems with cars that are too big for the single passenger inside.

We would be better off if more people lived in our current stock of houses. We would consume less heating oil and release fewer greenhouse gasses into the cosmos.

Since our housing market is overbuilt, and since heating costs are rising and since we've gone several decades with housing costs increasing faster than wages, then I think a correction in the cost of housing prices and a slow down in this most environmentally damaging industry should be welcome.

The idea that we should bail out subprime lenders to keep housing prices artificially high is wrong headed.

BTW, I think I mentioned in an earlier post that I suspect a big reason for the fall in housing prices is that we are chasing our immigrants away. That probably has a bigger effect on prices than the subprime loans.

On a final note, I hope people spend a bit of time this Fall working on ways to decrease their heating bill. If your house is too big, then don't bother heating every room. If you plan to heat the entire house, why not throw some cash into insulation or new double paned windows so that your heating bill will be just a little less in the cold winter months to come. (Salt Lake Home Links).

With the promise of increase heating costs, now is a good time to invest in conservation.

The Trivium

I support the Utah voucher initiative because I think it will lead to a Renaissance in teaching techniques and new curriculums which will expand learning opportunities for all students.

One interesting development is that many of the new private schools are working to revive the Trivium in primary education. The trivium was the basis of Western education from ancient to modern times. The trivium was the core of the classical liberal education.

The US founders received a classical education. Subsequent generations started falling under the sway of education theories based on Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and Marx. The trivium had its last hoorahs in the days of John Dewey who brought forth a Hegelian style ideology called Pragmatism.

IMHO, all of the manifestations of this Hegelian style ideology lead to totalitarianism. This will happen even when the people pretend they don't have an ideology. A good example is the present voucher debate where school teachers, who all proclaim adherence to the gods of diversity, are horrified by the prospect of real diversity that would result if there was an open market in education.

The Trivium is something that bloggers might find of interest.

The primary focus of the trivium is the development and communication of ideas. Please note, the trivium is abstract. You might want to read The Trivium by Sister Mariam Joseph.

The three legs of the trivium are grammar, logic and rhetoric. Yes, the classical world held rhetoric in high esteem.

Grammar is simply the study of the way language works. The western world has incredible rich, beautiful, multidimensional languages. The trivium taught the beauty of language. Poetry was held in esteem. The new think of modern education reduces language to its bare utility.

Logic (also known as analytics) is the study of ideas and how ideas fit together.

From my perspective as a mathematician, the decision of the modern education establishment to rip logic out of the curriculum stands among the crimes against humanity of the modern age. The dictators at the head of the education establishment have stolen our ability to engage in high quality reason.

Instead of learning how to reason, the modern education simply teaches us how to snipe each others. We engage in this process in the most vulgar ways.

The final leg of the trivium is rhetoric. With rhetoric, you learn how to communicate your ideas. Conversely, when you learn how to communicate your ideas, you become better at listening to others.

In the classical western world, the great speakers of the day would engage in organized events called disputations. These disputations, apparently, were big events where people were interested in both the quality of the discourse along with the content.

Today, of course, everyone vies for making the meanest and most provocative statement possible. The greater the provocateur, the more inbound links!!!!

The modern world holds that rhetoric is empty. Unfortunately, by de-emphasizing quality rhetoric in education, we have degenerated into a society where everything is propaganda.

In the classical ideal, rhetoric had the noble purpose of bringing out truth. In the modern relativistic world we are simply in a struggle for power and our words are seen simply as propaganda in pursuit of hegemony for our group.

Since we no longer value quality in rhetoric, we've developed new speaking techniques based on cunning and manipulation. We judge the effectiveness on our speaking entirely on the results achieved. If going negative with ad hominem attacks moves the polls, then politicians go for it. If projecting one's intentions on one's oppoents works, then our politicians dive into the propaganda technique. When all else fails, buy the vote with more public spending.

When you look at the rhetorical devices used by today's politicians you will find that they are routinely diverting attention away from the issues. We vote for Republicans who promise to reduce government. Since the promises are empty, they prove to be the opposite of the propagandist image. The Democrats have the population confused to the point where we think healthcare flows out of the fingers of politicians, when, in reality, healthcare is the process of individuals working with each other.

If Americans had learned the trivium, we would not put up with the low quality clowns that have turned our once proud legislative bodies into circuses.

The devaluing of rhetoric is extremely dangerous in a Democratic Republican such as the United States. In this system we are dependent on high quality rhetoric from our politicians so that we can make informed votes.

By ripping logic out of the curriculum of our schools, our left dominated education system has reduced both the ability of our leaders to engage in quality discourse and the ability of the public to appreciate quality discourse. We are left with sound bytes and shrill political maneuvering.

The Trivium v. The Three Rs

The trivium is the foundation of the liberal arts. It is actually much more abstract than the hardheaded three Rs that Conservatives like. The three Rs are Readin', wRitin', and 'Rithmetic.

The Trivium is about the development and communication of ideas. It is about free thinking. The trivium does not produce drones content to toil away in the mills. It actually does a better job of giving students the skills needed to engage in critical thinking than our modern classes in critical thinking. The modern classes in critical thinking are a joke. They teach people to criticize their opponents. It does not show how to formulate and communicate ideas.

I used to be a devout skeptic, until the day I accidentally applied my skepticism to skepticism itself.

An Enviable History

The trivium has an enviable history. It provided the foundations for science, most of mathematics, the American form of government, and the free market.

The modern dialectical method of thinking (new think) has produced a steady string of tyrannies, genocides and atrocities. New think has produced Communism, Fascism, Nazism, capitalism (I distinguish capitalism from the free market). There is strong indication that radical Islam is very much a product of the new think model. Both the Democratic and Republican Parties are now products of the modern new think.

The only thing that new think can claim as a success is the modern public school. This education system, however, is not a producer. It is rich because our society became rich because or forefathers gave us the free market and science.

Public school teachers cling religiously to their new think. Personally, I think the schools would be better if they taught real knowledge in place of new thinking.

The Trivium is Incomplete

Of course, there are big problems with the Trivium. The trivium itself is notably incomplete and there will always be disputes about how the method should be implemented. All you are really doing with the trivium in primary school is creating a high esteem for ideas.

The trivium really starts with the assumption that there is a truth, and that if we engage in high quality discourse we get closer to that truth. This idea is ridiculed by Steven Colbert and The American Dialect Society as "truthiness." The trivium holds that there is a truth, and that we can approach it with quality discourse. Of course, when you look at your discourse, analytical models and rhetorical statements, you always find yourself falling short of what you want to achieve.

A common theme in classical education is that the great thinkers always felt that their education fell short. One of the primary reasons that the left was able yank logic out of the classroom was that the trivium gives people the feeling that their education fell short.

Now, I actually think that this feeling that you are falling short of the truth is a good thing. It becomes a driving force.

What modern education does is it gives people paradoxes and short cuts that create an illusion of completeness. When faced with a moral dilemma or ethical question, the practicianer of new think will throw his dilemma against the paradoxes he learned to admire in primary school and feel smuggly content then do whatever he feels.

I would rather have leaders who are plagued with the vague unease that you feel with logic that one with the absolute uncertainty that one feels when schooled in new think. I would rather have a media that esteemed quality rhetoric than one content on tricking people with sound bytes while ridiculing any serious attempt to engage in dialog as truthiness.

I would rather live in a world with a diversity of schools, than one with an education monopoly that holds the paradox that you embrace diversity by forcing everyone to be the same.

Congratulations to Al Gore

Bringing forth peace is one of the single most difficult problems faced by mankind. The annual awarding of the Peace Prize is a welcome event as it generates discussion on creating peace. As always, it is wonderful to see an American name added to the list of Peace Prize recipients as the United States as Americans have a long history of actively engaging in the march for peace.

I openly congratulate Al Gore for winning the prize. Al Gore and Jimmy Carter are both notable for the hard work, long hours and determination in the struggle for peace.

There are no short cuts to peace.

I was extremely saddened when George W. Bush chose to invade Iraq at a time when we were finally starting to have a successful diplomatic effort in Iraq. This short cut to peace has proven a very long and difficult road.

At times I feel that the partisan nature of the two party system has created a situation where America is not as effective at bringing peace as we should have been. I wish Bush had been dovish enough to stop the march to war with Iraq when we were having diplomatic success. I feel that, with just a little bit more spine, the Clinto/Gore administration could have lessened the damages of the Rwanda and Somalia fiascos.

I do not envy the members of the Peace Prize committee. The challenge is to separate the short cuts to peace from those with a long hard committment to peace. I feel saddened at the apparent partisan nature of this year's peace prize. The fact that the strongest nation on the planet has an uber partisan political system has created a situation where we thrash from one method of short cut takers to another. This instability has the potential of making the US a catalyst for war ... which is the opposite of what the people of this nation want.

The Propaganda Front

The Democratic Congress did a great job yesterday showing how they would solve the problems in the Middle East. The method is simple: You schmooze up to and praise all enemies of the United States and condemn our allies. The example of condemning allies is the resolution to condemn Turkey for a genocide that took place a century ago under a radically different government.

There is nothing special about the US Congress that makes it the authoritative source for international moral definitions. Any act where one political body in one country tosses a label at another is, by definition, a political act.

The world needs to recognize the Armenian genocide as genocide, but the arena of politics is not the right forum. History is the proper forum for debating actions of a century ago. Political bodies should restrict their use of such labels specifically to efforts to stop mass murder. Ironically, in the same news program where Progressive Democrate Tom Lantos beamed about his resolution to condemn Modern Turkey for a genocide committed by their ancestors, the progressive democrat Jimmy Carter carefully split hairs to forgive the Sudanese of the genocide in their little corner of the world.

The genocide in Sudan is sadly like the genocide in Rwanda in that the UN and Western powers sat idly by waffling on definitions and completed failed in efforts to save lives.

The tossing about of labels by political bodies always will be seen within a political context. It is the ultimate in absurdity to think that the progressives really are in tune with some universal truth that the mass murders in Turkey are genocide while the mass murders in Sudan are not.

The roots of modern progressivism is relativism. A relativist rejects the existence of universal definitions. From the vantage point of moral relativism that is intrinsic in leftist thought, then this decision to condemn Modern Turkey for crimes against humanity committed by the Ottoman Turks is a blatant effort to harm the alliance between the US and modern Turkey.

As Congress was not meant to be the institution to define terms, it should stick to resolutions that positively affect the world.

Contrary to what Tom Lantos may think, the current government in Turkey has very little influence on the Ottoman Turks of a 100 years ago. This is not because the current leaders in Turkey are bad people. It is because time is linear.

There is some legitimacy to Carter's hesitancy to officially use the word genocide in diplomatic efforts in Sudan. Alienating a group can lead to atrocities, just as failures to notice the atrocity can lead to atrocity.

We must be careful in dishing out labels. In most cases, the assigning of political labels have unintended negative effects.

One label that is in the news is "Islamo-fascism." I can see some merit to the use of this term. Fascism was an ideology that emerged in the Western Christian world. The western roots of the name clearly implies that the problem is not Islam, but with the radicalization of Islam.

I think that moderate Islamic intellectuals might gain traction if they started emphasizing that Radical Islam is partially a product of the western influences.

Like the National Socialist Party in Germany, the National Socialism in Italy (fascism) was a refinement of communism. In my reading of post colonial history in the Middle East, I find that the communist family of thought has played a dominant role in Islamic intellectual theories. Many of the early thinkers of radical Islam studied revolutionary techniques in the West. Satre and Camus were big players in Algeria hoping to transform the Islamic world into a Communist style state. The Nazis were very active in Iran, to the point that the Iranian army still does the goose step. Saddam Hussein was an avid follower of Stalin. His secret service was trained by the East Germans.

If the Islamic world understood that the disease that currently affects their culture is similar to the one that affected the West in the 20th century, then we might be able to find ways to move beyond the hatred.

I see merit in this term "Islamo-fascism" as it adequately states that the problem is not with Islam, but with a bastardization of Islam. The west suffered under a similar bastardization of ideology.

Of course, I can also see why the left has a problem with the term. This term openly says that radical Islam shares the same intellectual roots as the modern progressives. The modern left uses the same propaganda techniques to support the public school monopoly in education and for arguing for universal health care that the Islamo-fascists use in arguing for Islamic domination of the West.

I suspect that this label "Islamo-fascism" will fail because the left has a stake in seeing it fail. The left is doing a great job is trying to get the term associated with xenophobia. The left made big inroads on this effort by pushing out fake flyers which portrayed the term as hate speech.

The left has hegemony in education, so I suspect that this upcoming Islamofascism Awareness Week will backfire on the right. The term sounds far too much like a jingo for my taste. I will stick with using "Radical Islam."

Regardless, Tom Lantos and Nancy Pelosi can be commended by fellow progressives for driving a wedge between the US and one of our few remaining allies.

The Education of an Alienated Wannabe

The alienated wannabe is one of the few local bloggers in favor the voucher proposal. The reason for his position is that public schools teach evolution as fact instead of theory.

There are two ways to interpret his post. Most people seem to read into his post that he is a right wing nut job who favors creationism creationism to science. I take the guy at his word. It seems to me that the real gist of his argument is simply that the public school system does not teach logic.

Science is dependent on logic. When you remove logic from the curriculum, science becomes a religion. It is possible that the Alienated Wannabe is more interested in protecting his faith than in the well being of kids.

I am more fond of science than religion. I think that modern efforts to transform science into a religion does more harm to science than the existence of a bunch of silly religions.

It is clear that the Alienated Wannabe feels that something was missing from his education. My guess is that he has never encountered a logic text. Without logic, we are unable to explain our ideas.

Like many, my first encounter with logic came in the form of a graduate level class.

The Classical Curriculum taught informal logic in primary school.

If the curriculum included logic, then this silly debate between the creationists and evolutionists would be muted as people would realize that both ideas are theories. Evolution appears to be a better explanation to the make up of this planet. Logic does not pit evolution in opposition to Christianity. After all, evolution is a process of creation.

Now, it is possible that the alienated wannabe is upset simply because his group does not have the hegemony in public education, and that he would be happy if his group had power. If this is the case, then it is true, the alienated wannabe is really not in favor of an open education market. There is a large number of people who only see value in freedom when they are not in power.

When you have a monopoly system in education, you will always find that there is one group or another cout out of the picture. If the lunatic right removed evolution theory from the class room, a different group of alienated people would be wanting to pull their students from the school.

The fundamental argument here is that both the left and right are full of ideas that they want to dictate to others. The right would as abusive with hegemony in the public education as the left currently is. The current monopolistic structure of education has the culture war take place in shrill screaming matches behind closed doors in teaching schools or in the legislature. The market allows for issues to work their way through in open public discourse and with parents finding the school that best suits their needs.

BTW, if you look at the curriculum of most private schools, they teach evolution and actually do a better a more thorough job of teaching the subject than public schools which still handle this important theory as a hot button political issue. When you have an open market of ideas, the best ideas tend to come forward.

Someday explorers might find a large black obelisk that spontaneously generates animals of different species. Were we to find such a device I would change my opinions about evolution in a heart beat, because the creationist argument would have more merit. Were our first interstellar voyage to bounce off a large black curtain encircling the solar system, I would abandon my believe in the large universe theory and readopt the helio centric view. In the market place of ideas, people tend toward the strongest ideas. There is also a long history of brilliant scientists who thought they got it right, but got it wrong.

It is precisely because people will veer toward the best explanation that an open market, open minded system of education would produce produce better results than a top heavy, monopolistic, bureaucratic system.

Mount Aire

I took Coco on a quick walk up Mount Aire in Mill Creek Canyon. The trail had recently been dusted with snow and was a bit muddy but not impassable. The trail rises 1800 feet in 1.8 miles. It is a favorite of fitness hikers and trail runners since you can get a good workout in a short trail.

The trail offers some sweet views of Mount Raymond and Goblers Knob. The picture to the left is of Goblers Nob. As we had a strong storm a few days back, a good portion of the fall folliage has been blown away, but there was enough to provide a few interesting Fall Leave style shots.

A Calculus Teaching Company

The reason I was seeking an education degree was because I had developed methods that would allow school to teach Calculus at a much earlier age. Bringing this method to fruition became a primary goal of my education career. I had hoped to turn it into a real career.

In my opinion, calculus should be taught immediately after or at in concurrence with algebra. Everything becomes easier when one knows calculus. Calculus is the basis of physics. Physics is the basis of chemistry and chemistry the basis of biology. In finance, you can't understand interest rates without calculus. Statistics leans heavily on calculus. Trigonometry is easier to understand once you know calculus. Calculus is primary and it should be taught earlier.

If we had a good method for teaching Calculus to your average high school student, then we would dramatically improve the quality of our math and science education and would dramatically improve the quality of life.

On a side note, my mother was interested in the history of logic. Logic was the center of education from the days of Aristotle through to the modern era. In this 2300 years history of teaching logic, there developed a plethora of approaches to the subject. Interestingly, the very first thing the left did when they gained hegemony in education was to rip the logic class out of the school. That is a different story.

… back to calculus ...

There are multiple ways to teach calculus. The traditional Cauchy method is a college level course. Proponents of new math favor a set theoretic approach which presents calculus as a construct of language. This method fits in well with the tradition of Hegel, Marx, Cantor, Russell and Chomsky. I find the approach paradox ridden. Again, I don't think it is suitable for high school. Marvin Kline proposed an Intuitive Approach to Calculus. His method fits in with the thinking of Montessori, however, it really depends on the skill of the teacher.

Not surprisingly, the method I wanted to develop fell squarely in the classical tradition of Aristotle, Descartes, Leibnitz, Newton, Gauss, Reimann, Einstein, etc.. It would work even better if schools taught logic.

I believed that there was merit to my method. Regardless of my personal thoughts, I would never force it on anyone without data to back up the claim. At the time, I figured I would need about $200,000 to develop and do alpha testing of the curriculum. If the data looked good, I would want to role out a controlled beta test. If the average high school student was able to master Calculus with my method, as I contended, then I would want it to compete with all of the other ideas on the market.

There are multiple ways of teaching subjects like logic and calculus. So, the question is: How do you create a mechanism that simultaneously allows for the development of multiple curriculums with the majority of students getting the best methods?

Unfortunately, in our current single payer system of education, there is market mechanism to allow for diversity of ideas.

In Utah, 96% of students go to public schools. The curriculum is set in Universities that have zero interest any method beyond New Math. Ideas, other than new math, don't even have the potential to survive.

With one extraordinarily corrupt group, the UEA, having absolute power over 96% of the education market, there is no longer any place for ideas such as teaching logic to primary students or teaching Calculus to all students in high school to exist. Survival for diverse ideas is not even possible. It is a stagnant system.

It is possible that new math really is the way to go, and that my method really should fail. That is entirely fine with me. Trying ideas and failing is part of life. For every profound scientific discovery, there are at least a thousand ideas thrown on the table that fail. For every blockbuster toy, there is a thousand flops. This method of developing and testing ideas through open inquiry is called science. The marketplace leads to prosperity. Our left dominated public school has destroyed the marketplace for ideas.

The fact that I never even got the opportunity to put any of my ideas on the table because a group of brownshirts in the education department weeded people out for political reasons is inexcusable and greatly devalues the value of our education.

In the past, I had rejected vouchers. I don't think it is as good as tax credits, neither is as good as a world where taxes are low and people have sufficient personal resources to send students to the school of their choice. In looking at the diversity of the charter and private schools that is starting to come to life in the wake of the State's legislature commitment to diversified education, I decided that the vouchers are a good interim step for breaking the monopoly in education.