Recently in Learning Category

Here's a short article by Roger Kimball about my home area of Chicago that suggests serious trouble both now and in the near future:
"* In the last six months, 292 people were murdered in Chicago.
* In the same period, there were 183 Americans casualties in Iraq.

* The Illinois State pension fund is $44 billion in debt. That's the worst in the country. Thanks, folks!
* Cook County, wherein Chicago sits, not only put JFK in the White House back in 1960 by encouraging everyone, dead or alive, to vote early and vote often, but it also has the highest sales tax in the United STates: 10.25 percent.
* Meanwhile, the Chicago school system is one of the worst in the country."

I've been joking that Illinois will go for Obama even if every dead person in Chicago has to vote five times. Behind that is a conversation I had as an election judge a few years ago with a fellow election judge about how he had personally been sent out to graveyards on election day in 1960 to find hundreds of votes for JFK. He could tell me that freely because the statute of limitations had run out. So far as I can tell, nothing in our area has changed since to prevent a recurrence.

I'm definitely finding other places to shop, now that my county has the highest sales tax in the country, and I'm sure I'm not alone.

I wonder where those missing pension dollars will be found, given that they are guaranteed by the Illinois constitution? There's no point blaming most of the state employees; they put up their share of pension contributions. It's our state government that never actually got around to funding pensions properly, even back when Republicans were in charge in Springfield.

There's also been some obvious abuse by entities goosing up the last year of pay of favored state employees, since the pension is somewhat based on the final salary. There was an effort this year to require such entities to personally kick in any added pension costs for such goosing, but I don't recall that reform effort succeeding.

One recent ray of hope in IL was State Senator James Meeks' effort this fall to bus poor kids from the south side to rich northern suburbs to call attention to the educational plight of city kids. I haven't seen any actual results from the campaign yet, but it's great to see even some Democrats now see school choice as good for kids otherwise forced into the worst schools.

We fostered one of those kids last fall, and it was amazing how much better he did in a suburban school When he arrived in October, he was a second grader who couldn't count to ten. Two months later, he'd advanced a year educationally - doing first grade level work, but the most telling fact for me was that when he went back into Chicago schools they put him in an honors class in his original grade! If that's typical, no wonder Meeks wants those kids educated anywhere else.

One of this year's hottest Christmas gifts is one you give to the poorest of the poor. The new XO laptop computer, originally intended to help poor children in the third world learn to use a computer, was for a limited time also available to donors via a buy one, get one free offer. Beginning November 14 and ending December 31, 2007, charitable donors were offered a chance to both donate an XO to a poor child via laptopgiving, plus get another XO for personal use or direct donation. Sweetening the pot even more, T-Mobile also threw in a free year of WiFi hot spot access (and I will definitely remember their generosity the next time I need a mobile phone.)

Without knowing this would become a trendy thing to do, I signed up immediately, and became one of the first to actually receive an XO.

The shocking thing to me is that the XO is actually a very cool laptop. It weighs just 3# 9oz (including the battery & power supply), is a tiny 10" x 10" x 1", and uses only 8 watts. yet includes a custom version of Linux, WiFi, 3 USB ports, an SD port, a mic and audio port, a 7" color screen visible even in full daylight that can be flipped over to cover the rubber-protected keyboard and used as a tablet for such tasks as reading an ebook,

Without much fuss I was able to connect to the Internet via my home WiFi system and browse my favorite blog. Even so, it may be months or even years before I figure out all the other options included in this critter. (By then my newborn grandson may be big enough to explain it all to me as we enjoy it together.)

Update: Here's a bit more technical info on the XO: It has a 433MHz AMD CPU, 256MB of RAM, 1GB of SSD storage, and can accept one SDHD card up to at least 8GB in capacity. It also has a 640 x 480 Web cam, so theoretically might even be capable of running the new Linux version 1.4 of Skype for video calls. Its browser is based on Gecko, the same as FireFox, and I've already managed to use the XO to run (albeit very slowly) the database I support at work. Here's my prediction: both kids and hackers (in the good sense) are going to have a ton of fun with this thing.

Update2: After seeing it, Shades agrees. Small example: It turns out the XO is an excellent eBook reader, with many of the features of the hot new Amazon "Kindle" reader. I've already downloaded and read one very good recent novel on it, and found it every bit as good an experience as reading a book on paper, and better than reading one on my Treo. I expect a LOT of good content to be made available for free on the XO, in support of its educational mission to the poorest of the poor. I'm happy to help with that, and also happy to be among those who benefit.

One more new learning: the target age for kids is 6-12, though kids as young as 3 are already enjoying the XO, as are adults.

Update3: The Give One Get One promotion has ended, and was a great success, with 150,000 computers donated. For those who got one, the first update is expected to be available sometime during January of 2008. Some expected features weren't ready yet on Day One, such as a spreadsheet, but will be eventually, so be sure to check the OLPC Wiki occasionally for updates.

Update4: Wow, look Shades, there's already an OLPC group at IMSA (Illinois Math & Science Academy, a wonderful public high school.) Here's their Wiki. Here's how OLPC News described their first presentation to a new Chicago OLPC group.:
"The evening opened with some presentations by the IMSA students. The thing you need to know about them is that they are scary smart. In a good way. Whatever you do, don't underestimate them. Students at IMSA are proud to hold the distinction of the only OLPC High School Interest Group.

Their work with the acoustic tape measure activity led them to believe that the OLPC is a good tool for conducting experiments. From here, they decided to work on a module to present the scientific method. This led them to do research on the societies where OLPC laptops are targeted for, so as to understand social constraints around manner of dress and gestures for video-based content."

Update5: Sadly, Nick Neg, head of OLPC may have just jumped the shark (gutting the OLPC movement of pretty much its entire purpose) by abandoning its open software design in hopes of making the XO into just one more cheap computer that is barely able to run Windows XP.

To American ears, being able to get XP for only $3 may sound pretty good, but to folks who only make a dollar a day in poor third world countries that's a whole lot of unnecessary money given up to make one of the richest men in the world even richer. Learning this made me want to barf, and I'm not alone. It sounds like pretty much everyone whose work I admired on the project has now left, either voluntarily or by being fired.

I usually say I have no regrets in life, by which I mean this:

Had otherwise-unfortunate decisions not been made,
other very-fortunate events might not have followed.

Even so, here are a few past decisions I now consider suboptimal:
1) Voting for Jimmy Carter.
2) Not trying for more kids
3) Not trying for a D. Min.
4) Donating to Planned Parenthood
5) Not moving to Chicago sooner

(Your mileage may vary.)

Popular Mechanics responds to "Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day" by instead recommending "instead of taking our kids to work, how about putting them to work?" Author Jim Meigs goes on to explain "Obviously, learning to pull their own weight helps kids develop independence and a sense of responsibility. But there’s something else. Modern life involves a whole host of skills that are best learned young."

This to me has absolutely the ring of truth. Sadly, my parents didn't succeed in getting me to do many chores around the house as a kid. Caring for the dog, mowing the yard, and taking out the trash was about it, unless I wanted extra money, in which case I was paid minimum wage to pull weeds.

Somehow, I later learned how to do most of the other key home chores, but not as a kid. I reflected on this as I pulled weeds today, realizing I now do for fun what as a child I would only occasionally do even for money.

Embarrassingly, I did no better as a father than I had as a son. My own son too has learned to pull his weight in home chores, but for the most part, he didn't learn it at home as a child. His chore too was taking out the trash, and he never liked the task. Miraculously, he has developed real skills in cooking and cleaning up, tasks I expect to master only in retirement, if even then.

But the key lesson to be learned at home, that we both had to learn later, is that family work is part of family life, and part of preparation for life, as opposed to something unfair that big people impose on little people with the help of either carrots or sticks.

I now fully agree with Meigs when he says "It seems to me that basic competence in life ought to include knowing things like how to change a tire, paint a room, cook a meal, mix concrete, and build simple items out of wood. And the best way to learn these things is working side-by-side with a parent. Those are some of my best memories of childhood (even if I complained at the time.) "

One of the more interesting topics in the recently-popular book Freakanomics is on the impact of various factors in how kids turn out. To sum up its teaching for parents, it doesn't matter what you do, but does matter who you are.

Here's a typical quote:
"Parents who are well educated, successful, and healthy tend to have children who test well in school; but it doesn't seem to much matter whether a child is trotted off to museums or spanked or sent to Head Start or freuently read to or plopped in front of the television."

Similarly, names parents give kids don't correlate with success, despite all the time spent choosing perfect monikers.

Another interesting tidbit is that school choice matters, but not quite the way advocates and opponents might expect. The mere effort of parents to send their child to a different school predicts success for that child compared to children of parents who make no such attempt, even if the first family fails to actually get their child into a different school. The motivation to try appears to be the deciding factor.

Update: As the book itself points out, correlation is not causation, so some of their conclusions are debatable. For instance, they don't think it matters for a child's success whether a family has one parent or two. But if I recall correctly, there is quite a lot of hard research proving the importance of having two parents in the home for child success. To be convinced, I would need to see a lot more evidence than was included in this thin book.

For such purposes, yes, they do have a blog.

Twice in the past year, I've been asked for recommendations to DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana by folks who know I studied there. Both times, I recommended another university. Similarly, I've never donated to DePauw.

The reason is well illustrated by news that DePauw has prevailed thus far in a lawsuit brought by employee Janis Price, who feels punished for conventional Christian religious views.

Here is the story as told by the United Methodist News Service.
A typical quote is: "'This decision represents total vindication of DePauw,' said John T. Neighbours, the attorney who defended the university."

Here is the story as told by Boundless, a source more sympathetic to Ms. Price.
A typical quote is: "“Tell me,” the lawsuit says she asked Abraham, “how is it that I am to be tolerant of others’ beliefs, but they don’t need to be tolerant of mine?”

“We cannot tolerate the intolerable,” Abraham told her, indicating the magazine article [an issue of Focus on the Family]."

A further wrinkle, according to blogger Jack Lewis is that the judge who wrote the Indiana Court of Appeals ruling overturning a jury decision in favor of Price may be a DePauw grad, and may have improperly communicated his decision to the university before it was made public.

I don't know the truth of this story. But I do know enough to direct my education donations elsewhere -- to places where a liberal arts education still means teaching critical thinking regarding multiple points of view, rather than merely indoctrination into currently-fashionable liberal views.

Update: DePauw, located in Greencastle, Indiana is often confused with DePaul, located in Chicago. Based on this Powerline story, looks like I won't be donating to DePaul any time soon either.
"DePaul University in Chicago has invited Ward Churchill to its campus to speak on--of all things--human rights. The college's Republicans have tried to mobilize opposition to Churchill's visit, but have been blocked by the college's administration. Amazingly, the Republicans were denied the right to post flyers criticizing Churchill's visit on the ground that the flyers were "propaganda"!"

Update2: Here's the Young America's Foundation's list of the ten most conservative and ten most liberal colleges:

Conservative:
* Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Mich.
* Grove City College in Grove City, Pa.
* Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio
* Indiana Wesleyan University in Marion, Ind.
* Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Paula, Calif.
* Harding University in Searcy, Ark.
* College of the Ozarks in Point Lookout, Mo.
* Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va.
* Patrick Henry College in Purcellville, Va.
* Christendom College in Front Royal, Va.

Liberal:
* Mills College in Oakland, Calif.
* Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.
* New College of Florida in Sarasota, Fla.
* Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass.
* Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina
* Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y.
* Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif.
* Reed College in Portland, Ore.
* Marlboro College in Marlboro, Vt.
* Earlham College in Richmond, Ind.

What I would consider ideal would be a college with proven ideological diversity across the political spectrum, in the faculty, among students, and in the ranks of guest speakers invited to campus.

Even the left-most of the leftists among our faculty are starting to admit that there just might be a bit of a liberal bias on campus. Recent discussions have centered on this article from The Economist.

Academia is simultaneously both the part of America that is most obsessed with diversity, and the least diverse part of the country. On the one hand, colleges bend over backwards to hire minority professors and recruit minority students, aided by an ever-burgeoning bureaucracy of “diversity officers”. Yet, when it comes to politics, they are not just indifferent to diversity, but downright allergic to it.

This is profoundly unhealthy per se. Debating chambers are becoming echo chambers. Students hear only one side of the story on everything from abortion (good) to the rise of the West (bad). It is notable that the surveys show far more conservatives in the more rigorous disciplines such as economics than in the vaguer 1960s “ologies”. Yet, as George Will pointed out in the Washington Post this week, this monotheism is also limiting universities' ability to influence the wider intellectual culture. In John Kennedy's day, there were so many profs in Washington that it was said the waters of the Charles flowed into the Potomac. These days, academia is marginalised in the capital—unless, of course, you count all the Straussian conservative intellectuals in think-tanks who left academia because they thought it was rigged against them.

To me, a liberal arts university is a place where all viewpoints are welcome and openly debated, with the truth far more likely to emerge from the resulting discussions.

How to find such schools? Just ask what prominent conservative and liberal speakers spoke on campus in the past year. Students for Academic Freedom will also be happy to help.

Update: Instapundit weighed in today with two good comments and links on this topic: one about Harvard managing to hire a renowned conservative despite opposition from liberals, and another about a professor at Foothill College attempting to intimidate an Arab student into therapy for praising the U.S. Constitution.

Update2: Powerline offers a practical example of a mighty institution brought low by lack of idealogical diversity:
" the fundamental problem that led to the downfall of 60 Minutes and, perhaps, CBS News, was the fact that no one involved in the reportorial or editorial process was a Republican or a conservative. If there had been anyone in the organization who did not share Mary Mapes's politics, who was not desperate to counteract the Swift Boat Vets and deliver the election to the Democrats, then certain obvious questions would have been asked: Where, exactly, did these documents come from? What reason is there to think that they really originated in the "personal files" of a long-dead National Guard officer, if his family has no knowledge of them? How did such modern-looking memos come to be produced in the early 1970s? How can these critical memos, allegedly by Jerry Killian, be reconciled with the glowing evaluations of Lt. Bush that Killian signed? Why haven't you interviewed General "Buck" Staudt, who is casually slandered in one of the alleged memos? Why didn't you show the memos to General Bobby Hodges, rather than reading phrases from them to him over the telephone? Isn't it a funny coincidence that these "newly discovered" memos are attributed to the one person in this story who is conveniently dead?

For some years now, the party line of the mainstream media has been: of course we're pretty much all Democrats, but that doesn't influence our news coverage. If nothing else, Rathergate should put that defense to rest once and for all."

Update3: The Opinion Journal offers an interesting perspective on how students are reacting to all this. Suddenly, being conservative is cool...

"The number of College Republicans has almost tripled, from 400 or so campus chapters six years ago, to 1,148 today, with 120,000-plus members (compared with the College Democrats' 900 or so chapters and 100,000 members). College Republicans are thriving even on elite campuses. "We've doubled in size over the last few years, to more than 400 students," reports Evan Baehr, the square-jawed future pol heading the Princeton chapter. The number of College Republicans at Penn has also rocketed upward, says chapter president Stephanie Steward, from 25 or so members a couple of years ago to 700 today. Same story at Harvard. These young Republican activists, trudging into battleground states this fall in get-out-the-vote efforts, helped George W. Bush win.

The bustle reflects a general rightward shift in college students' views."

Why is this happening? Perhaps the Roe Effect.

Mark Satin's book "Radical Middle" makes a great point about education: "Some school districts boast more than three and a half times more spending per pupil than others... It may be the most pressing civil rights issue of our time."

Historically, the Democratic Party has been the one in Illinois wanting to change how elementary and secondary schools are funded, to reduce or eliminate funding differences between rich and poor school districts. This year they have the power to act -- a Democratic governor, Democratic majorities in both houses of the legislature, and of course a Democratic mayor and city council in Chicago.

Unfortunately, silence on this issue remains deafening.

That suggests one more ingredient is still needed -- preferably one that also ensures Republican votes. And the magic ingredient is --- choice. Jeff Jacoby has an excellent column here (read the whole thing), suggesting our current local education system is essentially a monopoly, at least for those without much money, and functions as badly as any other monopoly. The obvious cure he suggests is to let families vote with their feet, choosing better schools over worse ones. As he puts it "Putting power in the hands of parents is the real key to equality -- and the key to excellence, too."

If it were proposed to fund the education of each child in our state equally, from state, rather than local taxes, many Republicans might initially oppose the idea. But if the proposal included vouchers, allowing poor families to select among a variety of schools, the same Republicans might suddenly support the funding change.

I expect teachers' unions are predisposed against changes that allow choice, but deep down I'm sure even they agree the present system is incredibly unfair to the poor, and unfortunately, according to Jacoby their preferred solution of only throwing money at the problem has already been tried and failed.

One more nuance: the new education funding plan could not simply be a redivision of the present resource pie. Rather, it needs to offer the chance for every school to compete fairly with New Trier. Thus it will necessarily cost more overall at first. But if the new system includes school choice, there is every reason to expect long-term economies, as competition among schools inspires each to improve its efficiency and effectiveness.

Experts Ignore Roe Effect

Why are more young adults conservative now than in the '60's? The Wall Street Journal's Opinion Journal suggests it may be by "choice."

"The Supreme Court legalized abortion nationwide in 1973, and it's almost a truism that sexually liberal women are more likely to abort their children than more traditional-minded moms. Result: Since the late 1980s, a higher proportion of teens have been raised in conservative households than would have been the case if abortion were legalized gradually or not at all."

My dad died many years ago, but some of his favorite sayings live on, still repeated regularly by his children and grandchildren:

Another good story spoiled by an eyewitness.

Never let the facts interfere with a good story.

Often wrong, but never in doubt.

It's no harder to arrive on time than to arrive late.

It costs no more to keep the gas tank full than it does to keep it empty.

Never borrow except for your first car and first home.

Graft, inefficiency and corruption run rife.

Never a borrower or a lender be.

If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

...and if I had wings, I could fly.

Experience keeps a dear school, where only fools need learn.

Never lend any more money to friends or relatives than you would be willing to give them as a gift.

Well ain't that a fine kettle of fish?

That's a lazy man's load.

Fish and guests spoil after three days.

Just one more thing to go wrong.

If it had been a snake, it would have bit you.