Peace In Our Time

Neville Chamberlain waving his agreement with Hitler

New York Times Obama groupie Maureen Dowd believes the President has a “superbrain” which produces “amazing insights,” and she predicts that his post-presidential memoir will be ” the most brilliant political memoir outside of Ulysses Grant.” Memo to Modo: Why rank Obama’s as yet unwritten White House masterpiece below that of the Dead White Male Grant?

The real question is not whether he has a super or less-than-super brain, but whether he possesses the knowledge you’d normally expect of an expensively educated (Columbia and Harvard Law School) public figure.

A few have reported on a phrase contained in Obama’s inaugural address that any reasonably knowledgeable person, let alone one with a super brain, would have avoided like the plague:

…America will remain the anchor of strong alliances in every corner of the globe. And we will renew those institutions that extend our capacity to manage crisis abroad. For no one has a greater stake in a peaceful world than its most powerful nation. We will support democracy from Asia to Africa, from the Americas to the Middle East, because our interests and our conscience compel us to act on behalf of those who long for freedom. And we must be a source of hope to the poor, the sick, the marginalized, the victims of prejudice.

Not out of mere charity, but because peace in our time [my emphasis] requires the constant advance of those principles that our common creed describes; tolerance and opportunity, human dignity and justice…

Who made the phrase “peace in our time” infamous?: British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who on returning from Munich in 1938 where he had negotiated with Hitler the so-called Munich Agreement which gave Germany the Sudetenland in return for Hitler’s pledge to stop threatening to invade Germany’s neighbors, waved a piece of paper and said, “I have returned from Germany with peace in our time.” Less than a year later, Germany invaded Poland and World War II began. Chamberlain’s policy was (approvingly back then) called “appeasement.” And for most of my lifetime Chamberlain, the Munich Agreement and appeasement were considered hard lessons of history, warnings that must be heeded in order to avoid catastrophic future wars.

Nowadays, some consider Obama’s foreign policy of “engagement” to be nothing more than appeasement by another name. But few believe that Obama and his speech writers purposely used the rhetorical embodiment of pre-World War II appeasement. No, it seems clear that neither the speech writers nor the super brain himself understood the ironic meaning of “peace in our time.”

Now if George Bush had said that…

You’re Nothing Special

David McCullough, Jr., the son of the famous historian who is a high school teacher at Wellesley, Massachusetts High School, delivers a commencement address students probably did not want to hear:

…From this day forward… truly… in sickness and in health, through financial fiascos, through midlife crises and passably attractive sales reps at trade shows in Cincinnati, through diminishing tolerance for annoyingness, through every difference, irreconcilable and otherwise, you will stay forever graduated from high school, you and your diploma as one, ‘til death do you part.

No, commencement is life’s great ceremonial beginning, with its own attendant and highly appropriate symbolism. Fitting, for example, for this auspicious rite of passage, is where we find ourselves this afternoon, the venue. Normally, I avoid clichés like the plague, wouldn’t touch them with a ten-foot pole, but here we are on a literal level playing field. That matters. That says something. And your ceremonial costume… shapeless, uniform, one-size-fits-all. Whether male or female, tall or short, scholar or slacker, spray-tanned prom queen or intergalactic X-Box assassin, each of you is dressed, you’ll notice, exactly the same. And your diploma… but for your name, exactly the same.

All of this is as it should be, because none of you is special.

You are not special. You are not exceptional.

Contrary to what your u9 soccer trophy suggests, your glowing seventh grade report card, despite every assurance of a certain corpulent purple dinosaur, that nice Mister Rogers and your batty Aunt Sylvia, no matter how often your maternal caped crusader has swooped in to save you… you’re nothing special.

Yes, you’ve been pampered, cosseted, doted upon, helmeted, bubble-wrapped. Yes, capable adults with other things to do have held you, kissed you, fed you, wiped your mouth, wiped your bottom, trained you, taught you, tutored you, coached you, listened to you, counseled you, encouraged you, consoled you and encouraged you again. You’ve been nudged, cajoled, wheedled and implored. You’ve been feted and fawned over and called sweetie pie. Yes, you have. And, certainly, we’ve been to your games, your plays, your recitals, your science fairs. Absolutely, smiles ignite when you walk into a room, and hundreds gasp with delight at your every tweet… And now you’ve conquered high school… and, indisputably, here we all have gathered for you, the pride and joy of this fine community, the first to emerge from that magnificent new building…

But do not get the idea you’re anything special. Because you’re not.

The empirical evidence is everywhere, numbers even an English teacher can’t ignore. Newton, Natick, Nee… I am allowed to say Needham, yes? …that has to be two thousand high school graduates right there, give or take, and that’s just the neighborhood Ns. Across the country no fewer than 3.2 million seniors are graduating about now from more than 37,000 high schools. That’s 37,000 valedictorians… 37,000 class presidents… 92,000 harmonizing altos… 340,000 swaggering jocks… 2,185,967 pairs of Uggs. But why limit ourselves to high school? After all, you’re leaving it. So think about this: even if you’re one in a million, on a planet of 6.8 billion that means there are nearly 7,000 people just like you. Imagine standing somewhere over there on Washington Street on Marathon Monday and watching sixty-eight hundred yous go running by. And consider for a moment the bigger picture: your planet, I’ll remind you, is not the center of its solar system, your solar system is not the center of its galaxy, your galaxy is not the center of the universe. In fact, astrophysicists assure us the universe has no center; therefore, you cannot be it. Neither can Donald Trump… which someone should tell him… although that hair is quite a phenomenon.

“But, Dave,” you cry, “Walt Whitman tells me I’m my own version of perfection! Epictetus tells me I have the spark of Zeus!” And I don’t disagree. So that makes 6.8 billion examples of perfection, 6.8 billion sparks of Zeus. You see, if everyone is special, then no one is. If everyone gets a trophy, trophies become meaningless. In our unspoken but not so subtle Darwinian competition with one another–which springs, I think, from our fear of our own insignificance, a subset of our dread of mortality — we have of late, we Americans, to our detriment, come to love accolades more than genuine achievement. We have come to see them as the point — and we’re happy to compromise standards, or ignore reality, if we suspect that’s the quickest way, or only way, to have something to put on the mantelpiece, something to pose with, crow about, something with which to leverage ourselves into a better spot on the social totem pole. No longer is it how you play the game, no longer is it even whether you win or lose, or learn or grow, or enjoy yourself doing it… Now it’s “So what does this get me?” As a consequence, we cheapen worthy endeavors, and building a Guatemalan medical clinic becomes more about the application to Bowdoin than the well-being of Guatemalans. It’s an epidemic — and in its way, not even dear old Wellesley High is immune… one of the best of the 37,000 nationwide, Wellesley High School… where good is no longer good enough, where a B is the new C, and the midlevel curriculum is called Advanced College Placement. And I hope you caught me when I said “one of the best.” I said “one of the best” so we can feel better about ourselves, so we can bask in a little easy distinction, however vague and unverifiable, and count ourselves among the elite, whoever they might be, and enjoy a perceived leg up on the perceived competition. But the phrase defies logic. By definition there can be only one best. You’re it or you’re not…

Inflated Grades, Useless Subjects, a Debased Degree

I taught school for the 35 years that saw the birth and explosion of “self-esteem” education: the belief that forcing students to acquire “mere knowledge” is cruel and unnecessary (not to mention difficult and time consuming) and that teaching students “how to think” (really pumping up their egos while marinating their minds in the agenda of the Democratic Party) is what education ought to be about.

When Barack Obama came on the scene, I recognized him as the perfect product of the post-1960′s American education system which gave us the obliviously ignorant but powerfully narcissistic elite university graduate. Decades ago, researchers reported on the highly skilled and knowledgeable Korean students who nonetheless were insecure about their abilities. At the same time, their American counterparts were woefully lacking in knowledge and skills while maintaining an incomparable level of self-esteem, which perfectly describes our current president.

Wall Street Journal columnist Brett Stephens sums up Obama and his acolytes in a piece addressed to “the class of 2012:

Dear Class of 2012:

Allow me to be the first one not to congratulate you. Through exertions that—let’s be honest—were probably less than heroic, most of you have spent the last few years getting inflated grades in useless subjects in order to obtain a debased degree. Now you’re entering a lousy economy, courtesy of the very president whom you, as freshmen, voted for with such enthusiasm. Please spare us the self-pity about how tough it is to look for a job while living with your parents. They’re the ones who spent a fortune on your education only to get you back— return-to-sender, forwarding address unknown.

No doubt some of you have overcome real hardships or taken real degrees. A couple of years ago I hired a summer intern from West Point. She came to the office directly from weeks of field exercises in which she kept a bulletproof vest on at all times, even while sleeping. She writes brilliantly and is as self-effacing as she is accomplished. Now she’s in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban.

If you’re like that intern, please feel free to feel sorry for yourself. Just remember she doesn’t.

Unfortunately, dear graduates, chances are you’re nothing like her. And since you’re no longer children, at least officially, it’s time someone tells you the facts of life. The other facts.

Fact One is that, in our “knowledge-based” economy, knowledge counts. Yet here you are, probably the least knowledgeable graduating class in history.

A few months ago, I interviewed a young man with an astonishingly high GPA from an Ivy League university and aspirations to write about Middle East politics. We got on the subject of the Suez Crisis of 1956. He was vaguely familiar with it. But he didn’t know who was president of the United States in 1956. And he didn’t know who succeeded that president.

Pop quiz, Class of ’12: Do you?

Many of you have been reared on the cliché that the purpose of education isn’t to stuff your head with facts but to teach you how to think. Wrong. I routinely interview college students, mostly from top schools, and I notice that their brains are like old maps, with lots of blank spaces for the uncharted terrain. It’s not that they lack for motivation or IQ. It’s that they can’t connect the dots when they don’t know where the dots are in the first place…

When did puffery become the American way? Probably around the time Norman Mailer came out with “Advertisements for Myself.” But at least that was in the service of provoking an establishment that liked to cultivate an ideal of emotional restraint and public reserve.

To read through your CVs, dear graduates, is to be assaulted by endless Advertisements for Myself. Here you are, 21 or 22 years old, claiming to have accomplished feats in past summer internships or at your school newspaper that would be hard to credit in a biography of Walter Lippmann or Ernie Pyle.

If you’re not too bright, you may think this kind of nonsense goes undetected; if you’re a little brighter, you probably figure everyone does it so you must as well.

But the best of you don’t do this kind of thing at all. You have an innate sense of modesty. You’re confident that your résumé needs no embellishment. You understand that less is more.

In other words, you’re probably capable of thinking for yourself. And here’s… [another fact]: There will always be a market for people who can do that.

In every generation there’s a strong tendency for everyone to think like everyone else. But your generation has an especially bad case, because your mass conformism is masked by the appearance of mass nonconformism. It’s a point I learned from my West Point intern, when I asked her what it was like to lead such a uniformed existence.

Her answer stayed with me: Wearing a uniform, she said, helped her figure out what it was that really distinguished her as an individual.

Now she’s a second lieutenant, leading a life of meaning and honor, figuring out how to Think Different for the sake of a cause that counts. Not many of you will be able to follow in her precise footsteps, nor do you need to do so. But if you can just manage to tone down your egos, shape up your minds, and think unfashionable thoughts, you just might be able to do something worthy with your lives…

And here’s John Steele Gordon on our puffed-up president:

The new web ad being run by the Obama re-election campaign stars Bill Clinton. The copy is priceless, vintage Obama self-absorption. It starts off with the words on the screen, “The commander-in-chief gets one chance to make the right decision.” Then President Clinton comes on and says,

“Look, he knew what would happen. Suppose the Navy SEALs had gone in there and it hadn’t been bin Laden. Suppose they had been captured or killed. The downside would have been horrible for him.”

Isn’t that great? The Navy SEALs risk death or imprisonment in some filthy Pakistani jail and Obama risks . . . . a bad headline.

It reminds me of a story about Harold Ross, the legendary founding editor of The New Yorker. James Thurber had written a profile on someone and it was scheduled to run in the next issue as the lead article. About half an hour before the magazine was to close, however, Thurber ran into Ross’s office and told him they would have to kill the profile because the subject had just died. Ross’s reaction? “Goddamnit! Why does everything have to happen to me?”

At least Harold Ross was a great editor.

It’s The Federalist Framework, Stupid!

Most Americans (apparently including Rick Santorum) don’t understand how the American constitutional system of government is supposed to work. Ann Coulter (you’ll excuse the expression) brilliantly explains in a column critical of Rick Santorum:

…It’s strange that Santorum doesn’t seem to understand the crucial state-federal divide bequeathed to us by the framers of our Constitution, inasmuch as it is precisely that difference that underlies his own point that states could ban contraception.

Of course they can. States could outlaw purple hats or Gummi bears under our Constitution!

State constitutions, laws, judicial rulings or the people themselves, voting democratically, tend to prevent such silly state bans from arising. But the Constitution written by James Madison, et al, does not prevent a state’s elected representatives from enacting them.

The Constitution mostly places limits on what the federal government can do. Only in a few instances does it restrict what states can do.

A state cannot, for example, infringe on the people’s right to bear arms or to engage in the free exercise of religion. A state can’t send a senator to the U.S. Congress if he is under 30 years old. But with rare exceptions, the Constitution leaves states free to govern themselves as they see fit.

In New York City, they can have live sex clubs and abortion on demand, but no salt or smoking sections. In Tennessee, they can ban abortion, but have salt, creches and 80 mph highways. At least that’s how it’s supposed to work.

And yet when Santorum tried to explain why states could ban contraception to Bill O’Reilly back in January, not once did he use the words “Constitution,” “constitutionally,” “federalism,” their synonyms or derivatives. Lawyers who are well familiar with the Constitution had no idea what Santorum was talking about.

He genuinely does not seem to understand the Constitution’s federalist framework, except as a brief talking point on the way to saying states can ban contraception. Otherwise, he wouldn’t keep claiming, falsely, that Obamacare is the same as Romneycare.

Rick! We’re conservatives! We believe the states can establish a religion — and the federal government can’t.

If he truly believed in the Constitution, Santorum wouldn’t be promoting big social programs out of the federal government, such as tripling the child tax credit exemption and voting for “No Child Left Behind.” …

Then she deals hilariously with Santorum’s line about those who say everyone should go to college are snobs:

…This isn’t the ’20s, when only the upper classes went to college. These days, every idiot who can scratch an “X” on his checkbook assumes hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to make himself less employable by taking college courses in — for example — “Lady Gaga and the Sociology of Fame” (University of South Carolina, Columbia), “GaGa for Gaga: Sex, Gender and Identity” (University of Virginia), “Arguing With Judge Judy: Popular ‘Logic’ on TV Judge Shows” (University of California, Berkeley), “The Phallus” (Occidental College), “Zombies” (University of Baltimore), “Comics” (Oregon State University), “Harry Potter: Finding Your Patronus” (Oregon State University), and “Underwater Basket Weaving” (University of California at San Diego).

My fellow Americans, Meghan McCain has a bachelor’s degree.

It’s not snobbery that compels liberals to promote college for all; it’s a scam to manufacture more Democratic voters, much like their immigration policies.

Is a Valley Girl who takes courses in Self-Esteem at Cal State Fresno (an actual course at an actual college) a finer class of person than a skilled plumber with approximately 1,000 times the earning capacity and social worth of the airhead?

No. But she is more likely to vote Democratic.

Encouraging everyone to go to college creates an all-new class of people entirely dependent on the government, which is to say: reliable Democratic voters.

First, the taxpayer subsidizes the wasted human space teaching these moronic courses (at prices far outpacing inflation), and then the taxpayer pays the incomes of the graduates who are resigned to filling ever-growing no-show, self-paced and self-evaluated government jobs.

Who else would employ a graduate with a degree in Women’s Studies, Early Childhood Education, Physical Education , Sociology or Queer Studies but the government?

The Penn State Spa and Country Club

Ann Neal, writing in the Wall Street Journal, reveals another quite different Penn State scandal:

…Edward Shils, distinguished service professor at the University of Chicago, saw the task of the university as the “discovery and teaching of truths about serious and important things.” Could Penn State—or most other American universities for that matter—make such a claim today?

When the most highly paid employee is the football coach, not the president, it’s clear something is awry. When football tickets and fancy student centers are the currency of the day, rather than affordable and quality education, clearly something is awry. When most classes are scheduled only between Tuesday and Thursday and the institutional answer is to build more buildings to accommodate the demand from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.—as Penn State is doing—something is awry.…

So the taxpayers of Pennsylvania are financing unnecessary buildings because spoiled adolescents and their under-worked teachers prefer a 3 day work week and then only between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m.?

No wonder we are broke.

Whining Wall Street Bullies

Dana Summers

The great Canadian columnist David Warren gives some sage advice to the zombies “occupying” Wall Street:

The “Occupy Wall Street” demonstrations – now franchising across the U.S. and Canada – are the latest fashion statement from the Left, for the fall political season, in a year that has already offered the Arab Spring, and the debt riots of Europe. North Americans hate to miss out on a trend.

What can be said to these people? Where to start?

If you honestly think the banks are making too much money, then you should buy some bank shares. They are freely available in the open market.

And if you think all these profits are immoral, then get your friends together. Buy up lots of shares. Collect all these obscene dividends, and then: give the money to the poor and unemployed.

No, I’m not kidding. The poor are unlikely to refuse. I have the honour to live among them (thanks to the ministrations of government bureaucracies, with initials like CRA and FRO), and I know them. They are not shy. They will take your money. Indeed, if you get to know them yourself, you will find that they are as human as bankers, and as greedy. Just not very successful…

[O]pen a soup kitchen… Or pay some poor kid’s college tuition. It’s your call. (I personally think a college education is, these days, about the most destructive thing you can provide for a kid, but that’s just my opinion.)

This is the unanswerable argument to the Left of all ages: Instead of trying to coerce someone else to do what you think is right and just (and every Left policy I have ever seen involved coercion of the non-Left), put your money where your mouth is. Go “liberate” cash by legitimate means (within the laws), then set an example in how you spend it.

Give, until it hurts, to the most needful. And you can volunteer your free time into the bargain, for in my experience, you cannot begin to know who is most needful, until you have rolled up your pant legs and waded into action…

But now comes the disappointment. For I am recommending a course that gives none of the rewards craved by the cavorting young ego. There is none of the euphoria of street demonstrations, none of the easy applause (and easy sex) that comes from boldly posturing as one of the “good people,” fighting against the “bad people.”

The rewards for doing something, where it counts, are different in kind; and they do not come easily.

I look at all the faces of the young, made up as zombies, clutching that fake dollar-store money, and strutting down Wall Street. Most, obviously, college-educated: the final products of an educational system that imparts little knowledge but a lot of self-esteem. I look at the sheer smugness in those faces, of people who have never experienced real hardship. All demanding that someone else do something.

For that is the nature of street demonstrations: a form of coercion, of public bullying. Getting yourself arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge, by gratuitously blocking the traffic of the working stiffs, does not help anyone. It is a form of personal display, an act of whining self-righteousness that is intrinsic to the psychology of the bully.

The attraction, to the copy-cat demonstrators across the continent, is “me too.” This is the Left’s answer to the Tea Party in the U.S. – a point made repeatedly through the liberal media, which themselves take pleasure in the analogy.

The comparison is utterly false. The Tea Party types have not taken the streets, and their organizers have consistently struggled to maintain civility: to ostracize any member whose behaviour or loose talk detracts from the dignity of the movement. They are organizing to win elections, chiefly through the established Republican Party: to advance their cause by legitimate democratic means. And their rank-and-file consists, overwhelmingly, of grown-ups.

Close ‘Em Down!

As usual, Mark Steyn entertainingly reveals the hypocrisy behind the liberal media’s gleeful coverage of the Rupert Murdoch/News of the World scandal:

News of the World employees, now unemployed

…I confess to feeling a little queasy at the sight of bien pensant liberal opinion gloating at having deprived four million people of their preferred reading matter. If one were so inclined, one might be heartened by the swift responsiveness to pressure of the allegedly all-powerful bogeyman Murdoch. But you can’t help but notice that this supposed public shaming is awfully selective. In the week of the News Of The World revelations, it was reported that the Atlanta Public Schools system has spent the last decade systemically cheating on its tests. Not the students, but the Superintendent, and the union, and 38 principals, and at least 178 teachers – whoops, pardon me, “educators,” and some 44 of the 56 school districts. Teachers held “changing parties” at their homes at which they sat around with extra supplies of erasers correcting their students’ test answers in order to improve overall scores and qualify for “No Child Left Behind” federal funding that could be sluiced into maintaining their lavish remuneration. Let’s face it, it’s easier than teaching, right?

The APS Human Resources honcho Millicent Few had an early report into test-tampering illegally destroyed. So APS not only got the federal gravy but was also held up to the nation at large as a heartwarming, inspirational example of how large urban school districts can reform themselves and improve educational opportunities for their children.

And its fake test scores got its leader, Beverly Hall, garlanded with the National Superintendent of the Year Award, the Administrator of the Year Award, the Distinguished Public Service Award, the Keystone Award for Leadership in Education, the Concerned Black Clergy Education Award, the American Association of School Administrators Effie H. Jones Humanitarian Award and a zillion other phony-baloney baubles with which the American edu-fraud cartel scratches its own back.

In reality, Beverly Hall’s Atlanta Public Schools system was in the child-abuse business: It violated the education of its students to improve its employees’ cozy sinecures.

The whole rotten stinking school system is systemically corrupt from the superintendent down. But what are the chances of APS being closed down? How many of those fraudulent non-teachers will waft on within the system until their lucrative retirements?

Or consider “Operation Fast and Furious,” about which nothing is happening terribly fast and over which Americans should be furious.

The official explanation is that the federal government used stimulus funding to buy guns from Arizona gun shops for known criminals to funnel to Mexican drug cartels. As I said, that’s the official explanation: As soon as your head stops spinning, we’ll resume the narrative. Supposedly, United States taxpayers were picking up the tab for Mexican drug lords’ weaponry in order that the ATF could identify high-up gun-traffickers. But, as it turns out, these high-up gun-traffickers were already known to other agencies – FBI, DEA and other big-spending acronyms in the great fetid ooze of federal alphabet soup in which this republic is drowning. And, indeed, some of those high-ups are said to have been paid informants for those various federal agencies. So, in case you’re wondering why Obama’s second annual Recovery Summer is a wee bit sluggish at your end, relax: Stimulus dollars went to fund one federal agency to buy guns for the paid informants of another federal agency to funnel to foreign criminals in order that the first federal agency might identify the paid informants of the second federal agency.

Meanwhile, what did the drug cartels, the recipients of the guns, do with them? Well, they used them to kill at least one member of a third federal agency: Brian Terry of the United States Border Patrol. If that doesn’t bother you, well, they also killed not insignificant numbers of Mexican civilians.

If, by this stage, you’re wondering why U.S. stimulus dollars are being used to stimulate the Mexican coffin industry, consider the dark suspicion of many American gun owners – that the real reason the feds embarked on this murderous scheme was to plant the evidence that the increasing lawlessness on the southern border is the fault of the gun industry and the Second Amendment, and thereby advance its ideological agenda of ever greater gun control.

We’re not talking about hacking a schoolgirl’s cellphone here. Real people are dead. Yet nobody’s going to close down any wing of the vast spendaholic DEATFBI hydra-headed security-state turf-war. And while Eric Holder, the buccaneering attorney general at the center of this wilderness of mirrors, doesn’t yet have as many Distinguished Public Servant of the Year awards as Beverly Hall, judging from his cheerfully upfront obstruction of the congressional investigation, he’s not planning on going anywhere soon.

Eric Holder: still employed

So, at The News Of The World, every single employee is clearing out his desk. But, at the Atlantic Public Schools, at the DEATFBI, life goes on. A curious contrast. The striking feature of big government, from Athens to Sacramento, is its imperviousness to any kind of accountability – legal, fiscal, electoral, popular…

Another Miracle Worker Bites The Dust

Atlanta public schools’ superintendant Beverly Hall joins the ranks of disgraced educational miracle workers:

Dr. Beverly Hall and her medal

…Longtime Atlanta schools chief Beverly Hall has been lauded nationally as a top leader for turning around struggling urban districts, but she retires this week amid allegations of widespread cheating and accusations that she ordered a cover-up of test tampering.

It’s not quite the ending Hall’s supporters imagined for her nearly 12-year career as the superintendent of the 50,000-student district – where nearly three-fourths of students live at or below the poverty line.

The 64-year-old Jamaica native won the national Superintendent of the Year award in 2009 and landed on short lists for U.S. Department of Education jobs. Even her long tenure in Atlanta stands out nationally: few urban school superintendents stay in one district longer than four years.

But now Hall’s actions are among those being scrutinized as part of yearlong criminal investigation into the cheating allegations, which stem from a state report showing high numbers of erasures on standardized tests given to Atlanta students in 2009. And the district faces losing accreditation after school board squabbles over the scandal led to the system being put on probation by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools…

Hall’s tenure reminds me of that of Philadelphia schools’ superintendent Constance Clayton. Like Hall, the credulous local media declared her to be the one the city had been waiting for. She too was declared destined for higher office, in her case, mayor and U.S. Secretary of Education.

After a while, it became clear, even to many of those who had worshiped her, that the claims of skyrocketing test scores were another pipe dream, and she left with none of the fanfare that greeted her arrival as the first black woman schools’ chief.

Hall’s case is also similar to former D.C. schools’ head Michelle Rhee. There teachers and principals were accused of test tampering, but for some reason the media have not gone after Rhee, probably because they have invested so much of their own credibility in her “achievements.”

This ought to be cause for skepticism when it comes to educational miracle workers, but I suspect the naive media will fall for the next one just as hard as they did for the last ones.

The Eternal Adolescence of Higher Education

Mark Steyn on higher education, America’s “biggest structural deformity”:

…Passing a leisurely half-decade toying with a mélange of pseudo-disciplines is a very expensive way to acquire a piece of paper assuring U.S. businesses you’re safe for white-collar employment.

The “education” system is one of the biggest structural deformities in America today. It leads to later workforce participation and later family formation, both of which factor into our existentially catastrophic entitlement liabilities. And yet Obama wants every American child to go to college. What sort of “education” do you think they’ll be getting once that happens? And what value do you think that sheepskin will hold in the wider world?

The justification for this absurd prolongation of adolescence is that it opens up opportunities for the disadvantaged. But credential-fetishization has the opposite effect. Remember Ronald Reagan, alumnus of Eureka College, Illinois? Since then, for the first time in its history, America has lived under continuous rule by Ivy League — Yale (Bush I), Yale Law (Clinton), Harvard Business (Bush II), Harvard Law (Obama). In 2009, over a quarter of Obama’s political appointees had ties to Harvard; over 90 percent had “advanced degrees.” How’s that working out for you? In my soon to be imminently forthcomingly imminent book, I point out that once upon a time America was the land where guys without degrees (Truman) or only 18 months of formal education (Lincoln) or no schooling at all (Zachary Taylor) could become president. Credentialization is shrinking what was America’s advantage — a far greater social mobility than Europe. We’re decaying into a society where 40 percent of the population do minimal-skill service jobs and the rest run up a trillion dollars of debt in order to avoid that fate, and ne’er the twain shall meet, except for perfunctory social pleasantries in the drive-thru lane…

Depraved But Not Deprived

On his television show today, Fareed Zakaria referred to a new report on what causes people to become terrorists. Zakaria noted all the money we give to Pakistan that goes toward development to eliminate poverty which liberals like to claim is the “root cause” of all kinds of bad behavior.

But here is an excerpt from the conclusion of the report I think Zakaria referred to:

…terrorism resembles a violent form of political engagement. More educated people from privileged backgrounds are more likely to participate in politics, probably in part because political involvement requires some minimum level of interest, expertize, commitment to issues and effort, all of which are more likely if people have enough education and income to concern themselves with more than minimum subsistence…

I would go further than that: Modern education teaches disaffection as a normal reaction to allegedly racist, unjust and imperialistic societies. So an intellectual is by definition a political activist and often sees himself as a revolutionary compelled to bring down the present order “by any means necessary.”

The root causes theory (poverty) is the intellectuals’ conventional excuse for urban crime perpetrated by mostly poor minorities. But when asked why they engage in violent crime, the urban criminals often spout the same liberal platitudes as their intellectual apologists: Violent crime is a rational reaction to racism and poverty. Or as Stephen Sondheim wrote in the song “Officer Krupke” from West Side Story: “We’re depraved on account of we’re deprived!”