Education is to expand experience

Education’s dumbing down frays the bonds of citizenship and is hardest on the poor, says E.D. Hirsch, the man who wrote the book on cultural literacy.

Interviewed by Naomi Schaefer Riley, Wall Street Journal, Sept. 11, 2020

If you have school-age children, the pandemic-induced move to online classes may give you an unusual window into their education. E.D. Hirsch expects you’ll be surprised by “how little whole-class instruction is going on,” how little knowledge is communicated, and how there is “no coherence” from day to day, let alone from year to year.

The current fashion is for teachers to be a “guide on the side, instead of a sage on the stage,” he says, quoting the latest pedagogical slogan, which means that teachers aren’t supposed to lecture students but to “facilitate” learning by nudging students to follow their own curiosity. Everything Mr. Hirsch knows about how children learn tells him that’s the wrong approach. “If you want equity in education, as well as excellence, you have to have whole-class instruction,” in which a teacher directly communicates information using a prescribed sequential curriculum.

Mr. Hirsch, 92, is best known for his 1987 book, “Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know.” It is an argument for teaching “specifics,” followed by a lengthy list of them – thousands of historical figures, events, concepts and literary works with which, in Mr. Hirsch’s view, educated Americans should be familiar. Heavily weighted toward Western history and civilization, the list provoked charges of elitism. Yet Mr. Hirsch is singularly focused on helping disadvantaged kids. They “are not exposed to this information at home,” he says, so they’ll starve intellectually unless the schools provide it.

He continues the argument in his new book, “How to Educate a Citizen,” in which he describes himself as a heretofore “rather polite scholar” who has become more “forthright and impatient because things are getting worse. Intellectual error has become a threat to the well-being of the nation. A truly massive tragedy is building.” Schools “are diminishing our national unity and our basic competence.”

Mr. Hirsch is nonetheless cheerful in a Zoom interview from a vacation home in Maine, his armchair perched next to a window with a water view. An emeritus professor at the University of Virginia, he normally resides in Charlottesville, where he continues his research and acts as the chairman of the Core Knowledge Foundation.

He cites both history and neuroscience in explaining how education went wrong. It began in the 1940s, when “schools unbolted the desks and kids were no longer facing the teacher.” Instead children were divided into small groups and instructed to complete worksheets independently with occasional input from teachers. “That was also when our verbal test scores went down and the relative ranking of our elementary schools declined on a national level.” On the International Adult Literacy Survey, Americans went from being No. 1 for children who were educated in the 1950s to fifth for those in the ’70s and 14th in the ’90s. And things have only gotten worse. Between 2002 and 2015, American schoolchildren went from a ranking of 15th to 24th in reading on the Program for International Student Assessment.

The problem runs deeper than the style of instruction, Mr. Hirsch says. It’s the concept at its root – “child-centered classrooms,” the notion that “education is partly a matter of drawing out a child’s inborn nature.” Mr. Hirsch says emphatically that a child’s mind is “a blank slate.” On this point he agrees with John Locke and disagrees with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who thought children need to develop according to their nature. Both philosophers make the “Cultural Literacy” list, but “Locke has to make a comeback” among educators, Mr. Hirsch says. “The culture is up for grabs, and elementary schools are the culture makers.”

Mr. Hirsch is a man of the left – he has said he is “practically a socialist.” But he bristles at the idea that kids should read only books by people who look like them or live like them. He recalls how reading outside his own experience enabled him “to gain perspective.” Growing up in Memphis, Tenn., in the 1930s, he says, “there was no one I knew who wasn’t a racist.” In his teens, he picked up Gunnar Myrdal’s “An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy” (1944), which “allowed me to escape.” The Swedish sociologist’s survey of American race relations “made a huge impact” on Mr. Hirsch. “I take it as an illustration of how important knowledge is and how important it is to not necessarily become a member of your culture.”

That’s no less true in 21st-century America. “The idea that identity and ethnicity are inborn and indelible from birth is a false view that leads to group hostility,” Mr. Hirsch says. “The idea that there can be an American culture that everyone joins seems to be anathema to some academic thinkers,” Mr. Hirsch says. “But I can’t believe it’s anathema to any normal person in the country who isn’t some social theorist.” It’s fine for children to embrace their particular heritage, he says, but also vital to create an “American ethnicity.” The purpose of elementary schools “is to make children into good citizens.”

That requires knowledge that is “shared nationally, if you’re going to read and write and communicate with one another.” He’s dismayed that people keep getting hung up on the particulars. “I’m fine with arguing about whether it shall be Toni Morrison or Herman Melville. Who cares?” He calls elementary school “a nonpartisan institution,” a view that may seem quaint in an era when schools are adopting ideological curricula like the “1619 Project” and teachers are displaying “Black Lives Matter” banners as their Zoom backgrounds.

Mr. Hirsch wants to correct some of these excesses. He dedicates “How to Educate a Citizen” to the late political scientist Richard Rorty, who died in 2007. Rorty “made a distinction between the political left and the cultural left,” says Mr. Hirsch, who considers himself a man of the former but not the latter. He commends to me a 1994 New York Times article, “The Unpatriotic Academy,” in which Rorty wrote: “In the name of ‘the politics of difference,’ [the left] refuses to rejoice in the country it inhabits. It repudiates the idea of a national identity, and the emotion of national pride.” Mr. Hirsch agrees and longs for the “willingness to sacrifice for the good of society that was very strong” during his early years. “Patriotism is important because we want to make our society work.”

Mr. Hirsch also takes issue with grade schools’ focus on “skills.” Whether it is imparting “critical thinking skills,” “communication skills” or “problem-solving skills,” he says such instruction is a waste of time in the absence of specific knowledge. He describes the findings of the National Academy of Sciences on the subject of the “domain specificity of human skills.” What this means, he explains in the new book, “is that being good at tennis does not make you good at golf or soccer. You may be a talented person with great hand-eye coordination – and indeed there are native general abilities that can be nurtured in different ways – but being a first-class swimmer will not make a person good at hockey.”

He cites the “baseball study,” conducted by researchers at Marquette University in the 1980s, which found that kids who knew more about how baseball was played performed better when answering questions about a text on baseball than those who didn’t understand the game – regardless of their reading level. The conventional response in education circles is that standardized tests are unfair because some kids are exposed to more specific knowledge than others. In Mr. Hirsch’s view that’s precisely why children should be exposed to more content: Educators “simply haven’t faced up to their duty to provide a coherent sequence of knowledge to children.”

There are now about 5,000 schools in the U.S. that use some form of the Core Knowledge curriculum, developed by Mr. Hirsch’s foundation. And research suggests Mr. Hirsch is right. A recent large-scale randomized study of public-school pupils in kindergarten through second grade found that use of the Core Knowledge Language Arts curriculum had statistically significant benefits for vocabulary, science knowledge, and social-studies knowledge.

Even in poor neighborhoods, kids at Core Knowledge schools perform well and are admitted to competitive high schools. From the South Bronx Classical Charter School to the public schools in Sullivan County, Tenn., Mr. Hirsch is clearly proud that his ideas have helped the least privileged kids in America.

He questions the idea that children who are exposed to more “experiences” are at an automatic advantage. “That’s what fiction is for,” he quips. And not only fiction. “The residue of experience is knowledge,” he says. “If you get your knowledge from the classroom, it’s just as good as if you got it from going to the opera. Poor kids can catch up.” ...

Asked about the effect of the pandemic and lockdown on children’s emotional well-being, Mr. Hirsch shrugs, then offers an anecdote from a principal at a Core Knowledge school. Before classes began one morning, a second-grade girl approached him and said, “I’m so excited for [sic] today.” When the principal asked why, she said, “Because today we are going to learn about the War of 1812.”

“Gee, I wonder what that’s about,” the principal said.

“I don’t know,” the girl replied. “But today I’m going to find out!”

For Mr. Hirsch, the lesson is clear. No matter the circumstances, “kids delight in learning things.”

Ms. Riley is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum.

The arrogance of intellectual idiotism

A recent addition to the “liberal” genre of “why don’t people think as correctly as I do and how can we help them see the light” is by one Rebecca Coffey: “Why people believe in genuinely fake news”. She argues with a sense of superior logic and respect for “truth” and science, but her two main examples are one a lie and the other a falsehood.

She begins with the example of Trump claiming to have signed “veterans choice”, except that she takes that as referring to the “Veterans Choice Act” (i.e., the Veterans Access, Choice, and Accountability Act of 2014), which was generally regarded to have been a failure. It was remedied by the “VA MISSION Act of 2018”, which created the permanent as well as more comprehensive Veterans Community Care program. Crucially, it’s apparently been successful. Trump signed it, and gave veterans choice.

So why does she believe otherwise?

Later she cites a Slovakian study showing that logic is not persuasive regarding abortion. The researchers established basic logical syllogism with the participants: if a = b and b = c, then a = c. The establishing example Coffey provides is, “All dogs are mammals. Some carnivores are dogs. Some carnivores are mammals.” (That’s actually a = b, c = a, c = b, but it still works, if a little messy, with a as the connector between b and c. In standard form: Some mammals are dogs, Dogs are carnivores, Some mammals are carnivores. It’s easy to overlook the sloppiness because each statement stands alone as an incontestable fact; none of them actually depends on the others for proof.)

The abortion example, however, utterly fails logically: “All human beings should be protected. Some foetuses should be protected. Some foetuses are human beings.” That’s a = b, c = b, c = a. The conclusion is presented as one of the premises! An elementary logical fallacy. As it is, “should be protected” (b) is a red herring. This syllogism is like, “Dogs are mammals, Bats are mammals, Bats are dogs.” And that makes it clear that the crux of the corrected syllogism – moving c = a back to the middle – depends on proving it as a second premise, which no effort is actually made to do. What is presented as the “logical” conclusion remains both untested and unproven: Bats are dogs.

Yet Coffey writes, “That logical conclusion is not, strictly speaking, an argument for or against abortion. Even so, the researchers ... couldn’t get a statistically significant number of [the participants] to acknowledge the neutral logic that the foetus sequence builds.”

Again, why does Coffey willfully ignore the obvious fallacy?

Old-Time Religious Fanaticism

Penelope Dreadful comments at Clusterfuck:

Many Democrats and Leftists have gone off the deep end on the Democratic Party Narrative, the same way some people go off the deep end over Christianity. I think this is the result of a certain mindset, or maybe Jungian archetype that manifests itself in different ways over different time periods. Move these people back in time a hundred years and they would be busting up saloons and trying to save fallen women from alcohol. Move them to 1930-1940s Germany, and they would be just peachy with rounding up the Jews. Move them back several hundred years and they would be burning heretics at the stake. Or prosecuting witches, as in Europe, and then Salem.

The root of the current manifestation is the whole “we are on the side of the angels” belief among Democrats – that they are good and moral and smart and anybody who isn’t one of them is on the side of the devils. Just like the Spanish Inquisitors thought they were on the side of God, It explains the violent SJWs who are literally trying to burn people (heretics) alive with Molotov cocktails. It explains the Original Sin–like attributes of White Privilege, and the hysterical over-reaction to people who simply say All Lives Matter. And the burning need (literally sometimes) to rewrite history and dwell on 1492 and 1619. It explains the hyperbole about Global Warming and its apocalyptic effect on Earth.

There is even a parallel between “safe spaces” and the “sanctuary” aspect of churches. It explains the hysteria over various symbols like the Confederate flag, or statues of Columbus. It is simply religious fervor and fanaticism unmoored from a physical church building or any actual belief in a god. In fact, the current religious fanatics of the woke Democratic Left are anti-religion and anti-Christianity most of the time. But I surmise that it is more of a Catholic vs. Protestant schism or interdenominational squabble. This is why you see the tremendous pressure on Free Speech, and the attempt to shut down any dissenting view – because those views are not just arguably “wrong”, but are blasphemy and heresy. You even have a tie-in to “transubstantiation” where instead of the bread becoming the actual body of Christ, a man can become a woman, and vice versa, just because they have that Democratic Party faith. They have even brought back the old practice of “shunning”, where the members of the church would “dis-infellowship” the excommunicated, or others who broke certain religious taboos. Now, it is called “cancel culture”.

Outside of the cynical power mad maniacs like Pelosi, the Democrat Party is simply being led by religious fanatics. The Democrats had to go to a faith-based belief system because their main theories about life have turned out to be crap. ...

Democrats are starting to be confronted with the fact that cities and states they have run for decades are not the paradises that were promised. No, by and large they suck. Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit, Philadelphia, etc. And it is becoming more obvious to sensible people. Electing Democrats did not make things all better. So that is why they need to double down on that Old Time Religion, so to speak, and wasn’t that FDR a pip way back when!

And it is not going to get any better. As they are constantly barraged by real, actual facts as opposed to politically correct facts, they are going to become more mentally unraveled. They are already clamoring to defund the police, which pits them against the cynical wing of the party who knows that is nonsense. They are clamoring to secede, and just like the Old Time Puritans, they are trying to set up their own autonomous zones for “religious freedom” purposes, where they can worship at the altar of Social Justice. Delusional people do not go down easily. They go out kicking and screaming.

Civilization and Discontent

Civilization is a very fragile thing. Every one of its myriad members has to suppress themselves to a certain degree to keep it going, to tolerate things they don’t like, to be tolerated themselves. Some things need to be swept under the rug. People have to behave and respect each other. It’s not actually a natural instinct beyond the family or small tribal group. And it’s a very easy thing to destroy. And then things are much much worse for everyone except the very worst.

Race war and anti-worker globalism

K.L. writes—

Aug. 21, 2020:

Message from singer Billie Eilish delivered as part of the DNC convention the other night: “Donald Trump is destroying our country and everything we care about.”

Eilish’s remark is classic Democrat messaging. It ignores, writes off, silences, the voices of those who support Donald Trump—which from the get-go and on down to today happens to include a big chunk of ordinary American working class people of all colors who realized in 2016 they’d been shafted for decades by duplicitous, harmful Democrat policies, and had a rare chance to signal, by voting, their distress.

But this Eilish messaging is a perfect fit for the DNC, because, in reality, for all their talk of equality, the Democrats (and most under the banner of ‘progressivism’ and ‘leftism’ these days) absolutely do not “care about” the American working class. At all. In fact much worse than that: they are out to destroy it and replace this class with neofeudal serfs. (Joel Kotkin does a great job of explaining and predicting that this is what the neoliberal New World Order is out to accomplish.)

Yes, Democrats notably and enthusiastically participated in creating decades of American blue-collar jobs loss—under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama in particular. And as and after they created those losses, they laughed it off. They also added insult to injury about it, claiming the people hurt by their destructive policies didn’t count, were not an important constituency, were relics of the past, and were deplorable anyway.

Democrats (and ‘radical leftists’ too) typically take their brazen attitudes to the point of mocking working-class people of color who support Trump’s job-creating policies. This has been out in the open more or less for decades, but Trump was a flash point that really brought out into the open the ugly attitudes of liberal Democrats toward lower-class Americans in general.

The claim is oft-heard among all levels of Democrats and liberals that if people of color support Trump in any way, for any reason, they don’t count either. In fact, despite being people of color, ‘they ain’t black,’ but really closet white supremacists. Or at the least, mentally ill (which is how they condescendingly write off Kanye West). Talk about racist language. Democrats and most leftists these days have shown themselves to be the biggest, if sneakiest most duplicitous, racists on the planet, plus the biggest haters of the working class and proles generally.

The gall. Absolutely infuriating.

Like it or not, Trump is all that stands between us and these vile, sick, very confused and sometimes very evil puppies. Despite it all, at least pre-Covid, Trump did achieve good things on behalf of domestic working class interests (if of course for many corporate interests too with tax cuts to encourage re-domesticating) when he quashed the TPP, reworked trade deals, and started opportunity zones in underserved areas.

In contrast, Democratic authorities have in their time of leadership openly and wantonly destroyed communities, kept broken communities broken, taken away jobs, and tried to coercively keep people on poor liberal plantations. Now ramping it up, they have been encouraging bored liberal-arts educated kids (both black and white, but mostly white) to riot and destroy in the major cities, often hurting poor black neighborhoods. They are also beating and killing innocent proles who get too close—dragging them out of their vehicles for rough ‘justice.’ No due process needed when you just eyeball a white person or black Trump supporter and declare they are a racist. All ‘racists’ should be beaten and murdered after all.

And Democrats have the gall to say Trump is divisive and destroying the country!

The utterly depraved projections in the DNC messaging is mind-boggling.

But they have big globalized fish to fry and marching orders to get people in line for the Global Reset. So they’re gonna lie and divide, and hold out crumbs to the idpol careerists, whatever it takes, to take down the impediment they perceive in Trump, and most importantly, the ‘hordes’ of little no-account Trump supporters they perceive as being in the way of their Brave New World.

Aug. 18, 2020, on Dem endorsement of violence in the streets:

Democrats really are fine with fomenting race war, so long as it mostly targets the hapless proles (both black and white) who are already the designated losers in neoliberal globalism. Both of which (working class losers and neoliberalism) the Democratic Party have enthusiastically and increasingly helped to create in their dream of a fully technocratic world run by the ‘deserving educated’ professionals and managers like themselves. (They’d really prefer to sweep aside or eliminate anyone not like them. Maybe they’ll keep a few proles around as a novelty or for menial tasks in their brave new robot-run world. Well, the joke’s on them since this new world will eliminate a lot of their professional jobs too.)

Race war as cover for class war, same as it ever was, just under newer, slyer virtue-signaling liberal Democrat management, doing the dirty work for the one-percenter globalist-control vision. Work carried out by usefully tribal idiots and pawns, smug in their delusions of superior importance compared to the deplorables.

To the special class of anti-Trumpers who pretend your outsized Trump hatred is because you believe Trump ‘bamboozled’ the working class and has done (and will do) nothing for them. Ha. What a bunch of reality-challenged jokers you are. You don’t give a fig for the working class or you’d see what Trump has accomplished while under tremendous nonstop onslaughts from viciously lying obstructive Democrats and the deep state. And you’d really hate instead the Democrat class-based betrayals. You’d fight against them with the fervent hate you reserve for Trump. But no, you don’t care enough about the working class to look at reality. Instead, you stay ensconced in comfortable virtue-stroking echo chambers and talking points. You cocoon inside lame outworn liberal ‘virtuous’ categories that mean worse than nothing now, as they’ve been hijacked to justify punishing and taking out the deplorable undeserving little people in favor of vile careerist idpol ladder-climbers.

Trump’s quashing of the planned job-busting TPP was huge, worth the price of admission alone. His busting up of NAFTA and his reworked trade deals are huge too. Ask the people in rust-belt Pennsylvania, who were thrilled when Trump brought back industry to their region. (Despite Obama’s callous assurance those jobs would never come back.). Ask the blacks in Trump’s opportunity zones who were positively impressed not only with increased job opportunities but also with Trump’s First Step Act which released several black first time nonviolent offenders. This explains why pre-Covid, Emerson polling found Trump’s approval rating among blacks rose from 10% to 40%, which is significant.

Too bad the Democrats have turned so ugly and evil that one of their main desperate strategies at this time is to prolong shutdowns in hopes they can continue to pin Covid economic fallout on Trump, even as they project their own dark cynicisms, failures, sins, and betrayals of the people onto him.

Aug. 19, 2020, on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez seconding the nomination of Bernie Sanders for the Dem candidate for President:

Wild. Pretty little speech. It sounds nice.

But to believe it, you have to ignore the grand delusions, huge lies, vicious incivility, and, above all, the destructive ANTI-WORKER GLOBALISM that she, Sanders, and the rest of the DNC have helped stoke and foment for the past four years. And the destructive roots for that go back even far longer, most notably to when Bill Clinton initiated disastrous trade deals that gutted and laid waste to many once-proud American working communities.

The actions of the DNC and its agents have long been long on pretty words to gloss over the way they’ve robbed, demoralized, and betrayed the heart of the ordinary American working class (and used the ill-gotten gains to further line the pockets of the already wealthy and powerful).

Actions should speak louder than words.

No justice no peace, as is said. We must fight and resist the Democrat hate and divisive tactics used against ordinary working (or once working) Americans.

O.E. writes—

They call themselves the left, but they are the forces of reaction against actual progress. They are against the people. And what they promote for themselves are not actual rights but willing self-debasement.

O.E. writes—

Race war is imperial globalism’s most reliable weapon.

Fear and Loathing

There are two kinds of totalitarianism: that modeled by Orwell’s 1984, and that model by Huxley’s Brave New World. Each of them justifies itself as bulwark against the other, against (to oversimply) decadence on one hand and deprivation on the other. The consumerism of the West (decadence!) has indeed ushered us in the direction of a Huxleyan technocracy, but it seems to have taken a diabolic turn with the exploitation of victimhood as a supreme marker of social worth.

Victimhood is thus eagerly embraced as a means of removing anyone who stands in the way of one’s advancing in an institution (academia, business, politics). But it also condemns one to continued victimhood: The Huxleyan machine offers protection, salvation, validation, just sign over your privacy and freedom, both physical and of thought.

And that’s how MeToo, BLM, and Covid lockdown/mask/vaccine mania intersect with globalist neoliberalism and imperial neoconservatism. We’re just demographics in their ad and PR campaigns, their nonsensical consultancies.

Classic advertising plays to status anxiety – that you’re losing out, but you can buy in – and political advertising often plays to outright fear – that you’re losing out owing to the actions of others. With Brexit, Trump, and other successful uprisings against globalism, the ruling elites and their courtiers have panicked. Their fear of losing some of their power, their sense of superiority, has been transferred to a campaign of public fear-mongering that has continued to intensify over the years, especially as Trump’s reelection and the actual implementation of Brexit loom.

In addition to redirecting their own fear to social issues, they have engaged in a campaign of hate, transferring their own status fears to smearing the supporters of Brexit and Trump and anyone who questions the neolib/neocon program of the past four decades, to blaming and mocking the victims of globalism for being at all angry about their privilege (their one-time sense of economic security). And so, lest they be aligned with the losers, so many people align with their victimizers, cheering on their own debasement.

It has succeeded in its goal of making people increasingly more hysterical, irrational, filled with rage and fear. All of us dying in 10 years because of climate change wasn’t enough: now we’re all going to die if you don’t wear a mask! (and even then, stay at least 2 meters away!) Above all, Trump wants you to die! And everyone who does not denounce Trump is your mortal enemy, an agent of sexist and racist hate and genocide.

They have pathologized social interaction and economic life. They have revived racism as a driving force of unrest. They have made a mockery of true grievance and injustice. They have debased politics as well as themselves.

And they will take us all down with them. They have made us hate and fear not only each other, but ourselves as well.

How to set up htaccess to use a parked domain as itself

The problem: You pay for hosting of one domain but you would also like to serve other domains that you have parked there, their files being in subdirectories of the account domain.

The solution: I can only vouch for my experience with Apache, where what is working for me is:

1. In the htaccess file of your account domain:

    RewriteEngine on
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^.*parkeddomain\.com
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /parkeddomain/$1 [L]

2. In the htaccess file of your parked domain:

    RewriteEngine on
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^.*parkeddomain\.com
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} \/parkeddomain\/
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.parkeddomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Brief explanation: The first instruction rewrites the requests for your parked domain to the appropriate subdirectory. That would appear to be enough, but the files in that subdirectory can also be loaded by the account domain and any other parked domain if the path is designated, i.e., http://accountdomain.com/parkeddomain/ and http://parkeddomain2.com/parkeddomain/. So the second instruction prevents this by redirecting the requests for the subdirectory back to the parked domain if they are for any other domain.

Note: Any subdirectory of the parked domain that has the same name as a subdirectory of the account domain, such as “image”, must also have an htaccess file with the directive “RewriteEngine on”. And remember while testing to use your browser’s developer tools to disable caching.