Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
This article from the New York Times‘s education issue (click on screenshot) tells us once again the degree of political sensitivity in American schools—this time in an elite New York secondary school. It’s a long read, but worth it:
The story in short: a somewhat socially awkward but popular teacher, Ben Frisch, who worked for years at Friends Seminary in Manhattan (a private Quaker school for rich kids), wound up turning an extended arm into what he thought was a joke. But it turned out to be a bad and misconceived joke. As the NYT reports:
Ben Frisch opened his Feb. 14 pre-calculus class at Friends Seminary the same way that he opened all his classes over the course of his 34 years at the private Quaker school in Manhattan: with an invitation to his students to share anything that was on their minds, followed by the gentle ringing of a chime and a long moment of silence. He then introduced the day’s lesson, involving the calculating of angles of depression and elevation. Frisch straightened out his right arm to demonstrate. He lowered it down and then raised it up. Glancing at his arm, now fully extended and pointing slightly upward, Frisch realized something: He was inadvertently pantomiming the Nazi salute. Frisch is a practicing Quaker, but his father was Jewish, and two of his great-grandmothers were killed at Auschwitz. Mortified, he searched for some way to defuse the awkwardness of the moment. And then he said it: “Heil Hitler!”
A few students gasped; others exchanged surprised looks or laughed nervously. Instantly aware that his stab at Mel Brooks-style parody hadn’t landed, Frisch lowered his arm and tried to explain himself, telling his students that it used to be common to make fun of Nazis. Only recently, he said, had such jokes become taboo. He resumed the lesson, and the weird moment seemed to be over.
It wasn’t. Frisch was fired.
Parents’ reaction were somewhat mixed about this, but, as the Times reports, “the overwhelming majority of students, teachers, and alumni disapproved of Frisch’s firing”, though some thought this was “unforgivably offensive.” I don’t think so. It was a hamhanded attempt to make a joke out of a weird gesture, and it backfired. Frisch even apologized, but it wasn’t enough. And the fact that his father was Jewish and two relatives were killed in the Holocaust didn’t matter. Bo Lauder, head of the school, who wants to make it the equivalent of Manhattan’s most elite private prep schools, terminated Frisch. Further, he prohibited the students from putting out an issue of their newspaper that defended Frisch, and then fired the editors when they disseminated the issue to the school as a pdf. Lauder’s excuse?
Lauder did not consider the “Heil Hitler” episode a close call. “Personally, I was appalled,” he told me. “I couldn’t imagine, even as a joke — and I grew up watching ‘Hogan’s Heroes’ — that in a class that had nothing to do with history or World War II or Nazism or teaching German language that an incident like that could happen.” I asked Lauder why he felt he needed to go so far as to fire Frisch. “One of our pledges is to make all of our students feel safe,” he replied. “And that is something that I take very, very seriously.”
That no one has accused Frisch of being an anti-Semite was beside the point: His invocation of the Nazi salute in a classroom full of high school students, regardless of his intentions, was enough to end his career. On today’s campus, words and symbols can be seen as a form of violence; to many people, engaging in a public debate about the nuances of their power is to tolerate their use.
This really is going too far, and abrogates common decency and an empathic understanding of what happened. It isn’t even close to Count Dankula, the Scotsman who trained his girlfriend’s dog to make a “Heil Hitler” salute with his paw when Dankula said “Gas the Jews.” That was deliberate, though a (bad) joke—and I think Dankula, who was convicted, should have been found innocent. But what Frisch did wasn’t even a deliberate joke: just a misfired attempt to turn a gesture into something lighthearted. But these days you don’t use Hitler to be lighthearted.
So kudos to the students, teachers, and parents who are supporting Frisch (see photo below). Although he was fired, Frisch was a member of a teacher’s union, and they’re appealing his suspension.
Some of the supportive students; it’s heartening to see such sentiments in students not yet in college:
BENJAMIN LEVINE, ABRAHAM LEVIN, CAMILO DURR AND MAEVE WOOLLEN, ALL RECENT GRADUATES OF FRIENDS SEMINARY, AT STUYVESANT SQUARE PARK. ELIZABETH BICK FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
The Chronicle of Higher Education, a rather sober venue not given to polemics (I think they edit essays pretty thoroughly), nevertheless published a strong-minded article on how graduates of American schools of education are taking over the student-life administration of many schools, converting them into propaganda mills. Click on the screenshot to read the piece. The author, Lyell Asher, is an associate professor of English at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, which means he’s in for trouble (Portland is Antifa and Authoritarian Left Central; Asher is also an Old White Man). If you can’t see the article, judicious inquiry might yield you a copy:
Asher’s thesis is threefold. First, American schools of education are dire: he sees them as more ideologically-infused factories designed to produce “social justice warriors” than schools devoted to objective investigation of the truth, wherever that investigation goes. I can’t speak about that, but in the article’s comments you’ll see ed-school people who both agree and vehemently disagree.
Second, Asher argues that graduates who took jobs at colleges as administrators and bureaucrats (instead of professors) found that they could justify their existence by acting as professors—by propagandizing students with the views they’d acquired in ed school. He gives several examples; here is one:
How did college administrators become so involved in “training” undergraduates in subjects that are properly the domain of academic departments? It’s a complex story, and a long one. There are chapters in this story, however, and one of the most significant opened around 2004, when two administrators at the University of Delaware — both of whom have doctorates in “educational leadership” — determined that resident advisers should be thought of as residence-hall “educators.” And as educators, they needed a curriculum. Kathleen Kerr and James Tweedy said they felt “invited” to develop such a curriculum by the views of their professional organizations, the American College Personnel Association and the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators, which have more than 20,000 members between them. Delaware faculty members were not consulted.
The program Kerr and Tweedy developed, the “curricular model” (CM) for learning beyond the classroom, has had enormous influence on college administrators across the nation. Kerr and Tweedy celebrated that influence in an essay published last spring in About Campus, a professional journal for college administrators.
. . . For what’s striking about Kerr and Tweedy’s 10-year retrospective essay, besides the moving sidewalk of bureaucratic jargon, is how little content there actually is, ideological or otherwise, until one gets to the issue of status — the status of administrators themselves as “educators.” That’s when things get concrete, and personal. Above all, the authors argue, their curricular model changed “how we view ourselves as educators,” “how we think about … our own roles as educators,” and “the spaces and places on campus” administrators now “occupy.” The model is “energizing and reinvigorating to professional staff,” they report, quoting new administrators in the thralls of relevance: “I finally get to use my master’s degree.” In the penultimate paragraph they declare: “The first change for everyone involved in this transformation is deciding unequivocally that we are educators.”
Such undisguised anxiety about their status as educators might provoke sympathy were it not for the authors’ lack of anxiety about the things that actually matter — the substance of education itself and the intellectual welfare of students; their right, for example, not to be coerced into facile, unreflective orthodoxy. Judging from the essay, those aren’t even peripheral considerations.
Finally, Asher argues that this proselytizing and curriculum-changing by those trained in ed schools is turning American colleges into places where you must parrot received ideological views rather than examine them. Here I agree, at least from my experience reading about universities and seeing things like members of my own faculty, and students at my own school, urging the deplatforming and banning of “impure” speakers like Steve Bannon. Asher:
There might be nothing wrong with training students in equity and social justice were it not for the inconvenient fact that a college campus is where these ideals and others like them are to be rigorously examined rather than piously assumed. It’s the difference between a curriculum and a catechism. Do ed schools recognize that difference? Perhaps some do. But it’s significant that their largest national accrediting agency, the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, for many years included “social justice” in its glossary of so-called “dispositions” that ed schools could consider when evaluating a candidate’s fitness for the K-12 classroom. It dropped the criteria only in 2006, after complaints from both the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and the National Association of Scholars.
One example of the influence ed-school people have had on college curricula involves microaggressions, a concept first outlined in 2007 by Derald Wing Sue and his colleagues in the paper below (American Psychologist 62:271-286), which has been cited thousands of times and launched the bandwagon of microaggression policy in many colleges (click on screenshot to access the paper for free). I haven’t yet read it, but will today:
The authors of this paper are associated with Teachers College of Columbia University, and the article has been widely criticized for its lack of rigor by several of my recent readings, including The Rise of Victimhood Culture, the book I discussed the other day. Readers who have time should read it and weigh in below (the article is 16 pages long). Here’s Asher’s take:
The weak foundations on which this vision often rests are evident in ed-school scholarship. Take the essay generally regarded as the founding text of the recent microaggression movement, “Racial Microaggressions in Everyday Life,” whose lead author, Derald Wing Sue, is a professor of psychology and education at Teachers College. His six co-authors were also associated with Teachers College when the article was published, in American Psychologist in 2007. Among administrators especially, their essay has achieved canonical status.
Reading the article for the first time last year, I was dumbfounded — not just that it had gained such currency, but that it had ever been published in a journal with pretensions to intellectual rigor. I don’t doubt that microaggressions exist or that they can do harm, but the confidence with which Sue and his co-authors reduce complex interactions to Manichaean encounters between villains and victims is astonishing.
It goes on, but you can read Asher’s criticism of Sue et al.’s Manichaean tactics in the original article.
The paper of Sue et al., as I said, has been enormously influential in shaping American college policy towards students, how those students are treated, how they are given orientation, and how “transgressions” are punished. That’s why those of us interested in this area should read it. You’ll recognize its thesis and many of the “microaggressions” that it lists. The article has been criticized for lack of definitional specificity, absence of research to see if these microaggressions are actually seen as such by their “targets”, whether they are “aggressive” in intending to demean people, and whether they have the negative psychological effects claimed. My own view is that it’s simple civility to think out your words in advance to try to avoid statements that might be interpreted as bigoted, whether meant that way or not, also that it’s not the business of colleges to beat that lesson into students or, more important, to outline what kinds of statements are unacceptable (one, of course is that “America is a melting pot,” but see the list in Sue et al.)
In case you don’t know the Yiddish, a “yeshiva bocher” is a Jewish student at an Orthodox religious school (a “yeshiva”) who is a “bocher” (male student, usually unmarried). And what this article points out—one of the open secrets of Judaism—is that yeshivas are the American equivalent of Islamic madrassas: schools where you study religion—and nothing else. That means that the students wind up largely unsuited to enter society at large or hold down many jobs, with many of these going on welfare deliberately, aiming to spend their entire lives studying the Torah. In fact, because of the brainwashing they get from their parents, they don’t want to enter society at large, but prefer to remain in their insulated communities. That is their right. But it’s not their right to neglect state educational requirements.
In the U.S., there are educational standards that all students have to meet, regardless of their school, but these are largely ignored for yeshiva students, many of whom live in New York. As the following New York Times piece reports (click on the screenshot), the cultural and actual illiteracy of yeshiva students (most of them ultra-Orthodox) is staggering. Further, a state senator from Brooklyn, Simcha Felder, who represents many of these Jews, is campaigning to get a legal exemption for yeshiva students from the state’s educational standards.
The piece’s author, Shulem Deen, was a Hasidic Jew who left his community at age 33, and still considers himself “educationally handicapped” even though he got his high school equivalency degree. Having left the Hasidic community, he lost custody of his sons.
The education problem is worse for men than for women, as Jewish girls aren’t required to study the Torah and so, says Deen, receive a “decent secular education.” But, later destined for marriage and strictly bound to the home, they can’t use it in jobs.
Just a few facts from the piece:
When I was in my 20s, already a father of three, I had no marketable skills, despite 18 years of schooling. I could rely only on an ill-paid position as a teacher of religious studies at the local boys’ yeshiva, which required no special training or certification. As our family grew steadily — birth control, or even basic sexual education, wasn’t part of the curriculum — my then-wife and I struggled, even with food stamps, Medicaid and Section 8 housing vouchers, which are officially factored into the budgets of many of New York’s Hasidic families.
I remember feeling both shame and anger. Shame for being unable to provide for those who relied on me. Anger at those responsible for educating me who had failed me so colossally.
A woman I know works as a physician at Maimonides Medical Center, in heavily Hasidic Borough Park in Brooklyn, and often sees adult male patients who can barely communicate to her what ails them. “It’s not just that they’re like immigrants, barely able to speak the language,” she told me. “It’s also a lack of knowledge of basic physiology. They can barely name their own body parts.”
. . . Across the state, there are dozens of Hasidic yeshivas, with tens of thousands of students — nearly 60,000 in New York City alone — whose education is being atrociously neglected. These schools receive hundreds of millions of dollars in government funding, through federal programs like Title I and Head Start and state programs like Academic Intervention Services and universal pre-K. For New York City’s yeshivas, $120 million comes from the state-funded, city-run Child Care and Development Block Grant subsidy program: nearly a quarter of the allocation to the entire city.
The result: millions of taxpayer dollars spent to provide welfare for those who, because of religion, are denied a proper education:
According to a report by Yaffed, or Young Advocates for Fair Education, an organization that advocates for improved general studies in Hasidic yeshivas, an estimated 59 percent of Hasidic households are poor or near-poor. According to United States Census figures, the all-Hasidic village of Kiryas Joel, an hour north of New York City, is the poorest in the country, with median family income less than $18,000.
One heavily Hasidic district of Brooklyn, South Williamsburg, has, over the last decade, shown dramatic increases in using public income support such as cash assistance, Supplemental Security Income and Medicaid.
This is insupportable, and a terrible waste of young minds—minds doomed to endlessly pore over ancient scripts and argue about their meaning, yearning for the return of the Messiah.
Yes, the religious have a right to their craziness, but when it interferes with civil requirements—like getting a good secular education—religion has to take a back seat. I weep to think of all those boys who, had they not been born into Orthodox families, would have the freedom to do and study what they want, some achieving great things. The endless scrutinizing and exposition of the Torah is not a great thing; it’s nonsense. And Felder is a reprehensible man for furthering this nonsense.
The dearth of women in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) in the U.S. and U.K. is well known, and it turns out it’s also an issue in other Western countries. It’s usually attributed to sexism that bars women from entering these fields. Other explanations are a difference in interests and preferences: perhaps women prefer to enter fields other than STEM for reasons other than the presumption that they’ll be discriminated against or criticized in the field. That idea—that there are inherent differences in the preferences of males and females (and we don’t know whether these are acculturated, genetically based, or a mixture of these)—was the subject of James Damore’s infamous Google memo, for which he was demonized and, at least in part, fired. (I’m told that Damore had a history of bad interactions at Google.) Finally, one can claim that women have lower abilities in STEM fields than do men, so even if they preferred such studies, the meritocracy would weed them out.
A new paper in Psychological Science (free Unpaywall access; pdf here, reference at bottom) by Gijsbert Stoet and David C. Geary points to the second explanation: consistent differences in preference, and dispels the third, finding no consistent sex differences in abilities. This doesn’t rule out sexism, as they didn’t test for that, but the important factor seems to be preference. That’s because the authors find a strong and counterintuitive correlation between the gender gap in stem degrees and the index of gender equality in countries. In those countries with more gender equality, the gap between men and women in getting STEM degrees is larger. The authors explain that as resulting from a combination of sex-based preferences and the standard of living in different countries.
Let me say first that I think there’s plenty of evidence that men and women differ in their preferences for what kind of work they want to do. I suspect, but don’t know, that part of that difference is based on evolution. After all, men and women have evolved separately for some six million years since we split from our common ancestor with the chimps, and it’s not unreasonable to think that different sex roles over that period led to the evolution of different preferences. I hasten to add that even if this be true, it is no reason to treat men and women unequally or give them different educational opportunities based on their sex. I’ve often emphasized that true equality between the sexes means that nobody be treated differently because of their gender, and that men and women be given the same opportunity from birth to realize their talents and ambitions. But if preferences be different, this may still lead to different outcomes.
It turns out that this is what Stoet and Geary think about the difference between men and women in STEM participation. The paper is a bit complicated, so I may make an error or two in describing the results. I thus urge readers interested in this topic to download the paper and read it for themselves.
The study. The authors used data from PISA, a study of science literacy, mathematics, and reading comprehension in students throughout the world. In this paper the sample was large: 472,242 students from 67 countries (15-16 years old), all assessed for these abilities. Also measured were interest in and enjoyment of science. For the 67 countries, the authors also obtained UNESCO data on college degrees in STEM fields (the range was 12.4% women in Macao to 40.7% wp,em in Algeria, with a median of 25.4% of STEM degrees obtained by women).
Data on “overall life satisfaction” (OLS) was obtained from a UN survey in 2016, using a ten step ladder as a metaphor for life satisfaction (highest at the top), and asking people to imagine which rung of the ladder they stood on.
Data on gender equality as obtained from the World Economic Forum survey in 2015, using data on earnings, enrollment in college, life expectancy, representation in government, and other indicators.
The results:
In overall science literacy, women and men were pretty equal throughout the world. As they authors note, “We found that girls outperformed boys in 19 (28.4%) countries, boys outperformed girls in 22 (32.8%) countries, and no statistically significant difference was found in the remaining 26 (38.8%) countries.” That is, there’s no inherent trend for one sex to be better than the other, though there are statistically significant differences among countries. That militates against some inborn difference and suggest that those differences are cultural.
However, when the authors looked at intraindividual differences in ability, that is, relative ability, they found that women generally ranked higher in reading compared to their average ability, while men ranked higher in science and mathematics compared to their average ability. Combined with the data above, I interpret this to mean that, overall, men and women are equal in science literacy and math comprehension, but since women have higher reading ability than men, they are higher overall academically. Nevertheless, there’s a big and consistent difference in these areas. As the authors note:
” In all countries except for Lebanon and Romania (97% of countries), boys’ intraindividual strength in science was (significantly) larger than that of girls (Fig. 2b). Further, in all countries, girls’ intraindividual strength in reading was larger than that of boys, while boys’ intraindividual strength in mathematics was larger than that of girls. In other words, the sex differences in intraindividual academic strengths were near universal.
“. . . Another way of calculating these patterns is to examine the percentage of students who have individual strengths in science, mathematics, and reading, respectively. To do so, we first determined students’ individual strength. Next, we calculated the percentage of boys and girls who had science, mathematics, or reading as their personal academic strength; this contrasts with the above analysis that focused on the overall magnitude of these strengths independently of whether they were the students’ personal strength. We found that on average (across nations), 24% of girls had science as their strength, 25% of girls had mathematics as their strength, and 51% had reading. The corresponding values for boys were 38% science, 42% mathematics, and 20% reading.
“. . . The above analyses show that most boys scored relatively higher in science than their all-subjects average, and most girls scored relatively higher in reading than their all-subjects average. Thus, even when girls outperformed boys in science, as was the case in Finland, girls generally performed even better in reading, which means that their individual strength was, unlike boys’ strength, reading.”
Remember, this is a gap in performance between men and women in their individual areas of strength (an “intraindividual gap”), not an absolute gap between individuals.
When the authors looked at this “gender gap” in relative performance, they found out that it was larger in countries that were more gender equal. That is, the more equal the country in gender treatment, the greater the relative performance of women in reading over science and math, and the greater the relative performance of men in science and math over reading. Here’s a figure showing that, which also shows you the countries that are more gender equal (higher on the y axis) and those at the bottom (countries like Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Tunisia, and Algeria):
(from paper): Scatterplots (with best-fitting regression lines) showing the relation between gender equality and sex differences in (a) intraindividual science performance and (b) the percentage of women among science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) graduates. Gender equality was measured with the Global Gender Gap Index (GGGI), which assesses the extent to which economic, educational, health, and political opportunities are equal for women and men. The gender gap in intraindividual science scores (a) was larger in more gender-equal countries (rs = .42).
Not only was the intraindividual “gender gap” larger in more gender-equal countries, but the percentage of women getting STEM degrees was lower in more gender-equal countries. Places like Norway, Finland, Sweden, Ireland, and Switzerland, which rank high on gender equality, had a much lower percentage of women among college STEM graduates than less gender-equal countries like the UAR, Tunisia, Turkey, and Algeria. Would you have expected that? The negative correlation is striking (same Y axis: higher Y scores mean more gender equality):
(From paper; first part of caption is the same as in graph above): The percentage of women with degrees in STEM fields (b) was lower in more gender-equal countries (rs = −.47).
What does this mean? The authors interpret this to mean that in countries with greater gender equality (which also have higher life satisfaction, as you might expect), women can exercise their preferences in careers, which is to go into careers that are more reading-oriented than STEM-oriented. They’re able to do that because those societies are also more socialistic, and thus women don’t have to be forced to go into the higher-paying STEM careers simply to get by. In contrast, less gender-equal societies tend to make women pursue STEM careers because those are a faster way out of poverty (such careers tend to be higher paying). Or, as the authors say in academ-ese:
We propose that when boys are relatively better in science and mathematics while girls are relatively better at reading than other academic areas, there is the potential for substantive sex differences to emerge in STEM-related educational pathways. The differences are expected on the basis of expectancy-value theory and are consistent with prior research (Eccles, 1983; Wang & Degol, 2013). The differences emerge from a seemingly rational choice to pursue academic paths that are a personal strength, which also seems to be common academic advice given to students, at least in the United Kingdom (e.g., Gardner, 2016; Universities and Colleges Admissions Service, 2015).
The greater realization of these potential sex differences in gender-equal nations is the opposite of what some scholars might expect intuitively, but it is consistent with findings for some other cognitive and social sex differences (e.g., Lippa, Collaer, & Peters, 2010; Pinker, 2008; Schmitt, 2015). One possibility is that the liberal mores in these cultures, combined with smaller financial costs of foregoing a STEM path (see below), amplify the influence of intraindividual academic strengths. The result would be the differentiation of the academic foci of girls and boys during secondary education and later in college, and across time, increasing sex differences in science as an academic strength and in graduation with STEM degrees.
The fact that the intra-individual differences also decrease with gender inequality would, then, reflect the fact that women are pursuing STEM paths more often in those countries, and those studies reflect on their test scores, narrowing the gap between their reading abilities and their science/math abilities.
What do we do about it? These results (and of course they need to be replicated, and do read the authors’ list of caveats) suggest that in freer, more egalitarian societies, women will be less likely to pursue STEM careers because, for one reason or another, they’re simply less interested in science. That will upset those who think that men and women are equal in preferences, but the data are there. It also leads to the notion that to get more women into STEM fields, the way to do it is not to make societies more egalitarian. Indeed, the way to do it is make them less egalitarian! Nobody wants that!
So what do we do? First, we have to ask whether we really want to strive for full gender equality (equal numbers) in STEM careers—or in careers in which women gravitate.
If women aren’t interested in STEM careers, what is the point of such striving? Well, there are some points; one being that women in STEM careers serve as role models for women who want to be in those fields but may be discouraged by an imbalanced sex ratio. That, at least, mandates that we work to make sure that women face no barriers to entering such careers, as other studies have pointed to gender bias as a bar to entry. The authors suggest that we find those women who have a higher STEM scores than reading scores, and concentrate on giving them the opportunities to get into STEM. And of course (this is my suggestion), we need to monitor various bars to women’s entry and try to eliminate them; academic departments are doing this now by, among other things, making sure that qualified female candidates are not neglected.
Over the years, having dealt with students coming out of public schools, having lectured at public schools, and having talked to many teachers (usually science teachers), I’ve come to really admire these people. They slave away for a pittance, often using their own funds to buy school materials, and they are vitally important to the education of our kids—and to society as a whole. Inspiring teachers make all the difference in a child’s life. I know that I, for one, probably wouldn’t be a scientist if it weren’t for my fourth-grade teacher Mrs. Burns, who was constantly doing science demonstrations, encouraging her kids, and showing infectious enthusiasm for science. My view is that public-school teachers (I’m not talking about professors here!) should, given their societal value, make at least twice what they’re paid now (see below). A surgeon can help one patient at a time; a teacher can change the lives of many children at once.
And so, this new article in the Financial Times is especially depressing (click on the screenshot to go there). Oklahoma is going down the tubes vis-à-vis public education.
Consider these facts:
With an average starting salary of $31,606, Oklahoma is the third lowest in the nation, after Mississippi and South Dakota. That’s about 1/5 of the lowest average salary of any branch of medicine in the U.S. The average salary for all teachers is $44,128, barely enough to support a family. The teachers haven’t had a raise in ten years.
Many school districts have had to cut back public schooling from five to four days a week. That’s considered a perk for Oklahoma teachers.
Health insurance erodes even those salaries: a single teacher’s monthly healthcare costs are $400, and another $480 for a spouse and $208 for each kid. As the article notes, one teacher’s aide earned so little (and had a family), that she paid the school $200 a month to work there.
Oklahoma is bleeding teachers to other states, and of course that’s going to really hurt public education.
The reason? Oklahoma decided to reduce taxes on oil revenues from 7% to 1%, in contrast to other states (it’s 11.5% in North Dakota). Income taxes have also been cut under both parties, with Democrats doing it out of fear that if they didn’t the Republicans would win. Now the Republicans are doing it. The state education budget for grades K-12 has been cut by 28.2% in the last 8 years. There are constitutional limitations on raising property taxes.
This has hit not just the schools, but public employees in general. Cops are told not to fill up their gas tanks, and drunk drivers don’t have their licenses revoked because the bureaucracy doesn’t have the dosh to revoke them. Some teachers even dig into the leftovers from food drives for poor people!
I’m not sure why this isn’t a pressing national issue—not just in Oklahoma, but in many other states. Here’s a map of teachers’ salaries (graded by color, but the site, Niche, gives the figures for starting and average salaries). Only the northeast, Alaska, the District of Columbia, and California offer decent wages to their teachers. The highest average salary I could find was New York’s $75,279 and that’s a big outlier: 71% higher than Oklahoma’s.
Of all the “infrastructure” Americans should invest in, education is the most pressing. Screw Trump’s wall: that money should go for education! How many teachers could be hired with the cost of that wall, which could go up to $20 billion—or more. That would buy 450,000 teacher-years in Oklahoma, or pay for 10,000 careers of teachers given a 45-year career.
Several days ago I wrote about a government-funded project, “Access Islam,” designed to be used in American public schools. Supported by the US Department of Education, as well as by the Smithsonian Institution and the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) the project is objectionable because it not only singles out Islam (there are no comparable projects for other faiths), making it unconstiutional, but is also patronizingly designed to whitewash any doctrine of Islam that could be seen as oppressive or injurious. I have no idea whether “Access Islam” was in fact used in any schools. (If readers know, do tell me.)
I see that several readers have argued for government-designed programs of “religious education” in public schools, dismissing my arguments against that as not dispositive. And, indeed, they might not be. But I think it would be very hard— in an America imbued with a sense of fair play—to design a religious curriculum that was not so sanitized and egalitarian that it didn’t teach kids anything they couldn’t learn by simply living in American society.
Don’t believe me? Here, found by reader Matt, is a quiz from the “Access Islam” course materials. It’s from the segment called “Roles of Woman”—the same sanitized and duplicitous segment (original lesson here) that I wrote about yesterday. And here is the quiz the students are supposed to take after reading that material; it appears on the website of WNET, a PBS station:
Look at some of those questions!
You want religious education in American public schools? This program, designed by the government and approved by the Smithsonian and PBS, is the kind of thing you’re gonna get.
It’s untenable to try teaching what “good” and “bad” things each faith has led to, for not all faiths are equal in that respect, and yet they must be presented as equal to conform to the First Amendment.
Given that, there are two solutions. Just list the beliefs of each religion (and you know the issue with that: which beliefs do we prioritize given diverse beliefs?), or sanitize all religions so they appear to be wonderful, empowering, and egalitarian.
That is no way to teach anything so divisive and controversial. And that’s why we shouldn’t have religious education in our public schools. Exhibit 1 is above.
I’m just going to steal reader Colin’s email, which called my attention to a 42-minute BBC4 program featuring several people, although, as usual, Richard Dawkins gets top billing (see screenshot below). I’ve just listened to the show and recommend it. Here’s what Colin wrote me:
The program is now be available here. It discusses with Richard Dawkins a new book by child psychologist Deborah Kelemen, which introduces the concept of evolution to children through fictional creatures called piloses. Her book, How the Piloses Evolved Skinny Noses, has a one line review from Steven Pinker on Amazon.
Richard Dawkins’ piece starts at around 17 minutes, and touches initially on a subject close to your heart, airline security checks, while discussing his latest collection of essays. The subject of creationism comes up at 25 minutes. Deborah’s book follows on about a minute later.
If you can spare half an hour, I think you may find it interesting.
Click on the screenshot to go to the program (press the arrow when you get to the site to hear it). Here’s the summary if you want a preview:
On Start the Week Andrew Marr asks whether scientists have failed in their task to communicate their work to the wider public. The ‘passionate rationalist’ Richard Dawkins has spent his career trying to illuminate the wonders of nature and challenge what he calls faulty logic. But he wonders whether Darwin would consider his legacy now with ‘a mixture of exhilaration and exasperation’. The child psychologist Deborah Kelemen has been working with young children to find out what they make of adaptation and evolution with the storybook, How the Piloses Evolved Skinny Noses, and is encouraged by the sophistication of their understanding. The mathematician Cathy O’Neil says it’s time people became more aware of the mathematical models and algorithms that dominate everything we do online and in finance, and yet are increasingly opaque, unregulated and left unchallenged. While Alex Bellos looks to improve numeracy with puzzles and brainteasers which have been entertaining and frustrating people for centuries.
Some highlights for me:
12:21: The famous “wolf, goat, and cabbage” puzzle, which is cool. Do you know the answer? I couldn’t figure it out in a few minutes of thinking, but I think I could if I had a pencil and paper.
16:23: The Dawkins bit begins with a question about the importance of mathematics in evolutionary biology (Dawkins points out, as I often do, that Darwin didn’t know much math and there are no equations in On the Origin of Species. He goes on to talk about the title of The Selfish Gene, rules, airline security (Woody Allen fans will find that Richard gets Allen’s quote on immortality wrong).
22:03: The discussion of science education begins; Richard decries the ubiquitous tendency to make science “fun”. Others chime in.
24:30: Discussion of creationism in American education.
25:10: Kelemen discusses misunderstandings of Darwinism and how her book overcomes them. (Dawkins chimes in that he likes the book, but says that it’s missing a crucial bit of information.) The discussion of how to teach science to kids goes on until the program almost ends.
39:55: The end: Richard pronounces on whether, in the future, the scientific mindset can overcome the hegemony of religion.
