Education not Poverty—Reclaiming What is Ours!

In the 2007, Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study test, students from Singapore took first or second place in all science categories. The United States ranked 11th.

The quality of our math and science education lags behind many other nations.

Barack Obama

Mark Roth, a former science editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette asks why do pupils, in a nation that is world leader in scientific research lag, behind other countries in science. Excuses range from poverty, poor training of teachers, disdainful attitudes to education and knowledge, the shockingly poor scientific illiteracy of American adults to the convenience of paying to import scientists and mathematicians from abroad where standards are higher. It is is actually cheaper for corporations to hire foreign scientists that for have to pay taxes to improve the US education service.

Meanwhile, the huge gap between students in affluent and poor school districts is reflected in racial disparities in scores. Affluent white kids in the US do as well as white kids in Europe. In the European Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, American students as a whole scored 502 in 2009, slightly above the industrialized nation average of 500. Arthur Eisenkraft, a science education expert at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, said economic differences play a part in the discrepancy:

We’ve always known there are high correlations between poverty and how kids do in school.

The downside is particularly noticeable in large urban school districts like Pittsburgh. Only two of the 17 big city school districts that participated in the National Assessment of Educational Progress science tests, in 2009, had more than a third of their students scoring in the proficient range. Eight of the districts had more than half of their students below the basic level. Alan J Friedman, a science education consultant, emphasized that those who are below basic in science at the eighth grade level most probably will be freezing themselves out of a whole lifetime of advancement opportunities.

Part of the reason for the fall in test scores from the elementary school to middle school is attitude—and is shared by parents as well as kids. In Asian countries, doing well in science is considered to be by application, hard work, but Americans think it is whether you have a natural gift for a subject, aptitude, natural ability—you just don’t want to do it! Students say, “I’m no good at science, and that’s just how it is”. Being a “celebrity” seems a lot more fun!

Besides the need for effort, school pupils need to know how to analyze problems and work out the answers to them. But many teachers who teach science are poorly trained in it themselves. Many have not done science in college. It becomes particularly critical if the content is controversial, as in teaching evolution in biology classes. Lack of the proper training in science and evolution leaves teachers without the confidence to face up to aggressive Christian kids challenging them, especially when they have equally aggressive and sometimes influential parents coming into the school to complain. Many parents love Jesus so much that they love guns, and high school shootings have become popular recently.

The lack of scientific literacy in America is compounded by the determination of many US Christians no keep on sabotaging science on the grounds that all the answers necessary are in Genesis. All Genesis answers is what is in it, and whatever regard people have for it, it is not science.

Ultimately America, and much of the west—the UK is going the same way—needs proper regulation of corporate greed. If people are to work hard, they need rewards that seem proportionate—decent wages, apprenticeships and training schemes, and sposorship of education—but corporate America could not care less than it does about American society. If they could get people to work for nothing they would, and when industry is fully robotized, that will be the real situation.

But who then would be able to buy anything? Without money at the base of society, at consumer level, society collapses, and discontent rises. Intelligent young people already see it, experience it, and feel that education is pointless when the prospect of any work for most is negligible. Already there are places where hundreds of people compete for each job that becomes available. They wonder whether it is lucky or clever to take any such job, if offered, because they will have to work for peanuts under a perpetual threat of being fired. Why bother? It is easier and more lucrative to be a thief. Already vast swathes of the inner cities are dying or dead, because industries have moved to cheap labor countries, or to another state in the Union that will offer the biggest incentives—bribes.

Social responsibility has to be made an important factor in corporate decisions. It can be done by strictly enforced legislation. And should the corporate bosses decide to move abroad, then they should do it with the knowledge that their products will be heavily taxed if they are imported to the USA, and Americans domiciled abroad whose businesses have been moved from the USA, should be taxed as if they still lived in the USA. It is time the country was taking back what it has allowed a small body of people to take away—the nation’s jobs and wages.

God or Liberty? A Fair Society, Please!

Not Freedom from Taxation, Nor Mystical Faith, but a Fair Distribution of Wealth and a Functioning Society

US religious and social history has been characterized by a periodical pulsation of religious fervor. Since the 1980s, the pulsation has been upbeat, evangelical movements and their leaders grabbing a lot of publicity and political power. These periods of religious fervency rarely last over half a century, so the latest one is probably on the wane, and the religious enthusiasts are riding the Tea Parties as if it were a religious revival. But Pulitzer Prize winner, Jon Meacham, a journalist and a historian, sees the Tea Party as “nationalistic, not moralistic”.

Tea Partyers are less concerned about the moral issues and more concerned about economic ones. It is conservative Christians who still say, “We need government to protect our morality, to protect us from ourselves”.

The myth stems from the original event in 1773, the Boston Tea Party, which was an act of rebellion against taxation without representation. The colonies were ruled by the King Georges of England and had no say in their own affairs. Three years later, the American colonies rebelled, and won independence. For Meacham:

It is liberty, less than religion, that holds us together.

S Augustine, in City of God, defined a people as “the association of a multitude of rational beings united by a common agreement on the objects of their love.” The “City of God” he meant was the Christian Church, in those days, the Catholic Church, and the objects of their love were their fellow human beings, and, of course, God, in the form of Jesus Christ, who had identified himself with the meek and the downtrodden in the world. When the new Christian religion began to spread from the original Jews to gentiles in the Roman empire, it was indeed the poor and the downtrodden who responded, and a much smaller number of mainly rich women, glad to give up their legacies for salvation.

For modern American Christians none of that applies. According to Meacham, “the attack culture has subsumed everything else”. American conservative Christians, like those who supported Bush, and who are now supporting “Tea Parties” to get rid of Obama think, and like to say, that the United States is a “Christian nation”. Even many liberal Americans agree. They think the country’s founding principles are based on Christianity, through the settlement of New England by the Pilgrim fathers in 1620.

It was not the Christian ideas of the Pilgrim Fathers who initially settled in America, but the Enlightenment values of the Founding Fathers of the new republic who set out the documents that proclaimed the nature of the new political entity, and set out its founding principles, principles that still apply. Since the country’s founding, Americans have confused its defining features.

Mark McGarvie, a history professor at the University of Richmond, points out that the stress on man’s duties and responsibilities towards his fellow man, according to the teaching of Christ, was an element in the motivation of the founding of some of the early US colonies, but Christianity had nothing to say about anyone’s individual freedom. Christ had nothing to say specifically about slavery. Plainly, though, slaves fell into the category of the poor, the meek and the downtrodden, people whom Christ said were blessed, would enter the kingdom of heaven and ought to be treated like God. The man Christians treat as their God, Paul, the one they prefer to cite rather than God—Christ whom they largely ignore—told slaves to settle for their lot. Paul marginalized Christ’s emphasis on being loving and kind to each other—on works, as the New Testament calls it—by substituting for Christ’s practical teaching his own mystification, faith in God and the body of Christ!

The Declaration of Independence was based on the ideas of the Enlightenment, the teachings of Locke and Rousseau, as expressed by Jefferson and Madison. These men were also concerned with the poor and downtrodden, with the centuries of oppression people had suffered while Europe was ruled by the Church, and its hereditary nobility, who wanted the people to believe that kings were divinely appointed and had to be obeyed, even when they were wicked. It is what S—Paul taught, but not Christ.

With the rise of the merchant class of capitalists, the Feudal System of government by the nobility and royalty was doomed, but struggles were needed to put it firmly in its grave, and the American Declaration of Independence was one of the acts that established that kings were not divinely right! Instead of the divine right of kings, the Enlightenment idea was that God had nothing to do with individual rights, except that free will meant everyone was personally free in God’s own view! The Enlightenment was about protecting individual rights, in contradiction of divine rights.

Now the point of individual rights is not that everyone should do as they like, for that would be intolerable, and indeed would be quite alien to anything that Christ taught or any Christian should believe. The Founding Fathers thought that humans were primarily good to each other, and that society should allow them to prosper according to their good nature. They inscribed on the country’s Great Seal the motto “Out of many, one”. Americans were to pursue their own interests and desires with the ultimate aim of doing good not just for themselves but for a whole united society.

The other side of the US Great Seal has two mottoes, one of which announces that the birth of the USA begins a “New Order of the Centuries”, while the other is simply “It Has Favored Our Efforts”, “It” meaning Fortune or Providence, according to your religious inclination. So, although Christians will read this as being God’s Providence, and therefore God, the deists who drew up the documents could be more neutral and read it as Fortune. Even here, then, a Christian interpretation is not the only one. Deists believed in a God, but not one that twiddled with the world he made.

The conflict between the mystified Christianity of Paul and Luther, and the practical Christianity of Christ himself, filtered through the Enlightenment, existed from the outset of the USA, and there seems little to be gained in denying it. Christians nevertheless do, or they do not recognize it at all.

In modern practical terms, freedom is the freedom of the hyper rich one or two percent of the people to take the enormity of the country’s wealth that leaves the poor and even the middle classes struggling, either to stay alive or to maintain their standards. It is not social schemes like health and education, schemes that no civilized country can do without but which are being starved of sufficient cash to offer a proper service, both in the US and abroad. Christ went about curing people gratis and blessing the poor like Lazarus, the beggar, while approving the damnation of the rich, like Dives, the rich man. The greed of the minority is the real moral problem of all societies. That is what Christ taught.

It is all very simply set out in the Christian gospels but none of the evangelical crowd, who think Tea Parties are sent by God, have read or comprehend the teachings of Christ. They believe what their Republican pastors and politicians tell them, and, as Limbaugh and Beck prove, being idiotic is what the conservative Christian loves—“That’s just how I feel. Boy aren’t these guys just great!” They are too easily conned to see they are being conned! These guys are not idiots. They are! They are being taken for a ride, and the only benefactors are the Republican grandees, the mega rich, whom they think will help them by reducing taxation when all it does is leave those with the income worth taxing, better off.

Gambler’s Psychology among Bankers Demands Tight Regulations

Dr Paul Crosthwaite, an academic at Cardiff University, has found that the bankers who brought the global economy to its knees two years ago may have enjoyed the sensation of losing hundreds of billions of pounds and plunging the world into recession. He argues such catastrophic losses can give some people masochistic pleasure.

He thinks financial crises, such as the “Black Monday” crash of 19 October 1987, the bursting of the dotcom bubble in the spring of 2000, and the credit crunch that entered into its most intense phase in the autumn of 2008 with the nationalization of banks in the UK, US, and Europe, demonstrate the innate urge for self destruction that Sigmund Freud called the “death drive”. A full blown crash is a source of euphoria as much as despair. Dr Crosthwaite said:

Economists and financial policymakers must recognize that investor psychology is far more complex than their models have allowed up to now. They need to take much greater account of psychological factors such as emotion and desire, which affect how market actors behave in profound ways.

His research challenges the conventional economic thinking that investors are wholly rational, and always pursue whatever is most likely to increase their own wealth, a rarely questioned assumption that is the basis of the free, minimally regulated market of standard capitalist thinking. In fact, financial markets are disposed to crisis because participants seek excess for thrills as well as their assumed betterment. Bankers and financiers take risks not only for high returns, but to get a gambler’s high.

Dr Crosthwaite says this research strengthens the case for firm regulation of banks and other financial institutions:

To avoid a repeat of the great recession, it is vital that policy makers and regulators limit the capacity of financial professionals to engage in excessive practices by curbing the disproportionate levels of risk that we’ve seen in the financial sector in recent years.