on Arendt

At Slate, Ron Rosenbaum uses two new books on Hannah Arendt to unleash his fury over her phrase 'banality of evil.' He calls it 'fatuous,' 'subprime,' ' bankrupt,' 'fathomless,' 'deceitful and disingenuous,' 'utterly fraudulent' and 'the most overused, misused, abused pseudo-intellectual phrase in our language.' So there.

Rosenbaum offers sound evidence, pulled from the books under review and several other recent commentaries on Arendt. He builds up a psycho-tableau of her self-identy, burrowing her idea(s) under a kind of unconscious adaptation to the zeit of Germany in the 30s. Or a 'parochial' Jew living in Germany high society in the 30s. Fine. But in doing so, he must accept the patency in what Arendt meant. In condemning 'banality of evil' as he does, Rossbaum risks assigning Arendt's thinking to the banality of evil represented by nascent-Hitlerian Germany. What led her to construct a meaningless and historically empty phrase is her meaningful and historically potent frame of mind. She understand the banality of evil because, well, she represented the banality of evil in other form.

Human reason is necessarily contingent of the content of the mind at any given point in life. That content is supplied by the socio-temporal moment in which we live, our 'lifeworld' of all that is known and believed in our time. Our reason is necessarily limited by the cultural community that nurtures us, the educativeness of the society in which we grow to understand the world and the openness of our thinking to a skepticism that appreciates the novel as a challenge to the normal, the assumed to be. That kind of openness is itself subject to these same limitations. The banality impressed by Arendt fronts the everyday nature of human communities. We can not always question everything and everyone. We function through a matrix of understandings presented through a consistent world; it would be ridiculously superhuman of us to wake up everyday and remap the essence of our lives.

So we live a banal life, a fluid participation of what is, stopping to question when life unspools in front of us (major calamity), when our ideas and expectations fail to produce (William James' gut-level pragmatism) and when the mystifying overwhelms the senses. Arendt may have missed some essential truth about herself when writing Eichman, as Rosenbaum details. Yet she presents us moderns with a devastatingly clear explanation for the hubris to human understanding: reason is not an objective state of perfect clarity, but a subjective experience complete in itself. We are frail, fallible and committed to error with every thought. Accepting that radical humanness does not mean we should live in fear of acting or even thinking. Rather, the banality of evil looms over us in harmony with the banality of goodness. What we do is what we do. Our moral life is measured not by the balance sheet of deeds presented after death to Osiris, or whoever awaits outside the tombs of everlasting life, but by the capacity to understand ourselves down to the most minute and fragmentary of trace implication. Time and history, space and place; we are always and already in flow with all there is.

The Impossibles

Freud once stated that teaching is impossible.

I doubt he meant a harrumph at the indolence and irresponsibility of his students. Nor, I suppose, a lash out at the folly of standardized tests, outcome-based standards or any other idealized version of education as technical tinkering. To assume, further, that he thought as a small government, low-tax, anti-public spending libertarian would be make him too much contemporary. History still does not allow a revision of the past in the identities of the present.

So what then did Freud mean?

Let me explain this question another way. In the current model of accountability (courtesy of NCLB), our educational system uses standardized, quantitative scores on tests to determine student knowledge and skills, and growth in knowledge and skills over the course of a set period (a semester, a year, a unit). Merit or performance pay synthesizes the students' learning into their teachers' effectiveness; the so-called "value-added" model of teacher accountability. Through inferential and raw/direct statistics, a teacher can be evaluated by the result of her students' scores on such exams. This process uses a positive gain as a determination of a successful student/good teacher; a negative loss as a determination of an unsuccessful student/poor teacher.

The flaw in this system is exposed when considering the reasons for schooling. Put another way, the qualitative rationale for schooling can not be analyzed through the quantitative measures used in schooling. While we believe we can measure a student's learning of concepts and skills, we have no method for measuring the justifications for learning these concepts and skills. This lack does not mean a better instrument is needed to do so. Rather, such instruments are impossible to create. What does all this mean? It tells us that no matter how efficient and effective our teaching, no matter how documentable through quantitative data our students' learning, no matter how empirical and obvious our beautiful numbers, we can not analyze the effect of schooling in the same way. Our measurements of learning give no significant or even sensical information on what effect that learning has on the the student or society.

Now, for me, this is a huge, huge thing. If I am not able to apply the metrics used to determine whether a student has learned to determine any justification for their learning, then either

1. there is no justification for schooling, or
2. the metrics used to determine learning need to be radically transformed.

Common sense, perhaps, explains why we would want our children to learn to read and communicate, to understand and manipulate numbers, to hold a common core of truths regarding the physical and biological sciences, to have knowledge of the history of our kind and the art of our cultural heritages. Common sense, as well, explains why our democracy needs literate, rational thinkers; our economy needs effective, knowledgeable workers; our culture needs the values and capabilities of appreciation for the products of human artifice. But common sense has no purchase in the accountability we employ in the institution of education. Common sense represents something tacit, but felt and experienced to be obvious. It presents a taken-for-granted obviousness, something one need not spend time defending. To question common sense is to question rationality itself. Yet common sense prevails in schooling through the curriculum and skills expected in our students. In other words, there is no need to statistically warrant the course and scope of study (with some ding-a-ling culture wars on the margin; part of Freud labeled the "narcissism of small differences"), because the why is implied in all this common sense. This paradox, or double-consciousness, of quantitative measuring and qualitative common sense exposes the impossibility of ever getting schooling right. "Right" does not exist; only politics does.

Teaching is impossible, not because it is difficult. Nor because it is too open-ended, or even indeterminate. No, teaching is impossible because, by the laws presented as how to measure its effect, we will never know what effect its effect has on students. The outcome of teaching, like the outcome of the experience of schooling itself, is immeasurable. Literally. Both are acts, or participation of acts, that ultimate point beyond themselves. Nothing that we can determine about what is learned tells us anything about what that learning means. Teaching is therefore the investing in a purposeful act the mystification of what that act means. It is a myth, mythic; teaching is the religion of everyday life. That we have chosen to place this practice at the heart of our social order is the finest expression of the mystery to existence.

Teachers are not bankers?

Paul Krugman has a smart brief this morning on changing the way bankers are compensated. Right now, rewards are earned through short-term success, without consideration of longer term effects. As he writes, "In a nutshell, bank executives are lavishly rewarded if they deliver big short-term profits — but aren’t correspondingly punished if they later suffer even bigger losses."

Many of the current ideas about 'merit pay' and/or 'value-added' models of teacher compensation take a strikingly similar approach. Teacher earn their bones, and its rewards, when their students demonstrate competency of standards-based outcomes. Sounds like a sane approach. Yet, as for the bankers, teachers in this system (just like right now) are not held responsible for a students' success or struggle in the future. After all, how could they? Rigorous research methodology would never warrant any conclusion that claimed such a longer-term effect; too much life intervenes, making any claim specious, more projection than evident.

As part of the accreditation of teacher ed programs (whether nationally, through NCATE, or state-based - in Oregon, Teacher Standards and Practices Commission/TSPC), documentation must be presented that shows the effect a program has on the success of its graduates. In other words, my school must present evidence on the effect our alumni have on their students. The evidence? Some qualitative artifacts, but mostly, k-12 student test scores.

Schools are already on that path. A 'traditional' approach to teacher pay took teachers as salaried employees of a large system, where the overall health of the community significantly effected the learning of the students. Teachers were never paid well, comfortably more in recent years, but never comparable to professionals. Implied, though, was the role teachers played in the bigger wheel of society. Their effects, in essence, were part of something bigger.

To put this all in perspective, then. Teachers are to be paid in relation to how their students demonstrate the objectives for the year. They are not held responsible, at least in terms of their pay, for a student's performance in subsequent year; that is another teacher's load. Schools of education, however, are held responsibly for how their graduates perform once they leave, regardless of the intervening factors and contingencies that occur. If Krugman is correct, and I for one agree with him, then any pay-for-performance system established for educators replicates the dysfunctional incentives that spurred the financial crisis.

Gross National Happiness

Reading Joseph Stiglitz makes me feel as if my inner-conscience has been draped over the world. He comes with all the laurels (Noble Prize, full Professorship, extensive publication via peer-review) and he invokes all the logic of doing things differently because what we are doing now blows. I often do not believe that he means what he writes, since his ideas make too much sense to me.

Take this latest essay. The challenge of measuring the most inscrutable - the quality of human experience - renders moot any attempt. As he writes, "What we measure affects what we do. If we have the wrong metrics, we will strive for the wrong things." Using GNP as a syllogism for the state of society, the micro world of individual lives suffers for the macro world of a big thing: economic growth. A rising tide may lift all boats, true; but not everyone in the world has a boat. Or can swim.

Of course, using Bhutan as a model of clarity might not win over the same-as-usual empiricists. And this topic is itself another version of the defense of liberal arts learning, more or less. Still. It encourages me to trust what I think I know, to realize that some of the important people also know what I think I know.

Senator Ted Kennedy, rest in peace.

Some journalists will eventually ask other Senators whether they now have an obligation to pass a health care bill, out of respect for Kennedy.

That is not the right question. Instead, it should be:

"If Sen. Kennedy were on life support in a permanent vegetative state and his family was ready to end his life if Congress did not pass a health care bill by the time he fell into his coma, because his family says that that is what the Senator wanted because he told them even though he did not have an advanced direct because Medicare would not cover that kind of meeting with his physician, would the Senate and House rush back to D.C. to pass a health care bill?"

Perception

Give humans something to see, and we make a world of it. A phrase from a contract, a flower in a field, one moment out of the infinite moments of a day. We give it meaning, significance. Or we don't. Context matters, so both are true. The smallest thing means everything, as the largest, not at all.

This might just be another of saying that life and all its enterprise gives itself over to excess. We find meaning in the slightest fragment of perception. We plunge into what jumps to mind, what presents itself with the slightest flicker to our open senses. All is Surface, without end, perfectly smooth and complete, but infinitely dense. Depth is the meaning we give, the fullness we find in all things. We live in that slippage; content to skim across things as they are until forced by habit or purpose or intuition to free-fall into the grain, which we catch as meaning.

Think of some professions. Medicine, teaching, state craft, law; all require inquiry and expense. When dealing with others, heuristics make for human need. Doctors and teachers, politicians and soldiers must burn through resources with impunity if they are to heal or to lead. Outcomes matter, but these are the outcomes of people, for whom being is more than a description. Means must be human, too, must give in to the accelerating complexity of what being human requires. Our bodies constantly self-stabilize, unlike clocks whose gears lie inert before the clockmaker. Doctors get to know the body, how it functions and interacts with itself, through an extensive process of exploration. Again, the means are profligate by function. Teachers, too, come to understand their students in a similar; learning is both piecemeal and indefinite, the result of an individual's own condition, not the application of technology to a clear problem. No less legislators, nor generals, when dealing with others, can avoid messy extraneous efforts. We have to go too far, because the outcome in its rightness shows itself only after we wade in. In this sense, we splurge in order to figure out what we want the ends to be.

Isaiah Berlin once said that "we must be free to make mistakes." He was talking about political democracy, but I take him to imply truth as well. And it truth, reality. Being free to err is not a license. Rather, Berlin means that we are free to be correct. The world is not given (less so a government). We thus have a responsibility to search it out, to find meanings - many wrong, few right - benefiting our task. That is an awesome load. This "negative" liberty, in Berlin's phrase, restricts prior constraint on our experiences. Put another way, institutions (whether the state or church, the academy or the hospital) do have any final answers. Citizenship of state and of humanity requires us to ask more than the given.

The difficulty in this life is obvious. We must chart things for ourselves, in concert with others on their own courses. No more so than in the professions. Doctors and teachers go as far beyond the horizon of what is known as necessary to attend the person in need. Each patient, each student brings something new in a new way with new conditions. The freedom to make mistakes is limited by the dangers of being wrong, of course, with their deadly finality. Being right, though needs the space to avoid that danger, while also engaging the difficulty of understanding the particulars of any one person.

Learning is the word for the layered interaction of what a student knew and felt previously and how the new material is experienced. Teachers can not mandate nor control that experience. At best, they create climates rich with material (content, say) for students to work through, then layer on pedagogy. Since not all students will experience the same thing, not all students will learn the same way or at the same speed. A teachers keeps this classroom practice going, long after something has been learned. She is not being inefficient; rather, she is exercising her freedom to be right for this student in this lesson at this time. Business hates waste. Teachers hate doing less than is needed since what is needed might only be known after the fact. We call this "time." Imagine the irresponsible doctor prescribing the same drug to every patient with the same symptoms. Now imagine the teacher treating every reading problem with the same lesson. It takes time to create the work that leads to learning, for each and every student. In schools, time wasted is time not being taken.

To sum this up, think about the invisible hand. It works wonderfully for economic reason by evoking the image of centrifugal wind that naturally blows goods and services to their best use. It creates an order, spontaneous and beautiful, from the combined self-interest of its participants. Yes, if we consider the hand always already at work. Within its functioning order, energy is efficiently expended to achieve known, expected outcomes. That is the system in its pure form. How, though, did it get that way? What happened before? The human need for more, for expansive time and excessive action, generates the hand. Our interests follow from our discoveries, which follow from the kind of mazy runs we take across new fields. And new fields come to us in the briefest of forms. We find patterns wherever we look; meanings emerge with the effort to form them, no matter the text.

That is why we can see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower. To be human is to be large, to contain multitudes.

WSJ

I like the Wall Street Journal. I subscribe. Its reporting is usually generous, its arts pages are limited but do inform me of books that I might never discover and its back-page columnists, while reflexively anti-Democratic, usually provide a coherent perspective and thought on an eclectic variety of content. Plus, its letters page stokes up the most interesting reading from patrons, even compared to the NYTimes. I read its editorials knowing I'll get a combination of business-friendly and politically-rightist cultism. At least, I tell myself, they offer a kind of one-dimensional transparency.

Right.

1. In his review of Rich by Larry Samuel, Adrian Wooldridge writes:

"From 1960 on, the ... rise of the counterculture stimulated hedonistic consumerism even as it eroded Puritan morality."

A facile, almost rote historiography about US social history, that attempts to reify liberalism as a dark path we best avoid.

I am not sure when the "Puritan morality" held (or what it is/was). Maybe during the "dying times" in early colonial history John Smith could call it up - he who does not work, does not eat. By the the post-Civil War gilded age, if not earlier, no morality of any kind seems to have stemmed the greed of corporations and their leaders, not if proliferating tenements, rancid and dangerous food production systems and aggrandizing trusts represent anything. I suppose we could even laughably claim that the Depression was caused by a sudden rise of people not working and still wanting food. But that would miss the greed infused market climb in the 20s, the immoral (at least illegal) speakeasies that sparkled with hedonism incarnate, the cooptation of Jazz and hipster lifestyles, and even the salience of films, like Marlon Brando's "The Wild Ones" (1953). My historical knowledge has gaps, but I use what I do have to make this point. Advertising, a form of history not constrained by fact, is a better culprit, for it has long sought to shake standard comforts, inviting us to put down everyday, conserving practices and try a new way of doing and being. But that argument would be anti-business.

So attempting to center the rise of rapacious consumerism on a brief period of reaction strikes me as cowardly. It blinds us from contemplating a more robust significance of the 60s: transparency hurts. Let's dispel the easy trope of blaming moral decline on a few freedom-actualizing hippies and free-lovers. And it is easier to offer a demagogic version of social illness (perverts pervert the purists' purity and we go to hell). Reconstructing a more evocative historical narrative requires, well, actual history and the willingness to put aside fabricated versions of American beauty. Mirrors are not windows, nor is history escapist literature. We will not regenerate republican virtue by hiding how we came to be who we are.

2. The editors make a mess in their opinon piece "Obama's 'Race to the Top.'"

Data. The editors state that educational spending topped $665b last year. Add in the $100b in stimulus funds staked already this year, and we are talking huge sums of money. The paper, however, plays loose with what this means. For instance, the stimulus money went to states in order to make up for the more than $200b they will not spend on education because of the recession. Next, the paper sees as spurious any charge of "underfunding" by explaining how President Bush increased federal spending on education from $28.3b to $37.5b. $9b sounds like revolutionary step, unless you realize that it increases the fed share by 1.5% of the total amount spent. In fact, the Bush administration increased its share from 5.1% in 2008 ($28.3b/$553b) to 5.6% ($37.5b/$665b). A whopping .5% of the total expenditures.

Third, in next paragraph, the editors write

"It’s also worth noting that the U.S. has been trying without much success to spend its way to education excellence for decades. Between 1970 and 2004, per-pupil outlays more than doubled in real terms, and the federal portion of that spending nearly tripled. Yet reading scores on national standardized tests have remained relatively flat. Black and Hispanic students are doing better, but they continue to lag far behind white students in both test scores and graduation rates."

According to the Census bureau, there were roughly the same number of students in school in 1970 and 2003 (the last figures I could find), around 49m. How out of whack is a doubling of the money spent per pupil? If a comparison works (it may not - forgive my googling), a new house cost around $23k; a new car $3900; bananas were $.12/lb, a tube of Crest was $.77 and Jiffy peanut butter $.59. A 1970 dollar would be worth roughly $5.30; reverse that, and $1 today would buy > $.20 in 1970. While prices have jumped five-fold, the government has up spending two-fold and still achieved the same results. Consider as well that today a greater percentage of the students are English language learners, due to demographic shifts. That would mean that while they have had their total funding cut by nearly 60% in relative dollars and their student population now present greater academic challenges due to second language acquisition, schools and teachers have been just as successful as they were in 1970, at least in terms of test results.

Of course, the editors could have used the same statistics to argue for the abolishment for the Department of Education, due to how little it actually contributes. But their real zeal deal is vouchers.

Bait and Switch. The editors complement the White House for its "Race to the Top" program, which "the Obama Administration claims will reward only those states that raise their academic standards, improve teacher quality and expand the reach of charter schools," then criticize it for "being at the behest of the unions, also shuttering a popular school voucher program that its own evaluation shows is improving test scores for low-income minorities in Washington, D.C."

So the White is trying to improve education through a $4.5b competition to produce the most effective charter schools, something to which the teachers' unions object. Unfortunately, this only sounds good. It is not really good, because money does not go to voucher programs. Put another way, the Obama administration antes up just under 50% as much as Bush did (on top of $100b stimuli), specifically for a program to expand school choice, to the teachers' displeasure, but that is still not good enough, because the money does not go to voucher programs.

The Federal government spends way too much money on education and the Federal government spends way too little money on vouchers.