I reviewed this intriguing textbook (Facts, Not Fear: Teaching Children about the Environment) recently for LibraryThing. As the book originates with our own Alabama Policy Institute (formerly the Alabama Family Alliance), I thought the review might be worth repeating here. There’s nothing about the Alabama organization in the acknowledgments, but I found a magazine article in which AFA president Gary Palmer claimed responsibility for this book.
This textbook (for homeschoolers) poses as an antidote to biased, alarmist teaching about the environment, but its own bias is flagrant. It is valuable as a model of propaganda technique in general, and of anti-regulatory rhetorical strategies in particular. Its method mostly consists of amassing anecdotes, omitting unfriendly evidence (while preaching about respect for “science”), and keeping strict silence about topics that cannot be easily spun. There’s not a peep about toxic or nuclear waste, for instance, or about human health problems stemming from pollution.
The tykes whose parents use this book are likely to come away thinking that “garbage” consists entirely of household waste, and that industrial plants are just bigger versions of their own households. It follows, then, that petrochemical plants are just as concerned with keeping things neat and tidy as Mommy and Daddy are. And the biggest threats to the environment? Government regulation and public ownership of land, of course. Continue reading →
This is the first such school in Georgia, but not in the country. The concept is likely to catch on, given that education secretary nominee Arne Duncan presided over the creation of six of these schools in Chicago.
The DeKalb schools superintendent denies that this will be a training ground for directing children to the military. Yet the Marine Corps will help pay for the school, including a portion of teacher salaries, and the principal will divide authority with a Marine commandant. Other details about the school’s “military-style regimen” remain sketchy.
I’m reminded of Marine author E.B. Sledge’s description of Marine training and its function. I don’t doubt that military training has changed a great deal since 1943, when Sledge arrived at Camp Pendleton. There is less tolerance for cruelty and degradation of recruits. But the function of basic training remains the same: to prepare recruits to endure and survive modern combat. And in Sledge’s assessment, the “seemingly cruel and senseless harassment” of Marine training was essential to its effectiveness at preparing men to enter “the meat grinder.”
Boot camp taught me that I was expected to excel, or try to, even under stress. My drill instructor … was a strict disciplinarian, a total realist about our future, and an absolute perfectionist dedicated to excellence. To him … I attribute my ability to have withstood the stress of [combat on] Peleliu. [E.B. Sledge, With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 157]
This future, about which the drill instructor was so realistic, was one in which most of the men who entered the meat grinder would leave, as Sledge puts it, “shocked, bleeding, or stiff.”
In popular belief, military academies have a storied ability to “straighten out” young men who are difficult to manage. “Boot camp” rehabilitation for young offenders has been popular in the South, even after being shown to be bad at rehabilitating.
Sledge’s insight may help explain why this is so. Boot camp was designed to prepare young men to face an insane level of senseless violence. A boot-camp approach to general education is a way of giving up on certain young people — a half-conscious admission that we have nothing better to offer them than a life of random blows that make no sense.
It’s to be hoped that DeKalb County’s Marine school has something more to offer. All that’s been indicated so far, though, is that the academic curriculum will emphasize math and science. The school will be a “magnet school” for students from throughout the district.
Could the Marine school actually be a good idea? Maybe so, for some students. Our society is not competent at giving young people a compelling reason for living. We know that suicide is endemic among teens in the U.S., and our experts respond by prescribing pills.
So where the choice is one between training to kill and killing oneself, the Marine school may at least claim to be the lesser of two evils.
The State of Alabama is in trouble with parents of college-bound students. Like seventeen other states, Alabama created a tuition savings program designed to cover the cost of tuition to a state college or university. The Alabama program, called PACT (Prepaid Affordable College Tuition), bears the state’s implicit guarantee that participants will save enough to pay for college.
But with the crisis on Wall Street we find that PACT managers, hired by the trustees, were counting on the stock market to generate growth in the fund; in fact, 72 percent of assets were in stocks a year ago. As a result, PACT’s losses are the largest of any state tuition savings plan. Suddenly the fund is in no position to cover its obligations, and its trustees are saying they never really promised that it would in the first place.
It’s true that contracts executed between 1990 and 1994 state that the program “guarantees payment of undergraduate tuition,” while later contracts state more ambiguously that the program “will” pay tuition. But according to the Birmingham News, state attorneys now argue that the state “always lacked the legal authority to guarantee payment.”
In other words, if you took that PACT name literally, you’re a sucker.
Just as an aside, an accounting error overstated the fund’s assets by more than $22.6 million until an independent audit reported the error in February 2008. It doesn’t give the impression that PACT trustees have been on the ball.
Unless the state takes extraordinary steps, parents who participated in PACT and whose children are not yet enrolled in college are likely to have to take a loss by withdrawing from the program. This means they recover only their initial investment, less fees.
The board of trustees has held a public meeting about the problem, but has been slow to release financial statements and audits. The 2008 statement is scheduled for release after the board meets again on March 24.
The state’s credibility is taking a huge hit because of the PACT debacle. Extraordinary measures to replace the program’s losses are justified, not least because failure to do so will place a large number of families in a position where they cannot afford to send a child to college.
Birmingham News: Q&A about PACT, indifferently formatted but useful.
Neil Howe, writing in the Sunday Washington Post, makes the case that my 40-something generation is in no position to criticize the intellectual attainments of today’s youth; in fact, we qualify as the “dumbest generation” currently on offer. (Thanks to Mike O’Connor for mentioning the article.) Howe shows how the generation born in the years around 1963 have, compared to their elders and juniors, “performed the worst on standardized exams, acquired the fewest educational degrees and been the least attracted to professional careers. In a word, they’re the dumbest.”
Growing up in the wake of the Baby Boom, raised by the television, defined from the start as a walking social problem, our generation was (it’s been argued) a victim of timing. The postwar economy contracted, the career ladder was crowded with Boomers, there was a mood of failure, and we were told to feel shocked that we might have less than our parents had had. Little wonder, then, that we dampened our curiosity along with our expectations. Sarah Palin, who shares my birth year of 1964, is typical of us in her contempt for insight and subtlety.
This is not to say that we’re all dummies, or that we have little to offer. Howe notes that while we’re relatively dumb, we’re also resilient and pragmatic, not inclined to agonize over decisions. As a group we take an aggressive interest, sometimes too aggressive perhaps, in the circumstances of our own children’s education, as if making sure they are not short-changed as we were.
From “Life in Hell,” Matt Groening’s dumb comic strip
One aspect that Howe does not discuss — it’s only newspaper column after all — is the role of technology and mass communication in the culture of an age group. My generation frets about the compelling power of the Internet, but we are oblivious to the harm done to us by television. Video has now become a two-way street: You watch a short YouTube vid and immediately type a comment, or shoot and post your own video in response. For us it was different. Video came at us from outside, and we were sponges, soaking up the sensory data and never making a move. This was the template for our lives. We soaked up experiences that taught us nothing. School was a joke that had stopped being funny. Mostly we didn’t read, didn’t write, didn’t think, didn’t feel, didn’t see the point.
Another aspect: living life in the shadow of apocalypse. A few shreds of the Civil Defense culture of the ’50s survived in our time, such as monthly air raid sirens (but no drills) and “Fallout Shelter” signs on buildings. In the era of U.S.-Soviet détente, I suppose it was impolite to openly discuss the threat of nuclear annihilation. We just knew about it. We also knew that a dozen kinds of pollution were threatening our survival, and the world’s population was growing too rapidly. (We were supposed to want “Zero Population Growth.”) The post-Watergate government managed to be corrupt, ridiculous, and menacing all at the same time. Our future was going to be like Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four (one of the few books we actually read). When we grew old, we would be like Edward G. Robinson’s character in Soylent Green — pained by memories, dazed by present ugliness. There was nothing to look forward to. Might as well take drugs.
When we hit college and young adulthood, my generation shocked (and either delighted or appalled) our elders by falling for Reagan and the New Right. Most of us who had any political opinion at all were eager to believe that it was morning in America and that our life up until then had been a bad dream. Reagan was our television father. That meant he would always come out on top by the end of the show, and the people who called attention to his mistakes or stood in his way were just plot devices to be overcome. We always knew how the show would end, with Dad cracking jokes and in charge.
We learned a new adjective: “homeless.” The cities of our childhood had not had these squads of shabby men and women walking the sidewalks and begging for change. They appeared out of nowhere, just as we had to strike out on our own and make a living. We noticed their traces in the parks, under bridges, in an abandoned house where we used to play.
We entered the workforce and learned more new words, like “downsizing” and “jobless expansion.” We were told, a little late, that a successful employee has to keep moving, like a shark, and that loyalty to a company will not be rewarded. The homeless took on an ominous prophetic quality, like figures from a post-apocalyptic movie coming true. We lived in fear of violent crime, even as the crime rate fell. These half-legendary crackheads, panhandlers, and crazy Vietnam vets made us feel deeply angry, sometimes. When we had children of our own, we kept them indoors, safe from the sick men on the street.
None of our generation’s problems are unique to us; it’s a question of degree, not of kind. What I’ve offered here is not a self-portrait. It’s an essay — in other words, an attempt — and it may not be worth much. My main point is (as Howe implies) we forty-somethings should forego the time-honored tradition of accusing youth of failing to live up to their elders’ standards. All in all, the kids today are brainier than we are, and by the time they hit college, they’ve done much more reading, writing, and thinking than we had done at that age. They seem much better qualified to run the world. We should be pleased to turn it over to them.
If worse comes to worst, in the year 2022 one of us will need a younger man’s help to uncover “the secret of Soylent Green”:
I reviewed this intriguing textbook (Facts, Not Fear: Teaching Children about the Environment) recently for LibraryThing. As the book originates with our own Alabama Policy Institute (formerly the Alabama Family Alliance), I thought the review might be worth repeating here. There’s nothing about the Alabama organization in the acknowledgments, but I found a magazine article in which AFA president Gary Palmer claimed responsibility for this book.
The State of Alabama is in trouble with parents of college-bound students. Like seventeen other states, Alabama created a tuition savings program designed to cover the cost of tuition to a state college or university. The Alabama program, called 
Another aspect: living life in the shadow of apocalypse. A few shreds of the Civil Defense culture of the ’50s survived in our time, such as monthly air raid sirens (but no drills) and “Fallout Shelter” signs on buildings. In the era of U.S.-Soviet détente, I suppose it was impolite to openly discuss the threat of nuclear annihilation. We just knew about it. We also knew that a dozen kinds of pollution were threatening our survival, and the world’s population was growing too rapidly. (We were supposed to want “Zero Population Growth.”) The post-
When we hit college and young adulthood, my generation shocked (and either delighted or appalled) our elders by falling for Reagan and the New Right. Most of us who had any political opinion at all were eager to believe that it was 
