Here’s an interesting article from a leftist magazine, Dissent, on how a few billionaires and their foundations are controlling—likely to its detriment—the direction our public schools are taking.

THE cost of K–12 public schooling in the United States comes to well over $500 billion per year. So, how much influence could anyone in the private sector exert by controlling just a few billion dollars of that immense sum? Decisive influence, it turns out. A few billion dollars in private foundation money, strategically invested every year for a decade, has sufficed to define the national debate on education; sustain a crusade for a set of mostly ill-conceived reforms; and determine public policy at the local, state, and national levels. In the domain of venture philanthropy—where donors decide what social transformation they want to engineer and then design and fund projects to implement their vision—investing in education yields great bang for the buck.

As someone in the trenches of education, I am absolutely convinced that the nations schools are going backward—not forward—with every new reform. We’ve spent two decades trying all of these new-fangled education ideas dreamed up by ambitious Ph.D.s and power accumulating state and federal bureaucrats and the end result, if you believe these same Ph.D.s and Bureaucrats is that things are getting worse. So much worse, in fact, that we need even more change than before.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

Lets go back to the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic with traditional teaching methods. That’s the education that the Ph.D.s and bureaucrats received that made them so smart in the first place.

I just ran across the free Tufts University Visual Understanding Environment tool and am very excited about the possibilities for classroom use. It essentially lets you create a mind map/concept map/pathway and then created multiple annotated pathways through that map. By linking various boxes, you can show each one individually in sequence, or the entire map as a whole, showing the interconnectedness.

Amazing stuff. Here’s what they say:

What is VUE?
At its core, the Visual Understanding Environment (VUE) is a concept and content mapping application, developed to support teaching, learning and research and for anyone who needs to organize, contextualize, and access digital information. Using a simple set of tools and a basic visual grammar consisting of nodes and links, faculty and students can map relationships between concepts, ideas and digital content.

Concept mapping is not new to the educational field. In fact, the benefits of concept mapping as a learning tool have been documented by over 40 years of cognitive science research. VUE provides a concept mapping interface, which can be used as such, or as an interface to organize digital content in non-linear ways.

Numerous tools currently exist for locating digital information, but few applications are available for making sense of the information available to us. As the availability of digital information continues to increase, VUE sets itself apart as a flexible tool to help faculty and students integrate, organize and contextualize electronic content in their work. Digital content can be accessed via the Web, or using the VUE’s “Resources” panel to tap into digital repositories, FTP servers and local file systems.

Sharing and presenting information are important aspects of academic work. VUE’s pathways feature allows presenters to create annotated trails through their maps, which become expert guided walk-throughs of the information. The pathways feature also provides a “slide view” of the information on the map. The power of VUE’s slide mode is the ability for presenters to focus on content (slide view) while preserving the information’s context (map view), by way of a single toggle between the two views.

VUE also provides supports for in-depth analysis of maps, with the ability to merge maps and export connectivity matrices to import in statistical packages. VUE also provide tools to apply semantic meaning to the maps, by way of ontologies and metadata schemas.
VUE can be used by anyone interested in visually structuring digital content, whether in support of teaching difficult to understand concepts or more generally, a tool for organizing personal digital resources.

I was just listening to Russ Roberts, a George Mason University Economics professor, and he said something that struck me:

Economics is the study of how to get the most out of life.

I’ve just got to find a way to convey that to my students.

I recently got a question from a former student, who has gone on to graduate school in business and is frustrated with a professor. She writes:

How are things? I have a question about inflation. I recently had to do a threaded discussion in my class about whether the falling dollar in the US was good or bad. I went on the side of it being concerning due to inflation and the standard of living decreasing.

My professor did not like my response and is criticizing the way that I think about many of the topics in his class. I was curious as to your opinion on inflation.

I feel like my International Business class should be renamed…Keynesian economics. We only discuss how he is so great, and that Von Mises, and Von Hayek, and Friedman are terrible.

Just thought I would get your thoughts!

Thanks,

My answer:

High inflation is the worst kind of tax—and is essentially a tax on consumption. You get hit by it every time you buy something. Worse, it’s a regressive tax, hitting the poor worse than the rich. In a high inflation period (like the 1970s, which I suffered through), you fall behind, even if your income rises.

Because inflation makes everything more expensive, it forces households to shift more and more resources to just the necessities. This reduces spending on all other items, and will ultimately increase unemployment in those industries. But unemployment is infectious, and will eventually spread to all industries.

That would bring back the 1970s era “stagflation,” of high unemployment and high inflation. Interestingly, the 1970s stagflation is exactly what discredits Keynes, since his theories failed to stop the condition.

Unfortunately, the spending of the current administration, combined with a loose money policy from the Fed makes unemployment a real threat.

They told me that if I voted for McCain, the economy would get worse. And they were right.

As you might have guessed, I’m a big fan of the Austrian economists and also of Friedman. I’m not surprised your professor thinks otherwise. He and others like him are victims of their own mind-set. The Austrians had a good grip on the causes of the Great Depression, but their solution was to wait it out. That didn’t suit the needs of the period’s politicians (esp. FDR), who needed to be seen doing something—anything. In steps Keynes, who offers the politically palatable solution of having government solve the problem. He was wrong, and his “solution” extended the Depression, but he said what they wanted to hear.

Your professor—like so many I encountered in grad school in economics—has a particular paradigm fixed in his calcified brain, and rejects anything which doesn’t fit. He has started with a conclusion—that big socialist government (fiscal policy) is the solution—and then picked his economic theories to fit. The Austrians argue that monetary policy is the solution, which leaves out big government, so he doesn’t like it.

(In this sense, your professior like the Global Warming Theorists, who started with the conclusion that the earth is warming, and then manipulated the data to prove it—a novel approach to the scientific method.)

The Keynesian apologists will make specious arguments, such as “If FDR didn’t follow Keynes, it would have been worst.” or, “If not for the 2009 Stimulus Package, unemployment would be worst.” But these are unprovable assertions, and they know it. What we do know—provable by facts—is that FDR got into office and things got worse. Obama and the Democrats passed the Stimulus, and unemployment rose.

We also know that stagflation discredits Keynes. The economic crisis (unemplyment, inflation) of the 1970s ended not as a result of more government spending, as Keynes’ theories prescribed. It ended when Paul Volker used monetary policy and the Fed to get a grip on the inflation which had plagued the nation for 20 years, and when Reagan cut taxes, freeing capital to find its most efficient uses.

Even though the 1970s discredited Keynes, too many academics cling to him because he justifies government activism. If, as the Austrians urged, we mitigate the business cycle by using the Fed to manipulate M according to V, big government loses some of its necessity.

A final, random thought. One reason global warming is so appealing as a concept to the academics is that it offers yet another justification for big socialist government. You need big socialism to save the planet.

I had been talking about the roles of the president’s cabinet. “So who knows who Colin Powell is,” I asked my group of high school juniors.

“I know, I know!” a girl waved her hand in the back. She looked happy and confident, so I let her continue.

“He’s the president of Africa.”

No one laughed.

The future is doomed.