Lift Up Your Hearts!

Is College Worth It? by William J. Bennett and David Wilezol (Thomas Nelson, 2013)

It is the best of times and the worst of times for education.  From preschool through higher education, there has been a steady decline in the quality of public education in at least the half-century I’ve been observing it.  If my father is to be believed—and he was always a very reliable source—it’s been declining for a lot longer than that.  He was frequently appalled at my generation’s ignorance of basic history, geography, and literature.  (He’d have said the same thing about basic arithmetic, but he was surrounded by engineers.)  It doesn’t take much observation to realize that today the average American’s grasp of those subjects makes me look brilliant.

At the same time—and my father would concur—in some fields, for some people, knowledge and ability has soared.  As a science fair judge, he was blown away by the scope and quality of the research done by high school students.  His own high school had offered no math beyond trigonometry, and it was rare among high schools to offer even that.  My high school offered only one Advanced Placement course—and that for seniors—whereas our children had at least a dozen to choose from, beginning as freshmen.  And yet only a few students were actually prepared to take advantage of the generous offerings:  back in fifth grade, I would have said the expectations of their teachers were well below those of my own, and far below those of my father’s.

Despite the best efforts of educators to mush us all into a sameness at any level—better all low than some higher than others—there has always been an upper class and a lower class when it comes to education, and there always will be.  What I’ve been noticing is that the highs are getting higher, the lows are getting lower, and the middle class is rapidly descending—much as is happening with economic measures.

I’m hoping the economic situation does not lead to revolution, but there’s a crisis and a revolution coming in education and I say, bring it on!

Except for Catholics, for whom parochial school was usually an option, and the rich, who had their exclusive, expensive private schools, for as long as I remember—and a long time before that—sending one’s children to the local public school was the assumed, unquestioned, default position.  About 40 years ago Protestant schools began to flourish as well, as more and more Christians found themselves less and less happy with the values being taught in the default schools.  Secular private schools arose to meet the needs of parents of the hippie generation who wanted a different approach to education for their children.  And then came homeschooling, for which there are nearly as many reasons as there are homeschoolers.  Even public schools got into the act, with magnet schools and some—though pitifully limited—choices offered to families.  What all these new options have in common is that more parents and students are now thinking about what’s best for their situations and making informed choices, even if they end up in the default position anyway.

Bennett—former U.S. Secretary of Education—and Wilezol wish to see the same thing happen at the level of higher education.  Just as our public schools have consistently consumed higher and higher sums of money for lower and lower return, so college tuition has risen explosively and yet left an unconscionable population of young people with staggering debt and no employment beyond what they could have found with just a high school diploma.  Everyone from parents to high school guidance counselors to college financial aid advisors to President Obama is urging high school students to make college the default option, and Bennett says this is a disaster waiting to happen—or rather having already begun.  College education, he says, is likely to be the next “bubble,” and when it bursts it will be as bad as the housing bubble.

If I were rating solely for the ideas presented in this book, it would receive five stars.  But the writing could have used a better editor—more than once the same story is presented twice—and the sheer quantity of numbers thrown about is overwhelming and wearying even for a math geek like me.  But even though I’m skeptical of some of Bennett’s numbers—if only because he sometimes uses the same statistic to bolster opposite points—there’s more than enough convincing evidence to prove his thesis.

Everyone considering attending (and/or paying for) college within the next 20 years should read this book.  Now.  What’s best about it is that the authors present facts, figures, philosophies, and scenarios but fall short of (better, rise higher than) answering the title’s question either yea or nay.  Whether or not college is “worth it” is a complex issue comprising such questions as, “for whom?” “for what purpose?”  “which college?” and “at what cost?”  The objective of Is College Worth It? is not to dismantle the higher education system in the United States, but to rethink it, above all encouraging students and their parents to put aside their prejudices, do their “due diligence,” and choose what is best for their particular situation, rather than simply taking the default. 

Reading the first section of the book, it is tempting to wish that Bennett was not so focused on the “return on investment” of a college education in purely financial terms.  Isn’t college all about growth and maturity and broadening one’s horizons?  Has someone who choses homemaking, motherhood, volunteer work, or working for less than his or her maximum potential income wasted a college education?  “Yes,” and “not at all,” the authors would say later on, but for many reasons the economic calculation is more relevant than ever before.  Students have been sold a bill of goods—by those who should know better—that going to college will guarantee them higher-paying jobs.  On average, this is true, but “average” includes doctors, lawyers, and petroleum engineers, which masks what happens to anthropology, religion, and women’s study majors, let alone the 40% of first-time freshmen who fail to graduate after six years of college.  College costs have skyrocketed, a fact cleverly hidden from students by college financial aid offices, which class as “aid” whopping loans that “don’t have to be paid until after you graduate.”  It’s astonishing how many college-bound teens have graduated from high school without realizing the effect on debt of compounding interest.  Then again, they’ve been lured by the siren song of, “it’s an investment; you’ll easily pay it off once you’re earning a paycheck."  Which is patently false for an increasingly worrisome segment of the population.  They’re defaulting, they’re mad, and all they can do is Occupy Whatever and whine that the world is unfair.  To be fair to them, it is our generation that let them think that college was a time for lavish living, wild parties, and little work—all on someone else’s dime $100,000.  Now the bill has come due, and they realize that much of it was on their tab after all.

How did we get to the point where college is where children go to become morally and financially wasted?  I suppose my generation—the ill-named flower children—deserve much of the blame for the moral degeneration.  But the proliferation of massive, crippling student loans is of more recent origin, and Bennett puts that at the combined feet of the Federal government and the colleges themselves.  Intentions were good, but you know the rest of that saying.  The dramatic increase in student loan money has fueled not only correspondingly increased tuition, but has led colleges (who have no stake in the loan repayment) to push loans on students who have no reasonable expectation of being able to pay them off.   In order not “to leave (Federal) money on the table,” colleges have every incentive to accept students who are not fit for college, and to lower academic standards so they bring in student aid dollars for as long as possible.  More sickening still is the use to which much of the increased tuition money—not to mention alumni donations—is being put:  the proliferation of obscure departments, enormous sports facilities, luxurious dormitories designed to wow prospective students (our own University of Central Florida is a recent case in point), and obscenely high salaries and benefits for a few super-star professors and administrators while more and more classes are being taught by poorly-paid adjunct professors with no benefits.

It’s a situation that’s bound to blow up sooner or later, and Bennett predicts (and perhaps hopes, for the sake of necessary if painful correction) it will be sooner.  It was a decade or so ago that a math professor friend prophesied that someday parents would wake up to what they were actually getting from their extravagant college outlay.  We’ve been a little slower on the uptake than he expected, but the time is coming.

There is some good news:    First, contrary to common belief, there are many good, well-paying jobs that do not require a bachelor’s degree.

One study conducted by Georgetown University found that by 2018, nearly fourteen million jobs will require more than a high school education but less than a bachelor’s degree. … In 2012, the Bureau of Labor Statistics identified twenty jobs typically requiring less than a bachelor’s degree that had a median salary of $50,000 or more, far above the median annual wage of all professions of about $34,000.  These included air traffic controllers ($108,000), dental hygienists ($68,000), and geological and petroleum technicians ($54,000), jobs that won’t disappear anytime soon.  Many of the jobs on the list were in health care and technology, two fields repeatedly shown to be in the top echelon of fastest-growing economic sectors throughout the next decade.

What’s more, many of these are jobs that are now going to non-citizens, because too few Americans have the necessary skills.  Bennett’s strongest plea is the establishment of an apprenticeship/certification system to which students with the appropriate interest and ability can be directed in lieu of four-year college, or even earlier.  Instead of struggling, languishing, or partying through college, these students could be bringing home a respectable paycheck years before their age-mates graduate with massive debt, a room in their parents’ basement, and a job as a Starbucks barista. 

Best of all, thanks to the Internet, higher education is even now in the throes of a revolution similar to that which opened up pre-college education.  The monopoly claimed for centuries by the brick-and-mortar university model is becoming increasingly available for free—or at least for a whole lot less.  There are still some bugs to be worked out, but the handwriting is on the wall.  The following story is long, but worth the effort to type it in.

One of the men responsible for what may be an Athens-like renaissance in higher education is Sebastian Thrun, Google’s vice president and pioneer in artificial intelligence and robotics.  Known in science circles for his engineering feats—like Stanley, the self-driving car—Thrun is using his technological prowess to make quality higher education available to the world.

In 2011, while teaching a graduate-level artificial intelligence class at Stanford University, Thrun lamented that his course could reach only two hundred students in the suburbs of Palo Alto.  So, he decided to offer his own free online class, with the same homework, quizzes, and tests that he gives to Stanford students.  He announced the proposal with a single e-mail.  Before he knew it, he had a flood of takers. … “Usually I reach about 200 students and now I reach 160,000.  In my entire life in education I didn’t have as much impact on people as I had in those two months.”

By using online videos and educational resources, Thrun’s class was being accessed by students from all corners of the world.  In fact, the students translated the class for free from English into forty-four languages.

Until now, an overwhelming number of these students—many in developing countries and lacking standard education credentials—never would have had a chance at a Stanford-level education.  Yet their appetite for quality education was strong.  When Thrun began testing his new hoard of students, all of the students taking the class globally and at Stanford, the top 410 students were online students.  The 411^th top performer was a Stanford student.  “We just found over 400 people in the world who outperformed the top Stanford student,” Thrun said.

Realizing the potential at his fingertips, Thrun launched Udacity, an independent online education company that provides high-quality education at low cost to virtually everyone.  … There are no admissions offices, and anyone can sign up.  After the class, students can choose to certify their skills online or in one of Udacity’s 4,500 testing centers for a fee….

The classes are structured much like university classes, but instead of traditional types of lectures, all-star professors give video presentations that directly engage and challenge students.  Thrun is using technology not only to transform educational access and curricula but also teaching.  For the past thousand years, professors have been lecturing at students.  “[It’s] like trying to lose weight by watching a professor exercise,” quips Thrun.  Now he is leading a new charge—interactive, student-focused technology education. …

As you can imagine, Thrun’s enterprise has rattled the foundations of the education establishment.  His critics say that a Udacity certificate is worth nothing, and how can one know the true identity or scholastic work of a student on the free-for-all jungle that is the Internet?

[Thrun] said Udacity has already partnered with more than twenty companies that verify and accept the certificates of course completion.  Some are already hiring graduates of Udacity courses.  [I would add, who cares?  Hire the person for, say, a three-month probationary period.  Either he can do the work or he can’t.  If he can’t, let him go; if he can, what does a certificate matter?]

We asked Thrun if his enterprise and others like it will be the end of higher education as we know it—exclusive enclaves for a limited number of students at high tuitions.  “I think it’s the beginning of higher education,” Thrun replied.

Much of traditional American higher education prides itself on a false promotion of diversity, opportunity, and excellence.  But to our knowledge, with one class alone, Thrun has provided a level of diversity, opportunity, and academic rigor not seen before.  People from any country, any background, and any income level can receive an elite education at virtually no cost.  We have been talking about equal educational opportunity for years.  This may be its true advent.

Bennett still finds plenty of scenarios under which it is best to go to college.  If money is not an issue for you—or more likely, your parents—you are one of the few who can afford to choose your school and your major without regard for future earnings potential.   If you’re a very good student and can get into one of the elite universities, it’s probably worthwhile to take on some debt, because even though those who know assure me that the quality of education even at Harvard has declined considerably, the quality of the school’s name, its students, and the connections you will make there still translate into financial reward sufficient to enable you to repay your loans without undue hardship.  But if you’re really, really good, you may want to find yourself a way directly into the workforce—such as the son of some friends, who because of his expertise in a narrow field was offered a job straight out of high school making more money than most college graduates.  He lives a good life in California, loves his work, and has already advanced significantly in the field.  Despite his parents’ fears, it would have been foolish for him to waste four years getting a degree.

What about those who can’t afford college tuition, won’t be going to an elite school, and still want to go into a field that requires a four-year degree or higher?   Think about getting creative:  Pick up what credits you can through Advanced Placement, community college, or online classes, particularly those credits that are required but in which you have little interest, then transfer to a four-year school for the last year or so.  You’ll save yourself a lot of money, and it’s the junior and senior courses in which the interaction with professors and fellow-students is most important.  (Just be aware of credit-transfer policies.  Sometimes state universities are excellent, and required to accept community college credits.  Unfortunately, you’re likely to find your community college colleagues less inspiring than in high school, and the courses less rigorous, which is why it’s better to get credits in courses you don’t care much about.)  If you’re considering post-graduate education look for a less-expensive undergrad school that is still good enough to impress the school you want to give you your final degree.  And if you want to major in the fine arts, or gender studies, or something else with few job prospects, consider taking a second major, or otherwise acquiring skills to fall back on while you are awaiting a job in your dream field.

Or, you could do what we did, and what our children did:  choose parents whose own parents paid for their college educations, and who felt an obligation to pass on the blessing.  But I suspect even that is no longer sufficient.  Students today need to be much wiser, and more creative in their college choices than we were, and than our children were.  On the whole, that’s a good thing, a needed wake-up call.  Following  the default actions of the crowd is rarely advantageous.  Parents, too, need to consider that spending money on a child’s pre-college education (private school, high-quality homeschool materials, specialized camps, educational travel) may in the end be more valuable than saving extensively for college.  Note to parents:  that’s not a go-ahead to buy an expensive boat or golf club membership, unless your child happens to be Jacques Cousteau or Tiger Woods.  Note to students:   above all, get out of your heads the idea—no matter how widespread among your peers—that the purpose of college is to party with your friends.  (Unless it’s on your own—unborrowed—money; then, as you please.)   You can buy a LOT of beer with just one semester’s tuition payment.

The bottom line is:  go into the post-high school decision well-informed, well-prepared, with your eyes wide open.  A good place to begin is by slogging through Is College Worth It?

Most of those who know me also know that I don’t like the government being involved in our health care, for too many reasons than I can go into now.  More than once I’ve asked, “Do you really want to trust your health to the same folks who are mangling public education?” 

Important note:  I support the public school system, much as I find fault with it.  There are many teachers among our family and friends.  Our own children attended the local schools for a number of years.  We pay school taxes, and have voted in favor of most requested tax increases, including last year’s. Everyone in the family has put countless hours into (public) school volunteer work.

Another important note:  I agree that our health care system is in a big mess, and big messes invite government interference whether we like it or not.  Personal experience of family and friends has shown me that public health care can work very well (France, Switzerland) and very badly (UK, Canada).  (I know there are readers of this blog who are happy with Canada’s health care, but I’m going by the experiences of those I know personally, which, alas, are negative.)  I don’t like the way in which our government is approaching health care reform, but that’s not the point here.

The point is consistency.

In the battle over health care, the faction I will loosely designate as “pro-government-social-program” (PSGP) wins for consistency:  The same people who are pushing national health insurance are ardent advocates of public education.  Viewing education as a fundamental, essential right of every child, they make it not only available but compulsory, and not only for the poor but for everyone, and expect everyone to participate.  They frequently oppose anything (private schools, home education, vouchers) that would allow students to opt out of monopoly government schooling.

Having concluded that the cost of a (possibly large) uneducated segment of the population is greater than the cost of providing “free” education to all, they are consistent in applying the same logic to health care.

I, on the other hand, am not consistent, and neither, it seems, are many with better conservative credentials than mine.  How can I support public education for all and not health care?  Why is it considered acceptable, even admirable, for everyone—including the rich—to take government assistance in the form of public education, but lower-class, even shameful to be on Medicaid, accept Food Stamps, or live in public housing?  What makes education so much more important than health care, food, or housing?

And maybe the PGSP’s are not as consistent as I thought, because I don’t see them pushing for compulsory soup-kitchen and housing project attendance.

Although … when our kids were in school, the school breakfast/lunch program, which served a useful purpose for poor children who otherwise would not eat, was pushed on everyone.  It wasn’t exactly mandatory, but the schools used plenty of promotions and advertisers’ tricks to get children to pressure their parents to send money for their lunches rather than pack them better food from home.  In the case of breakfast, they actually kept the other students trapped on the school bus until the breakfast-eaters were finished.  So who knows what's next in the minds of the PSGP's?

I don’t know where we’re going and what we’re in for with all this, and I don’t know how I’m going to rethink my attitude in regard to public education and/or health care.  But it certainly was a revelation to discover my own inconsistency.

I've been waiting for The Good Shepherds to become available online ever since I read the print version in Christianity Today magazine.  This positive, upbeat story resonates with me in so many ways, it well deserves a post.

[Insert the usual disclaimer here:  This way of life is not for everyone; it not my intention to offend, nor to imply disrespect for other people's life situations, much less push anyone into a lifestyle that is far from mainstream—albeit that it would have been considered normal by most of our ancestors.  But I can't help considering this a very cool life choice indeed.]

I encourage you to read the entire article; it's short, and tells an inspiring story of a small movement to revitalize both declining rural areas and declining family life. Here are some of my favorite quotes from the article:

Once you opt out of the conventional paradigm [of public schooling] and find it satisfying, then you begin searching for other paradigms to opt out of

So we discovered.  If we took baby steps of unconventionality when we decided to become a homeschooling family, our children are now taking full strides, not only in education but also in their approaches to family life, childbirth and childrearing, health and medicine, entrepreneurship, community life, and even running styles!  By no means do I think unconventionality is limited to homeschoolers.  Jon, after all, was not homeschooled, though he thinks in many ways like a homeschooler—if I may be permitted such stereotyping—and his schooling in small-town New Hampshire was unconventional enough, at least when measured against most public school experiences I know of.  Nonetheless, I'm convinced that homeschoolers, having chosen the step outside the mainstream in a big way, are predisposed to thinking unconventionally in other areas.

Scott was skeptical when his wife said that she felt God wanted the family to raise sheep. "Excuse me," Scott replied. "I can't even stand to mow my own yard. What makes you think I'm going to start doing things like that?"

I guess he found out that sheep make pretty good lawn mowers.  :) 

Thirty years ago, 80 percent of all visitors to our farm were hippie, cosmic-worshipping, nirvana earth muffins....Today, 80 percent are Christian homeschoolers.

I've found that the homeschooling, homebirthing, and back-to-earth movements are populated by groups of people that are in many ways radically different from each other; what they have in common is dedication to a particular set of ideas, and the fact that they are even more radically different from mainstream society.

How do I leave my Dilbert cubicle at the end of an expressway...and instead invest in my family, my kids, my community?

Sometimes by combining more mainstream work with farming, like Heather and Jon's friends at Providence Pastures Farm, which is where I first learned the delights of drinking raw milk.  Of course I immediately thought of them when I read the article.  Having a job that can be done primarily from home does help reduce the pressure of trying to make the farm self-sustaining.  I believe that when these folks their motivation was simply to provide healthy food for their children, and the farm lifestyle grew from there.

In our culture today, we've got this mentality that you send your kids off to school to get a good enough education, to get a good enough diploma, to get a good enough job, to pay well enough to work a thousand miles away from home, to accumulate enough money so they can put you in a nursing home when you get old. What I'm looking for is for my grandkids to argue over who gets to spend the day with grandpa.

Amen!  And grandma, too.

It's been a while since I've posted anything in the RETHINK category, but I was inspired by this article on the differences in chilbirth between the United Kingdom and the United States. As much as I have come to appreciate midwives and the option of home birth, the point of this post is not to tout the British socialized health care system, which I know has significant problems. Nor do I wish to make the all-too-common mistake of assuming that an idea is better just because it's not American—or because it is European—an error which is just as dangerous as its opposite.

What strikes me as so vitally important, especially for Americans who, thanks to the size and historical self-sufficiency of our country, tend to have less contact with other cultures than most educated people, is the great benefit of listening to and exploring other people's views on topics that are so well-ingrained in our own lives we never question them. Ideas that are so much a part of us we imagine anyone who would think otherwise as uncultured, uncivilized, and ignorant: "They do such-and-such because they don't know any better. When they see our way they will know it is best." Most of us wouldn't actually say that, but it's a strong gut reaction. It's a good thing, then for all of us to encounter people who have equally deep-seated feelings that their ways, very different from ours, are superior. Whether we come away from the comparison with our minds changed, or more convinced than ever that we are right, we benefit from the encounter.

Not many people can learn this lesson by living in another culture, as Janet has. But the Internet can be a great eye-opener, and most of us probably have neighbors, co-workers, and church or school friends who would be happy to share a different cultural view.  Not to mention that getting married, even to someone from one's own culture, can be a surprising introduction to the thought that ideas, habits, and customs we take for granted are not necessarily universal. :)

Far be it from me to champion the inane and dangerous idea that all cultures and customs are equally valuable.  But I think most of us are much more likely to make the opposite error.  I preach to myself most of all.

What would you think if you bought a top-of-the-line piece of equipment, and 19 months later—seven months out of warranty—it completely stopped working?  I wouldn't be happy even if it were a $25 item.

What if it cost over $1000—would you be a bit annoyed?  What if it was a piece of equipment necessary for much of the work you do?

But hey, sometimes things happen.  That's what repair shops are for.

But what if the manufacturer refuses to sell you the part you need to make the repair?

We've been loyal Gateway Computer fans for many long years; I think we've had five of them all told.  Cow boxes = excitement around here!

Nevermore.

In January of 2006 we bought our latest Gateway, a lovely high speed machine with lots of bells and whistles.  We did not opt for the extended warranty, since we've never had a bit of trouble with any of our Gateways—we only replaced them when they grew hopelessly out of date.   It was, indeed, a lovely machine, and did everything it promised.

Everything except last.

As I've written, last Monday it entered the machine-equivalent of a Persistent Vegetative State.  After trying several tricks, none of which did any good, we took it to a computer emergency room.  Diagnosis:  a failed motherboard.  If we would get a new Gateway motherboard, they would gladly replace it and get us up and running again.

Good news?  I thought so.  I mean, it was going to cost money, but that's life.  We spent $500 in car repairs over the last two weeks, too.  I was just glad that the diagnosis was not:  Your hard drive crashed and you've lost all your data.

I did think it was a little funny that the repair guy said we had to order the motherboard.  But now I know why.  Gateway doesn't sell them!  If your computer is under warranty, they'll fix it, but otherwise you're on your own.  The tech's recommendation?  "Google it."  Find a motherboard somewhere in cyberspace.  He even kindly provided the specs.

What kind of company won't sell replacement parts for a high-end, critical machine that's less than two years old???

Porter went down to Best Buy to ask them what they do when someone brings in such a machine under their extended warranty.  Um, guess what?  They Google it.  They dig around, looking for someone with the right Gateway motherboard to sell.

Je ne comprends pas!

What I do know is that I need to RETHINK.  How can I take advantage of what computers have to offer—they wouldn't be so important to me if they didn't have a lot of value to add—without being so dependent on them?  Do I go back to paper for critical information?

Should we get two of everything, to have a backup?  We sort of had that—our older Gateway still works, mostly.  But it's a Windows 98 machine with some funny quirks, and it lacks the power to do what I want to do.  So for backup purposes it's not really good enough.

Do I transfer as much as possible of my work to the Internet?  That's not possible with much of what I do, but if I used GMail I'd at least not lose e-mail messages when something like this happens.  That makes me a bit nervous, having all my e-mails stored elsewhere—but having them on my own machine didn't work out too well this time.

Any ideas?

Oh, and if I haven't answered an e-mail you sent me before last Monday, I'm probably not deliberatly ignoring it.  I just can't get to it....

Our friend Chris, the engineer who eschews e-mail and still uses a paper organizer, is fond of saying, "Just call me Ned."  I'm not ready to go that far, but his point of view is currently looking a little more reasonable.

Central Florida is the most dangerous place in the country, at least if it's lightning strikes that worry you.  The tragedy of a girl who was struck by lightning just after descending from her school bus is still fresh in our memories, so it's no wonder the Orange County school board policy errs on the side of caution:  No student is allowed outside until 30 minutes after the last lighning flash, if thunder follows the lightning within 30 seconds.

They are wisely reconsidering the policy, however, after a recent debacle.  A long-lasting storm coupled with rigid enforcement of the rules kept some 2000 students trapped at two schools until nearly 9 p.m.  Snacks were trucked in (the district apparently caring less about the safety of their employees), and no doubt many of the students thought the excitement high adventure—at least for the first hour.  But most of the children—not to mention the teachers—must have been anxious to get home to their families, with not a few kindergarteners crying for their mommies.

Certainly their mommies were longing to get to them.  If the students were imprisoned in relative comfort and safety, their parents did not fare as well, trapped as they were in a long line of cars, with no idea when their children might be released.  The students may have had food, but picture the poor mom, waiting in a hot car with a couple of preschoolers and no more than a couple of rice cakes and a bottle of water among them.  If that.  The schools would not even allow parents to sign their children out and walk outside with them under their own responsibility.  This policy, above all, needs to be rethought.

There are scenarios in which it may be necessary to keep parents away from campus and their children for a time.  We had a situation not long ago where a student was threatening others with a gun; under such circumstances, adding a swarm of panicked parents to the mix would only increase the danger. But such very exceptional cases should not be the model for less critical situations.

While students are on campus, schools have an awesome and serious responsibility for their safety, but this is a delegated responsibility.  The true authorities in a child's life are his parents, and if they temporarily transfer some of their responsibility to someone else, be it babysitter or institution, they must retain the right to take it back at will.  A school that does not recognize the primacy of parental authority needs to rethink its raison d'être, or risk tempting parents to rethink their educational choices.

That's the subtitle of a Wired article by Edward Tufte.  My brother sent me the link.  I prefer to believe he didn't know I was in the middle of working on a PowerPoint presentation of pictures from our recent trip to Europe.

Tufte is not speaking primarily about education, but he makes this perceptive observation: 

Particularly disturbing is the adoption of the PowerPoint cognitive style in our schools. Rather than learning to write a report using sentences, children are being taught how to formulate client pitches and infomercials. Elementary school PowerPoint exercises (as seen in teacher guides and in student work posted on the Internet) typically consist of 10 to 20 words and a piece of clip art on each slide in a presentation of three to six slides -a total of perhaps 80 words (15 seconds of silent reading) for a week of work. Students would be better off if the schools simply closed down on those days and everyone went to the Exploratorium or wrote an illustrated essay explaining something.

PowerPoint isn't really the villain here, however.

When our children were in high school, long before classroom computer use became pervasive, they were sometimes asked to "report on" books by making posters about them.  This was in honors, "gifted," or Advanced Placement classes, mind you!  Being artistically-minded, the girls enjoyed these projects, but they took up a lot of time and their educational value—except possibly in graphic arts—was essentially nil.

Speaking from experience, it's much easier and more fun to find clipart, arrange graphics, tweak colors, choose backgrounds, and play with shapes and shading than it is to craft text—and I happen to love writing.  How much more so to a student who is still struggling with the art of putting his thoughts down on paper! The making of an attractive presentation of written and visual information is not a bad skill to learn, but any teacher who frequently allows students to get away with Internet research instead of library visits, and low-content, high-graphic PowerPoint presentations instead of well-written, detailed, highly verbal reports, is wasting their time and taxpayers' money.

That said, I'll get back to my own PowerPoint work.  :)  To me, it's computer-based scrapbooking, and I want to get our trip pictures into a form that's easy to appreciate.  Some people prefer to read an illustrated story—the blog version is for them.  A few (very few) people will want to see every picture we took—all 900+ of them—minus the really awful ones.  Most, however, will appreciate the PowerPoint version, condensed, edited, and spruced up with some music and a few graphic effects.  At least I hope so—that's why I'm creating it.

I doubt any English teacher will ever see it.

The May 21, 2007 issue of Computerworld has an interview with Amory B. Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute.  Talk about RETHINKING—who would have thought industry had a good use for slush?

You advocate using, of all things, slush to cool data centers. Can you explain that? We recently did a design for a high-tech facility in a temperate climate that was originally going to have over 20,000 tons of chillers, and by the time we got through, the number was zero.

We found we could meet about 70% of the load with the coolness or dryness of the outside air using either air-side or water-side economizers, depending on the time of year. The rest [came from] a mountain of slush sprayed out of snow-making machines into a hole in the ground on a few cold nights and used to provide 32-degree Fahrenheit meltwater all year.

Twenty thousand tons of chillers originally planned; zero used.  They use snow-making machines to generate the slush; perhaps the next step should be finding a way to use the mountains of snow urban areas are always struggling to dispose of in the winter.

Joshua T. White, of the Institute for Global Engagment, spent a year in Peshawar, Pakistan, as the guest of the provincial chief minister, a radical Islamist leader. His insights, which he shares in this Christianity Today article, are well worth reading.

Why the Rest Hates the West:  Understanding the Roots of Global Rage, by Meic Pearse (Intervarsity Press, Downers Grove, Illinois, 2004)

This is not a book review; not yet.  I long to write about Meic Pearse's book, but it deserves a detailed and extensive review which I cannot at the moment accomplish.  Rather than wait entirely until I can put in the requisite time and effort, however, I'm posting this placeholder, because this is an incredibly valuable book!  Its somewhat unfortunate title calls to mind the hand-wringing post-9/11 whine, "Why do they hate us?" but Why the Rest Hates the West is a serious, insightful analysis of the chasm between modern Western culture—more precisely, "anti-culture"—and the rest of the world that no one with more than a few years left on this earth can afford to ignore.

Find the book!  Read it!  Then come back here and tell me what you think.

And I'll put Li'l Writer Guy to work on the review.

Imagine this scenario: After two devastating miscarriages you get pregnant, and you, your husband, and your children begin to dare to hope again. Then at five and a half weeks you have stomach pains and go to the doctor just to be sure. They do an ultrasound and tell you: No heartbeat, baby is dead, check into the hospital for a D&C to get all cleaned out. Numbly, you comply, and go home to grieve with your family.

Three weeks later you return to the doctor because you still feel pregnant. Another ultrasound: Oops, guess we made a mistake, baby is fine and growing well. Sorry about that.

That's what happened to Julie Brown, in Scotland. Thrilled of course that her baby is alive, she's naturally worried, having undergone a violent, invasive procedure, with anesthesia, pain medication, and antibiotics, and stopped taking normal pregnancy precautions (like folic acid supplements), not to mention having subjected the baby to a flood of stress (distress) hormones, all during the very critical first trimester of pregnancy.

So I'm not surprised she is "considering legal action." What does surprise me is the attitude of some commentators that she should just get over it, be happy she still has her baby, and understand that mistakes will happen. Huh? I deplore the lawsuit-happy culture more than most, and fully appreciate that in life there will be mistakes, and accidents, and troubles, and risks. But this isn't just a little mistake, it's a HUGE error. It indicates something is wrong, not with one particular ultrasound reading, but with the larger system that obviously doesn't have enough checks and balances where life and death matters are concerned. It's the equivalent of declaring a patient dead and wheeling him off to the morgue, only to have him sit up and start talking three days later.

It's also one more indictment of the industrialized, technological, interventionist approach to obstetrics we have come to consider normal.

Serendipity. Searching for one thing and finding another. And another. The Internet is a beachcomber's delight. While researching my Johari Window post, I found information on Duen Hsi Yen's commentary, which led me to his article on education, which in turn took me to another of his sites, which was chosen in May of 1999 as the Natural Child Project's Parenting Site of the Month. Investigating the Natural Child Project site led in turn to this month's honored parenting resource, Parents for Barefoot Children.

(This is beginning to sound like something from A Fly Went By: "The fly ran away in fear of the frog, who ran from the cat, who ran from the dog. The dog ran away in fear of the pig, who ran from the cow, she was so big!")

I don't know when I first rediscovered what every child knows about the joys of barefoot living. I do remember the first time I thought consciously of what shoes can do to feet besides protect them. In one of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, the dectective concludes that a footprint belongs to a native of a primitive culture, because the shape of the foot and the toeprints revealed a foot that had never been confined to a shoe.

That impressed me, but I never really questioned my footwear until I developed an affliction of the skin of my feet. No doctor ever came up with a definitive diagnosis, though that did not stop them from suggesting various medications, which either worked or didn't according to some random factor I never discerned. What unequivocally did work I discovered myself: shedding my shoes. If I kept my feet unshod whenever I could, they obliged me by enduring occasional imprisonment with good grace.

Since then I've been happy to remove my shoes when entering a home, and I've noticed in recent years many people are discovering that shoes left at the door don't bring dirt into the house. In this we are only a few thousand years behind the entire country of Japan.

Naturally an organization calling itself Parents for Barefoot Children (PFBC) intrigued me. So, too, did the Society for Barefoot Living, which (no surprise) I found through a link from the PFBC site. The latter takes barefooting a lot further than I thought possible. Along the way I learned several new things, from the many health benefits of walking sans shoes to the surprising legality of driving barefoot.

Although I am in sympathy with both organizations, especially when it comes to children's feet, two issues concern me that I have not seen addressed. The more trivial (though still important) one is that if one goes barefoot everywere, one has nothing to take off that will leave the dirt at the door of the house. Perhaps we should reinstate the Biblical custom of footwashing for guests!

What bothers me most is the chemical soup to which we would expose our feet by walking barefoot most of the time. The barefooting advocates address the issues of dirt, bacteria, and parasites, but what I worry about is what is laid down on our roads, sidewalks, business floors, and even public parks by automobile exhaust and tires, chemical spills, cleansers and polishing materials, herbicides, insecticides, and the other fallout from a modern industrial society. Everything from heavy metals to toxic organic compounds lies in wait to be absorbed through innocent skin, a special worry in the case of children. I don't want this to be a problem; I hope research will reveal an escape clause that will assure me it isn't harmful. But the issue needs to be addressed, not ignored.

The joys of free and unfettered childhood feet should not be yet another casualty of modern times!

The good news is that Starchild Abraham Cherrix and his family finally found a judge brave enough to lift the lower court order that would have forced him to undergo chemotherapy for his cancer. The bad news is that it's a temporary reprieve; he'll have to fight the battle again in court next month.

Abraham is not the only teen who has had to spend precious energy, resouces, and especially time fighting for the right to choose or refuse medical treatment. (See also Who Will Make Medical Decisions for You and Your Family?) That he has the full support of his family in his decision matters not to the social workers; they saw that as a reason to attempt to take custody of Abraham themselves.

This is not a diatribe against chemotherapy, which has been life-saving for many. But the right to make medical decisions, large and small, belongs to the individual, or in the case of a minor, his family. The courts should never have become involved in the first place, since Abraham and his family agree. Maybe they are wrong. Maybe their alternative treatment will lead to his death, and chemotherapy would cure him. But we have the right to be wrong. Even if a person chooses no treatment at all, prefering a shortened life to the agonies of therapy, that decision should be between him and his family.

If it weren't so serious, it would be amusing to consider the statements made by "experts" who insist that a 16-year-old is too young to make his own life-or-death decisions. You can't tell that to a genealogist. At that age, many of our ancestors were married, having babies, fighting in wars, and traveling thousands of miles away from home—and doing it quite capably, I might add.

How did we get to the point where our society can with one breath say a 12-year-old girl has the right to "control her own body" to the extent of having an abortion without so much as parental knowledge, let alone consent, and in the next deny a 16-year-old boy the right to refuse, with his parents' agreement, a painful and dangerous medical procedure?

Home Education Magazine has a great article by Deborah Markus called Being a Cheerful Rebel. Sometimes being a nonconformist feels great, and sometimes it just feels lonely. Sometimes you love explaining your lifestyle choices to others, and sometimes you wish they'd just mind their own business. But ready or not, the questions will come, and Markus has some good suggestions for preparing to meet them. My favorite is

Don't Apologize: Stand strong. If you don't seem firmly convinced of the rightness of your course of action, why should anyone else? Especially someone who's never heard anything but conventional wisdom on the subject, all of which disagrees with you?

St. Peter knew something of the pressures of being outside the mainstream, and he had good advice, too:

Always be preparied to make a defense to any one who calls you to account for the hope that is in you, yet do it with gentleness and reverence; and keep your conscience clear.

We always expected our children to surpass their parents; after all, they have the advantage of standing on our shoulders, and of learning from our experience. And there's no question that they have, particularly in the academic and spiritual domains.

So I should not have been so surprised to find both of them carrying our family unconventionality further than we ever imagined.

Not that we were ever all that revolutionary. We followed most of Neil Postman's prescriptions, and those of Cal Thomas, though we were already well established in that lifestyle before we read them. Getting along on one income, and refusing promotions that would have disrupted family life were becoming unusual, even in those days, but not radical. Perhaps had we stayed in the Northeast, our Christian faith might have raised some eyebrows, but not in the South. The decision that we had better things to do than watch television, and our devotion to classical music, certainly set us apart. But more than anything else, what set our children on their radical paths was homeschooling. You don't question the basic assumptions of society in one area without opening others to inquiry; you don't teach your children to think differently about education and expect them to conform blindly in other areas; you don't give them a taste of freedom and think they won't look for other ways to loose their chains.

Heather and Jon chose to reclaim childbirth the way we reclaimed education. They paid a high price for their convictions, which made it all the more difficult for us to recognize how right they were. But, after much struggle, we came around with enthusiasm.

Thus it is that I am trying to maintain an open mind as Janet explores her own non-conformist path, which I will tentatively call reclaiming vocation, unless maybe it should be "reclaiming life in general." I find myself disagreeing vehemently with some of the literature she has shared with us, and some of it could scare me if I let it. But the homeschooling and home birthing communities have shown me that wherever there is a fringe, there is also a lunatic fringe, the existence of which does not negate the value of the basic idea. And from those with whom we have little else in common, we can still learn much.

With that in mind, I recommend checking out Ran Prieur's essay on dropping out of our crazy modern lifestyle. You can spend quite an interesting time wandering around his site. Many of his notions are just plain nuts, but there's gold amidst the dross. I like his insistence that you have to prepare intelligently for freedom.

The goal is not to get out of the prison, but to get out in a way that enables you to stay out. Be patient. Think ahead. Getting free is not like walking through a magic doorway—it's like growing a fruit tree.

Nor does he advocate throwing everything out, just what you don't need and don't want. He plans for his wilderness home, with no other externally-supplied utilities, to have satellite-based Internet service.

He has some good advice—as far as I can tell—for buying land.

I do think he's wrong about the benefits of "mindless" jobs and the advisability of separating vocation and avocation, employment from the rest of life. I think earning your living doing something you enjoy is an important and worthwhile goal. However, I agree there's no shame in doing low-paying or "lowly" work if it enables you to do whatever you find meaningful.

However crazy some of his notions, Ran Prieur is a RETHINKer with some valuable ideas.