I just read some news articles about the "hybrid revolution." Ah, what a relief that we have finally found a way to cut our consumption of fossil fuels! Just when we thought all hope was lost, along came Toyota and Chevy with their hybrid fuel-electric cars, and the day was saved! I mean, who can argue with 85 miles to the gallon, right?
Well, someone once told me that there's a cost to everything, and I think we might have finally run face-first into the hidden cost of hybrid cars: rare earth metals. For every hybrid manufactured approximately 2 lbs of rare metals are used in the magnets of the electric engine, and approximately 15-20 lbs of rare metals are required for the batteries. In all, there are 15 metals at issue, and the production of hybrid cars uses nearly 40,000 tons of these metals annually. So, what's the problem?
Well, quite simply rare metals are, well, rare. And expensive. Especially when the world's primary producer of these metals - China - is restricting exports of these elements to retain them for their own manufacturing needs. So, in "several years," whatever that means, you can expect shortages in the amount of these metals available to manufacturers of hybrid cars. Concordantly, you can expect the price of hybrid cars to go up and, if it gets tight enough, the number of hybrids produced each year to go down. So much for the hybrid revolution.
Allow me to suggest something that I may have said before - and forgive me if I am repeating myself, but a good idea should be shouted to the heavens until someone listens and takes action. ETHANOL! For God's sake, people, it's clean, it's renewable, and it's easy to make - cheap. If you're reading this, stop for a moment and Google "Coskata." Go to their web site and read about their process... Ok, so you did that? Now that we're on the same page, I'll continue. Three simple steps, right? Virtually unlimited sources from any kind of biomass imaginable, including garbage, tires, switch grass, wood chippings and mulch, underbrush and grass clippings. I mean, where in America do we not have these things? They're everywhere! And this process could be everywhere, but for the financial roadblocks that the company has encountered since its inception.
Coskata obtained much of its start-up funding from General Motors, which has recently filed bankruptcy and morphed into Government Motors. I'm sure this has hampered Coskata's efforts to get their plants operational. But the sooner they get established, the sooner this country can reap the benefits of a truly sustainable alternative energy.
The advantages of ethanol are tremendous, especially in the realm of transportation. Just consider, rather than sending millions of dollars to overseas car makers who produce new cars which run on completely new technology, we would have the preferable option of simply converting, at a much lower cost, the cars now on the road to run on the slightly different combustible fuel available in the form of ethanol. We already have internal combustion engines in all our vehicles; the means and materials to convert them to run on ethanol are simple, cheap and readily available. Made-in-the-USA manufacturing gets a boost from the conversions; the domestic auto mechanics' industry gets a boost from the conversion; everyone benefits, and the benefits stay in our economy, not China's. We become eco-friendly and self-sufficient, at least with respect to our fuel consumption, and we do it at far less cost to Americans than a full-fleet conversion to hybrid or electric cars. It's a win-win - for the economy, for the environment, and for national security. And no rare earth metals need be involved. So, we had the "Cash for Clunkers" program; now, Washington, may I suggest a real solution: A subsidy for Coskata and the rest of the struggling and neglected ethanol industry, coupled with a government program for Americans to convert their cars to ethanol. We could even call it "Cash for Conversions."
Until next time,
Discere Aude!
-Hephaestus
Friday, September 11, 2009
Thursday, September 3, 2009
It's been too long, old friend...
Ok, so I haven't shown my face around these parts in a while. It's true, I got you all worked up, expecting to hear something extraordinary about our country's educational future, and then I didn't deliver. Well, I apologize, but before you write me off as not keeping my word, let me explain.
Here's the deal: Our country has one F***ked-up educational system; we all know this without any argument. But this fact begs a few questions, the first of which is, why? Option #1: Lack of better ideas.
Well, that's what I thought, too. I figured that if we could just devise a better system, we could fix the problems with the current one by replacing it. Then I did a bit of research - remember, I was going to write a book? And in my reading, I realized a frustrating truth: a thousand people have devised better systems, some of which have actually been put into practice in select schools around the country with great success. However, none of these bright hopes have been copied by state-wide education programs, and none of them have received Federal recognition or support. So the problem isn't a lack of better ideas, and we find ourselves back at square one: why? Why are these new and better programs not being implemented on a large scale?
It isn't lack of funding; we have spent FAR greater sums on projects of far less value and importance for decades. It isn't an inability on the part of legislators to reform the cumbersome, ensconced system of education as we know it; we changed the whole organization of national intelligence with just two acts of Congress - the PATRIOT Act and the Homeland Security Act - and we could do likewise with education... if we wanted to. And that's the point.
While many Americans - parents, teachers, school administrators - might hold true educational reform dear to their hearts, there is, in fact, a narrow class of people in this country who stand to lose a great deal in the wake of such revamping of our schools: politicians. Indeed, the very people who hold the power to reform our educational system have been benefiting from its dysfunction for generations. An educated civic body is a vigilant, involved civic body, and no politician can expect to advance an agenda of personal gain when he (or she) has to answer to a sharp, interested constituency. Voter fraud, gerrymandering, pork legislation, and any plethora of other ill-advised policy simply would not go over in that environment. Furthermore, the very prevalent "politics of fear" that has found such frequent use this past decade would be, to an educated public, little more than a hollow shill - which is, for the most part, exactly what it is. On the other hand, these underhanded political tactics and rancid policy decisions go over without a hitch with a public that is ignorant, distracted and struggling to keep their heads above water. As long as the people of this country have it hard, the politicians have an easy time getting by with whatever seems most politically expedient to them. I don't have to spell it out any more, it's an easy picture to get. Dumb people are suckers, and if the politicians can let our broken educational system turn out ten thousand undereducated, unenlightened suckers a year, that's ten thousand less people that those politicians will have to seriously answer to in the next election. It's that simple, and that's why educational reform isn't seriously pushed in the marble halls of government.
Now, I know all of this is "mere speculation," backed up by little more than circumstantial evidence and a logical analysis of the history of powerful people and the corruption of governments, but the real story isn't in the ways that we could make our educational system better. For more than sixty years bright minds, both academic and professional, have been offering us alternative methods for better educating our youth; we have a veritable cornucopia of "new" and better ideas at our fingertips. The real story is in the truth about the roadblocks to reform - about the political expediency of letting America's educational system fail year after year; about the backroom politics that whitewash every renewed attempt to institute genuine change in education; about the benefit of an uneducated public for those who hold power in our country.
I say all of this in an attempt to justify why I never posted the remaining installments in the series of blog entries that I set out at the beginning. Maybe my reasoning is nothing more to you, my readers, than an excuse for my laziness or apathy. If that is how you see it, then so be it, that's your prerogative. I know, however, the general bent of the evidence that I encountered in my research, and I wish only that I had the resources and time to devote to proving my suspicions. Unfortunately, I do not. I can only hope that my brief exposition here will pique the interest of some who, unlike myself, do have the time and resources to invest in such an investigation. In the meantime, I will devote myself to other endeavors which I find my personal attributes more keenly aligned toward.
For now, it's good to be back.
Discere Aude,
Hephaestus
Here's the deal: Our country has one F***ked-up educational system; we all know this without any argument. But this fact begs a few questions, the first of which is, why? Option #1: Lack of better ideas.
Well, that's what I thought, too. I figured that if we could just devise a better system, we could fix the problems with the current one by replacing it. Then I did a bit of research - remember, I was going to write a book? And in my reading, I realized a frustrating truth: a thousand people have devised better systems, some of which have actually been put into practice in select schools around the country with great success. However, none of these bright hopes have been copied by state-wide education programs, and none of them have received Federal recognition or support. So the problem isn't a lack of better ideas, and we find ourselves back at square one: why? Why are these new and better programs not being implemented on a large scale?
It isn't lack of funding; we have spent FAR greater sums on projects of far less value and importance for decades. It isn't an inability on the part of legislators to reform the cumbersome, ensconced system of education as we know it; we changed the whole organization of national intelligence with just two acts of Congress - the PATRIOT Act and the Homeland Security Act - and we could do likewise with education... if we wanted to. And that's the point.
While many Americans - parents, teachers, school administrators - might hold true educational reform dear to their hearts, there is, in fact, a narrow class of people in this country who stand to lose a great deal in the wake of such revamping of our schools: politicians. Indeed, the very people who hold the power to reform our educational system have been benefiting from its dysfunction for generations. An educated civic body is a vigilant, involved civic body, and no politician can expect to advance an agenda of personal gain when he (or she) has to answer to a sharp, interested constituency. Voter fraud, gerrymandering, pork legislation, and any plethora of other ill-advised policy simply would not go over in that environment. Furthermore, the very prevalent "politics of fear" that has found such frequent use this past decade would be, to an educated public, little more than a hollow shill - which is, for the most part, exactly what it is. On the other hand, these underhanded political tactics and rancid policy decisions go over without a hitch with a public that is ignorant, distracted and struggling to keep their heads above water. As long as the people of this country have it hard, the politicians have an easy time getting by with whatever seems most politically expedient to them. I don't have to spell it out any more, it's an easy picture to get. Dumb people are suckers, and if the politicians can let our broken educational system turn out ten thousand undereducated, unenlightened suckers a year, that's ten thousand less people that those politicians will have to seriously answer to in the next election. It's that simple, and that's why educational reform isn't seriously pushed in the marble halls of government.
Now, I know all of this is "mere speculation," backed up by little more than circumstantial evidence and a logical analysis of the history of powerful people and the corruption of governments, but the real story isn't in the ways that we could make our educational system better. For more than sixty years bright minds, both academic and professional, have been offering us alternative methods for better educating our youth; we have a veritable cornucopia of "new" and better ideas at our fingertips. The real story is in the truth about the roadblocks to reform - about the political expediency of letting America's educational system fail year after year; about the backroom politics that whitewash every renewed attempt to institute genuine change in education; about the benefit of an uneducated public for those who hold power in our country.
I say all of this in an attempt to justify why I never posted the remaining installments in the series of blog entries that I set out at the beginning. Maybe my reasoning is nothing more to you, my readers, than an excuse for my laziness or apathy. If that is how you see it, then so be it, that's your prerogative. I know, however, the general bent of the evidence that I encountered in my research, and I wish only that I had the resources and time to devote to proving my suspicions. Unfortunately, I do not. I can only hope that my brief exposition here will pique the interest of some who, unlike myself, do have the time and resources to invest in such an investigation. In the meantime, I will devote myself to other endeavors which I find my personal attributes more keenly aligned toward.
For now, it's good to be back.
Discere Aude,
Hephaestus
Monday, June 1, 2009
Teaching As A Subversive Activity: Part One
The Elephant In The Room
As promised, the subject of this essay is the book Teaching As a Subversive Activity, by Neil Postman & Charles Weingartner. I would like to begin by saying that I will not be able to cover the entire book, chapter for chapter, in the space available; rather, I will touch upon what I believe to be the key points that the authors make on the state of our educational system, their diagnosis of the problems, and their prescription, if you will, for reforming education.
Let’s begin on a point I think we can all agree upon: our schools, as they are currently formulated and administered, are a disastrous failure. Ok, maybe this isn’t the best starting point, after all, because before we can say anything about the success or failure of an institution, we must clarify the purpose for which it was intended. In this case, there are a number of possible ends for which our schools might have been instituted. For instance, we might have built and staffed schools with the sole intention of providing publicly-funded daycare, or alternatively, the institution of the public schools might be imposed upon our impressionable children with the aim of indoctrinating them in the propaganda of the state, the conformist expectations of a consumerist society, and the docile subservience of good corporate wage-slaves. Without being paranoid, I would invite you to consider these options for a few moments. Honestly, though, there is no good reason for schools to exist aside from their publicly stated purpose: to educate our children, to give them the means to learn and to participate in the marketplace of ideas, so that they might more fully realize their potential as both citizens of our republican democracy, and as human beings in general. And, regardless of how well our schools might have achieved any of our other hypothetical ends, they have not succeeded in this legitimate purpose for many, many years now.
Mark Twain said that there are lies, damn lies, and then there are statistics. Books, reports and scholarly articles abound which could enlighten us as to the statistical failures of our schools, but I will not reprint them here. If we disagree at this early point, let me just say that only one who has been living with his head in a hole for the last quarter century could honestly declare that our educational system is living up to its name. The failure of our schools at their job of educating our youth is a given that, by now, should be beyond debate. In light of this state of affairs, we can now turn to our evaluation of Postman & Weingartner’s thesis.
Teaching the Process
Learning does not occur like filling a bathtub. Often, young people are thought of as empty vessels, into which a learned and sagacious teacher pours forth his wealth of knowledge, thus filling the student’s mind with facts and figures that will inevitably make him an educated person. Unfortunately, the metaphor is crucially flawed. One cannot teach in this way, for the underlying assumption is that the student, in his learning, is playing a passive role; the bathtub does nothing, while the water-bearer works hard to fill it. Such an arrangement ignores the vitality of the student, their interests and concerns, their aptitudes and abilities, as well as their character flaws and deficiencies. In short, the traditional metaphor neglects one of the most important facets of the learner: his humanity.
The truth is learning is an active process, a process of investigation and discovery, and the teacher is not an answer bank, he is a guide. Learning depends upon two basic skills: knowing how to ask the right questions, and being able to find the answers to them. And if schools are instituted among men to provide an education to the youth, then it is proficiency in these skills that they must impart to the students.
Of course, the logical prerequisite of asking questions is, naturally, interest. Engaging students’ natural curiosity in a subject is not such an easy thing to do, but without an interest in the question, a student will not willingly pursue the answer. Obviously, then, it is an exercise in futility to frame questions which fail to pique a student’s curiosity. The whole point is to teach them to pursue knowledge of their own volition, since the exuberance and fulfillment of the quest is as much a part of the lesson as is the process of finding out the answers. It is this thrill of the chase that will fuel their drive, their thirst for knowledge, once they have been cut loose as adults, and if there is no fulfillment in the task, they will loath to expend the effort. So the question arises, how does one engage a student’s curiosity?
The answer is that it is already engaged in something. Everyone is interested in something, whether it be astrophysics or astrology, mathematics or music, the silver screen or surfing, or anything else. Once again, the key is to recognize and account for the individual’s humanity, then to use that to break the ice. The truth is that every conceivable “subject” of study has some relation to everything else, so that even scuba diving can be used as the jumping off point for a discussion of fluid mechanics, marine biology, evolutionary and geological history, applied mathematics of a thousand varieties, and even poetry and literature. You just have to know what questions to ask to get the conversation started. The point is that students are not bathtubs, they are people, and like all people they have individual quirks and nuances which make them unlike any other person. If you want them to seek out knowledge, you have to meet them on their own turf, then you have to know how to lead them away from what’s familiar so that they will learn how to discover things they didn’t know before. Ironically, the hard part is figuring out what their home turf actually is.
One of the primary reasons for our schools’ monumental failure is that their design is a product of the industrial revolution, and though the prevailing philosophy of the time period in which they were conceived is now obsolete, the institution has failed to evolve. Specifically, our schools are guilty of treating students as shapeless masses of raw material, and mirroring the paradigms of the time of their inception, they were designed to take those raw masses and stamp out a series of homogeneous representations of the ideal “Educated Man.” Our schools are cast in the image of mass-production factories of such dehumanized products, and they have failed to produce educated people because they have failed to account for the very humanity of the ‘raw materials’ with which they are provided.
If meaningful education reform is to be achieved, then, we must begin with a complete reevaluation of the basic principles of the educational process. We must accept the organic nature of the student, with all that that entails, including the individual and unique characteristics that he brings to the classroom, his educational needs and desires as a growing, changing human being, his interests, concerns and aptitudes, and an understanding of the very human process of learning and discovering. Real learning takes place only when the student takes control of his own destiny, and if our schools cannot guide students through that process, if they cannot foster that interest and desire and provide the resources to satisfy the inquiring minds that develop, then what business have they got with our children?
______________________________________________________________________________
Discere Aude,
Hephaestus
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Inauguration
To those of you who choose to peruse my meandering verbiage, I extend my sincere thanks. I hope that you will find here something of value, something that will push the limits of your consciousness and understanding. I can tell you beforehand that my writings will extend across a wide range of topics, from my views on political and social issues relevant to our time and condition, to less grandiose ponderings on the topics of my personal hobbies, to my more intimate introspections regarding such subjects as science, spiritualty, history, and anything else that seems to me worthy of being cast in print. I heartily invite my readers to respond to my posts, but... there is a catch:
I insist that on my blog, civility and courtesy must be respected at all times. While we must resign ourselves to the inevitability of disagreement, I will not allow comments that do not further the aim of civilized dialogue. If the issue be serious enough, and the feelings run so hot that conversation must be abandoned, then the time has surely come when we must resort to violence and bloodshed, and under such circumstances there would no longer be any need of blogging. So, while our debate remains here, it shall remain clean, rational and respectful. No exceptions.
As I am new to this endeavor, I reserve the right to expand upon my guidelines for participation in the future, but barring any extraordinary circumstances, that's it, there are no other rules or restrictions. I want those who comment to feel free to express themselves honestly no matter what they may feel or think.
Now then, let's get on with it...
Greetings & Salutations, as the small spider once said. I would like to take a moment to preface my next entry for you.
I have been working on a project with my father, who is a teacher, on the crisis of the American educational system. In the end, our work will take the form of a published book on the subject - a book that we have every hope of successfully spurring sorely needed and widely controversial changes in the way Americans understand, conceive of, and implement the educational process from K thru 12th grade. We are not the first to have such hopes, and we are only the latest in a long line of "educationalists" who hold such radical and unconventional visions of how our country's educational institutions might be improved. But I did not intend to spend my time today talking about our book; I want to limit the scope of my focus to the thesis of a different book, one that I have read in the course of my research. The book of which I am speaking is not new - in fact, I was astonished to find how relevant and contemproary are its diagnoses and prescriptions given that it was written forty years ago! Nevertheless, it cuts right to the heart of our educational trainwreck. The authors, Neil Postman & Charles Weingartner, published Teaching As A Subversive Activity in 1969, and subsequently the book was lost to the twilight zone. You don't believe me? How else does one explain the fact that every problem they addressed then still exists - in spades - in our schools today? Obviously, the trucks that carried the freshly printed copies from the press were beamed up by alien spaceships and cast into that great fireball in the sky, because no one on this planet seems to have ever read a page of it. If they had, something would surely have been different by now. But I digress. So, to return to the subject at hand, let me declare here and now that this - our educational trainwreck, as I will call it - will be the topic of our first several posts, and Postman & Weingartner's book will be our jumping-off point. In my next post, I intend to outline the main thesis laid out in Teaching As A Subversive Activity, and to show why the book is more relevant now than ever. Concurrently, we will investigate potential solutions to our educational crisis, both those offered by Postman & Weingartner as well as those suggested by others who have made it their business to try to fix this problem. In the succeeding posts, I may diverge more and more from the book specifically in an effort to ferret out the real reasons why drastic change in our educational system, despite being critically necessary, has been so elusive for more than a generation. So, happy reading! I hope that you are looking forward to this as much as I am. I beseech your patience, as I have not already written any of what I have promised to you, but I will work diligently to deliver. I hope you will check back over the next few weeks for updates and comments.
Discere Aude,
Hephaestus
I insist that on my blog, civility and courtesy must be respected at all times. While we must resign ourselves to the inevitability of disagreement, I will not allow comments that do not further the aim of civilized dialogue. If the issue be serious enough, and the feelings run so hot that conversation must be abandoned, then the time has surely come when we must resort to violence and bloodshed, and under such circumstances there would no longer be any need of blogging. So, while our debate remains here, it shall remain clean, rational and respectful. No exceptions.
As I am new to this endeavor, I reserve the right to expand upon my guidelines for participation in the future, but barring any extraordinary circumstances, that's it, there are no other rules or restrictions. I want those who comment to feel free to express themselves honestly no matter what they may feel or think.
Now then, let's get on with it...
Greetings & Salutations, as the small spider once said. I would like to take a moment to preface my next entry for you.
I have been working on a project with my father, who is a teacher, on the crisis of the American educational system. In the end, our work will take the form of a published book on the subject - a book that we have every hope of successfully spurring sorely needed and widely controversial changes in the way Americans understand, conceive of, and implement the educational process from K thru 12th grade. We are not the first to have such hopes, and we are only the latest in a long line of "educationalists" who hold such radical and unconventional visions of how our country's educational institutions might be improved. But I did not intend to spend my time today talking about our book; I want to limit the scope of my focus to the thesis of a different book, one that I have read in the course of my research. The book of which I am speaking is not new - in fact, I was astonished to find how relevant and contemproary are its diagnoses and prescriptions given that it was written forty years ago! Nevertheless, it cuts right to the heart of our educational trainwreck. The authors, Neil Postman & Charles Weingartner, published Teaching As A Subversive Activity in 1969, and subsequently the book was lost to the twilight zone. You don't believe me? How else does one explain the fact that every problem they addressed then still exists - in spades - in our schools today? Obviously, the trucks that carried the freshly printed copies from the press were beamed up by alien spaceships and cast into that great fireball in the sky, because no one on this planet seems to have ever read a page of it. If they had, something would surely have been different by now. But I digress. So, to return to the subject at hand, let me declare here and now that this - our educational trainwreck, as I will call it - will be the topic of our first several posts, and Postman & Weingartner's book will be our jumping-off point. In my next post, I intend to outline the main thesis laid out in Teaching As A Subversive Activity, and to show why the book is more relevant now than ever. Concurrently, we will investigate potential solutions to our educational crisis, both those offered by Postman & Weingartner as well as those suggested by others who have made it their business to try to fix this problem. In the succeeding posts, I may diverge more and more from the book specifically in an effort to ferret out the real reasons why drastic change in our educational system, despite being critically necessary, has been so elusive for more than a generation. So, happy reading! I hope that you are looking forward to this as much as I am. I beseech your patience, as I have not already written any of what I have promised to you, but I will work diligently to deliver. I hope you will check back over the next few weeks for updates and comments.
Discere Aude,
Hephaestus
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