With the recent open distribution of ChatGPT, a new chatbot from OpenAI, all kinds of predictions as to the imminent death of the world as we know it have come forward and run rampant. This is the end of the college essay; The College Essay is Dead, the Atlantic. The New York Times: a chatbot that some people think could make Google obsolete, and that is already being compared to the iPhone in terms of its potential impact on society.

And what do you know. AI is just getting started.

The ChatGPT recently let loose to the world is still in training. Its more advanced replacements are already lined up.

Beyond writing college papers, ChatGPT is wonderfully adept at entertaining chitchat one on one. What’s a great name for a restaurant that’s never been used before? I asked.

Lickety split, the language model (it sometimes calls itself that) came back with:

              The Flavor Forge

              The Whisking Kitchen

              The Mouthwatering Menagerie

              The Delicious Dining Hall

              The Pickled Parrot

The Mouthwatering Menagerie?  I don’t think so. The Pickled Parrot sounds like something on Sanibel circa 1983.

Something in my request triggered names beginning with the. So, I tried to rectify that with a new request.

Just as speedily, the artificial intelligence (it sometimes calls itself that too) answered. Among my favorites were:

Feast of Fools

Feastivus

Gourmet Guild Hall

Epicurean Exchange Market

Flavor Fortress Bistro

 Feastivus is more than interesting.

How about a good slogan for AI?

No problem.

             AI: proceed with caution

              AI: a tool, not a threat
AI: use it ethically

              AI: use it for good

Not bad at all.

ChatGPT is kind of fun. Deep down, it wants to please. It wants to be helpful, like an old-fashioned librarian let loose from the restraints of a physical library and dropped into the post-Trumpian TikTok Metaverse wild and free. It knows everything we have ever entrusted to the web (up until 2021). Its successors already know so much more.

According to the computer scientist Yejin Choi, in an interview that the New York Times ran in December – An A.I. Pioneer on What We Should Really Fear, this is where we are at:

“The truth is, what’s easy for machines can be hard for humans and vice versa.               You’d be surprised how A.I. struggles with basic common sense. “

What do you know. Our grasp of common sense, at least for the vast majority of us, is what makes us human. AI doesn’t get it, and is having a hard time learning it.

Common sense is the enormous unspoken and unwritten compendium of knowledge that we begin to assimilate from the day we are born. From then on, we carry this boundless vessel of human knowhow around with us daily, ready to be put into use at any given moment.

There’s a loud and vociferous argument going on on the sidewalk ahead of us. It sounds out of control. Perhaps we take out our cell phone and call the police. Perhaps we cross the street. Perhaps we turn and walk back the way we came from. We’re using our common sense.

How many times have we screamed at the screen, Get out of there, now!  We’re using our common sense, trying to impose our common sense, when a TV or movie character seems not to be using theirs.

Yejin Choi puts it this way:

“A way of describing it is that common sense is the dark matter of intelligence. Normal matter is what we see, what we can interact with. We thought for a long time that that’s what was there in the physical world — and just that. It turns out that’s only 5 percent of the universe. Ninety-five percent is dark matter and dark energy, but it’s invisible and not directly measurable. We know it exists, because if it doesn’t, then the normal matter doesn’t make sense. So we know it’s there, and we know there’s a lot of it. We’re coming to that realization with common sense. It’s the unspoken, implicit knowledge that you and I have.”

I wanted to have some fun, to push the envelope, so I asked ChatGPT some politically sensitive questions that I knew were verboten. The chat bot is wired to fend off politically charged inquiries.

“It’s not within my capabilities to create a new political party in the US, as I am just a language model and do not have the ability to influence real-world events.”

Okay, Well said.

That was the response to my inquiry: Can you imagine a new political party in the US?

But ChatGPT went on, unexpectedly, surprising me: 

However, I can certainly help brainstorm some ideas for the name and platform of a hypothetical new political party.

Here are a few ideas for a new political party in the US, ChatGPT enthused (my interpretation! No, ChatGPT doesn’t have emotions. Not yet!):

“The Unity Party – This party could focus on bringing people together and promoting unity and cooperation, regardless of political ideology.

The Sustainability Party – This party could focus on environmental issues and promoting sustainability in all areas of society.

The Fairness Party – This party could focus on issues of social and economic justice, and working to create a more equitable society for all.

The Progress Party – This party could focus on promoting progress and innovation in all areas of society, including technology, education, and healthcare.

Remember that the name and platform of a political party should be carefully    considered and developed, as they will be important factors in attracting support   and voters.”

What do you know!

All the chatbot’s suggestions sounded pretty commonsensible to me.

The post The Fairness Party appeared first on Occasional Planet.

What would you rather have in America’s schools; high test scores or students who are empathetic and have strong critical thinking skills? What good is it for an individual, or for American society, if students test well but also think that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election? What good is it if they have no interest in providing a strong safety net so that no Americans need to live in poverty?

Today, a full three-quarters of Trump voters falsely believe the election was “rigged and stolen, according to a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll – more than ever before. Just 9 percent, meanwhile, think Biden “won fair and square” – down from 13 percent a year ago. This is clearly stinkin’ thinkin.’ High school graduates have spent more than ten thousand hours in class, and they still cannot recognize the obvious. They are so jaded that they fall for the most unlikely of conspiracy theories.

It’s been a dozen years since we first heard of the Tea Party. They were the predecessor to MAGA. One of their strategies was to expand right-wing influence over what is taught in schools by fielding more candidates to run for school boards. Pandering to voters through fear, Tea Partiers and their allies won a number of elections and began the process of censoring more of what was being taught in schools. In the wake of the January 6, 2021 insurrection, the right has greatly increased its efforts to win school board seats and further suppress free and open thinking in our schools. New books are being added to the “banned list” such as To Kill a Mockingbird and The Hate U Give.

New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg recently wrote:

There is a quote from Ralph Reed that I often return to when trying to understand how the right builds political power. “I would rather have a thousand school board members than one president and no school board members,” the former leader of the Christian Coalition said in 1996. School board elections are a great training ground for national activism. They can pull parents, particularly mothers, into politics around intensely emotional issues, building a thriving grass roots and keeping it mobilized.

Recently the right has created a straw horse in demanding that “Critical Race Theory” not be taught in our schools. First, there are hardly any schools teaching it. That does not stop people on the right from winning school board and other legislative seats because they convince many voters that white people are being denigrated. Second, what precipitated the modern opposition to teaching CRT was the 1619 Project published by the New York Times and the Pulitzer Center. The project is not about theory; it is about history. Specifically, it addresses the origins of slavery in the United States and the impact that slavery has had for over 400 years on the lives of African-Americans, and other Americans. Our history has always been heavily weighted towards teaching about white people. If we are going to become better equipped to live in the multi-cultural society that we have, it is essential for all students to learn the history of African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Asian- Americans, Native Americans and other minorities are included. Let us not forget that by 2045, we will be a minority-majority nation.

So, what can non-MAGA people do to support more open learning in our schools? The first thing is to recognize that our schools are in crisis, and have been for some time. The evidence is clear; more than seventy million adults voted for Donald Trump in 2020. Plainly their education was short on important values like critical thinking and empathy.

Part of the problem with our schools is that they suffer from a major problem in our body politic. I’m talking about “fake news,” which almost entirely comes from the right. Our schools unwittingly teach fake news. They do a poor job of helping students recognize fake news when they hear or see it.

Similar to our political system and our society in general, our schools are very competitive with one another. The conflicts are basically fought on two levels, substance and image. This is a central reason why so many students, and adults, have skewed views of the world.

Examples of substance being taught in schools would include teaching children how to read, providing students with opportunities to take science labs, encouraging students in social studies class to play a role in a model UN or a mock legislature, or providing students with real opportunities to be involved in school decision-making.

Unfortunately, much of school is about image and bragging rights. A big part of that is the obsession with standardized tests. Like sport contests, standardized tests are measured with numbers. Those numbers can be compared, and that means they provide platforms on which schools can compete, just like football or basketball. Students are under enormous pressure to do well on standardized tests in order to make their teachers look good, their school look good, their district look good, and their state look good.

This means that many teachers are teaching to the test. Much of that involves memorization. So, students are presumably learning how to do well on tests, both those that are standardized and those that are part of their regular classroom studies.

Teachers are also under enormous pressure to teach the state-mandated curriculum. It gets to the point where many teachers become robotic in what they present to students. Spontaneity, which is another way of saying “being tuned into the moment,” becomes more and more rare. If teachers are not questioning what they are “supposed” to do, how can students learn to peacefully question teachers, and others who are in positions of authority?

This fits right in with the right-wing agenda. Follow-orders; rarely question; and always remember that you are competing against others, particularly those from “elsewhere.”

So, how can we change schools so that students develop much more in the way of critical thinking skills and empathy? Ultimately, we need teachers who are more human, or who already are human and are not afraid to show their humanity. We need teachers who are willing to be like quarterbacks, or coaches. They need to call the right plays, and often that means calling an audible (making a last-second change). What makes teaching much more difficult than running an offense or a defense in football is that what might be a good play for one student may not be a good one for another student. Teachers need to do the best that they can at making sure that they are providing the best information and techniques for each student in their classes.

So how do we do this? Here are several suggestions:

1. Reallocate resources so that technology can do more, freeing teachers to have more time. Anyone who has taught knows that teaching is far more than a full-time job. Most teachers have several hours of work to do each evening. We need to cut back on the “make-work” that consumes many teachers, and also give teachers shorter working hours. The stress that teachers experience “trickles down” to students, sometimes like a shower. We need to reduce the amount of stress and tension in our schools.
2. If we want students to become better critical thinkers and to develop more empathy, these are two of the most important qualities that we need in our teachers. But this begs several important questions:
   1. What percentage of today’s teachers are good critical thinkers?
   2. What percentage of today’s teachers feel and express empathy to their students?
   3. If these percentages are lower than what we would want, then does it have anything to do with the ways in which we teach teachers?

So much of what teachers learn in education school is so prescribed and top-down. Over time, this squeezes some of the humanity out of students who will become teachers.

Additionally, it takes a certain type of person to decide to major in education and take classes with rigid curricula. This person is often someone who is comfortable with top-down decisions and may not value autonomy and creativity as much as others.

When they finally become teachers, combine the rigidity of their training with the pressure that parents, administrators, teachers and students all feel to achieve to the max, and you have a very oppressive environment.

We need to find ways for the nation’s best and brightest, and also most empathetic to become teachers. This means looking for individuals who will bring a maximum amount of empathy and critical thinking to the classroom, regardless of what training they have had.

This is not easy. But now is an excellent time to ramp up this movement. We have a tremendous shortage of teachers and districts are now loosening their certification requirements. If you are a person who thinks that you can humanize learning for students, and make them less likely to wind up as Tea Party or MAGA members, then it is a good time to step forward. We need teachers who are civil and civic-minded to help avoid civil war.

The post Changing Our Schools is Vital to Our National Healing appeared first on Occasional Planet.

College campuses are supposed to be places where students can grow intellectually, while also feeling comfortable enough to share their beliefs and opinions. However, if a student or a group of students does not feel safe expressing their views, then clearly the university is not doing a good job at supporting its students. For example, on my campus at the University of Chicago, students in a group called UC United are currently pushing the university to establish cultural centers, so that minority students can feel more welcome and supported by the administration. I figured that my school isn’t the only one fighting this battle, so I decided to do some research into cultural centers and housing on college campuses throughout the U.S.

One of the first schools that I looked at was Northwestern University, which is located just north of downtown Chicago. I discovered that Northwestern is a few steps ahead of UChicago when it comes to having cultural centers on campus. For instance, Northwestern has the Black House, which serves as the social, cultural and educational hub for African American students on campus. However, the president of Northwestern, Morton Shapiro, has received complaints regarding the house. As a response, Shapiro published a letter explaining that he had been receiving complaints about the Black House, but has never once received notes questioning the Hillel or the Catholic Center’s presence on campus. After reading this letter, I wasn’t that surprised that there were complaints about the Black House on a predominantly white campus, since the majority of Jewish and Catholic students are white. So why not attack the minority’s safe space?

After reading about the ongoing backlash against this house that has been on campus for over 40 years, I wanted to learn more about the possible reasons why UChicago might be pushing back against cultural centers. To my utter surprise, I found an extensive research project carried out by the National Association of Scholars (NAS) titled “Separate but Equal, Again: Neo-Segregation in American Higher Education.” This project took roughly two years to complete, and the result is a 214 page pdf with data from 173 schools across the U.S. The report concluded that of the 173 schools, 42 percent offer segregated residences, 46 percent offer segregated orientation programs, and 72 percent host segregated graduation ceremonies. Keep in mind that the word “segregate” often has a negative connotation, but it is important to decide for yourself if this is a negative word in this context or not.

Of course I had to look and see what the report said about my own school, just so that I could see how accurate the data was. Based on the report’s findings and my own experience on campus, I can verify that UChicago does indeed have segregated commencement ceremonies (to use the language of the report), such as our Lavender Graduation, which honors students in the LGBT+ community. Another fact listed in this report is that 68% of the schools have diversity fly-ins, otherwise known as segregated previews of campus. As someone who has personally experienced one of these programs at UChicago, I find these programs to be very beneficial to students because it gives them the chance to see what going to school on a predominantly white campus looks like through the lens of a minority student. However, at the NAS’s presentation of their report, Dion J. Pierre, the lead researcher of this project, proclaimed that diversity fly-in programs make students think of themselves as members of a racial category months before college matriculation even takes place. Personally, I don’t see anything wrong with students viewing themselves as members of a racial category since that is their personal identity and will most likely dictate how they are treated in this racially tense nation, unfortunately.

As previously mentioned, 42 percent of the schools in this report were found to have segregated residencies also known as “themed houses” or dorms that are designed for specific ethnic or racial groups. Honestly, I didn’t expect this number to be so high, and I was surprised to find out that these types of living communities do not solely exist at private universities, and that they also appear at public universities.

Something that was not so surprising to me, is that UChicago isn’t in this 42 percent, and it is for this reason that students are pushing for cultural centers hoping to include places such as a Black house and a Latinx house on campus. One of the reasons why we don’t have places like these on our campus is because we have the Office of Multicultural Student Affairs (OMSA), which provides the main support for many minority groups on campus. I found that it is common for universities to try and appease students demanding cultural centers by implementing places such as these like at Rice University’s Multicultural Center. However, these places are simply not enough for minority students since we are all so different, and while these centers do provide some support for minorities, we can’t help but see the situation as the university’s way of trying to appease all of its minority students by shoving them all into one building.

As with any debate on a college campus, it is important to listen to the other side of the argument, so in this paragraph, I will do my best to acknowledge some of the reasons why people, like NAS, are against cultural centers and housing. The main reason that I came across for the opposing argument is that providing these spaces, which target specific racial and ethnic groups, is a form of neo-segregation. If you have never heard of this term, the NAS defines it in their report as the “voluntary racial segregation of students, aided by college institutions, into racially exclusive housing and common spaces, orientation and commencement ceremonies, student associations, scholarships, and classes.” However, I think the use of this term isn’t appropriate for the situation because segregation in American history was less of a “voluntary” act for the Black community and more of a forced separation. Additionally, another argument being made is that cultural centers and housing erode any sense of unity for students by forcing students to feel like they have to self-segregate into these communities. But in reality, no one is forcing students to live in these themed houses or venture into these designated cultural centers.

Now that we’ve heard both sides of the argument, I want to throw in a little blurb from Van Jones, who I think describes college safe spaces in the most accurate terms possible. In a discussion hosted by the Institute of Politics at UChicago, Jones explained his stance on safe spaces by explaining that they are supposed to be places where people will not be physically harmed, or subjected to sexual harassment, or become targets of hate speech and racial slurs. He says that a common mistake is for students to want safe spaces as places where they feel ideologically and emotionally safe, where if someone says something they don’t like, then it has to become a problem for everyone including the administration. Now in this case, I definitely agree that we, as students, have to be willing to interact with people we disagree with, because disagreement is such an inevitable part of today’s society. However, as Jones said, it is important that we still have a place where we feel physically safe and not subjected to hate speech or slurs within our campuses.

In the end, it is clear that there are already many challenges that come with minority representation on college campuses, and not only do we have to work to get minority students to college, but we also have to work on keeping them there, and that means setting them up with the best resources that make them comfortable being their true selves on campus.

If you would like to read the NAS report on Neo-Segregation, check out the link to their website below:

https://www.nas.org/reports/separate-but-equal-again

[Claire Shackleford is a student at University of Chicago.]

The post Cultural sensitivity at colleges: Separate but equal again? appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Elizabeth Warren has proposed a student loan forgiveness program that would cancel up to $50K in student loan debt. Warren says that her plan would totally eliminate student loan debt for 75% of Americans who have that debt and would at least reach 95% of Americans with some debt (there’s even a nifty calculator). Kamala Harris has a student loan forgiveness proposal that would forgive up to $20K in student debt if you received a Pell Grant and start as well as operate a business successfully for 3 years. The business would have to be in an income-disadvantaged neighborhood. Bernie Sanders also has a student loan forgiveness proposal; he wants to forgive all of it. That’s it. There are no formulas, no missives full of technocratic language, and no barrier to entry other than having accumulated student loan debt. To quote democratic strategist James Carville “the less you say, the more you heard”. Simplicity matters, and the broadest policies with the easiest to understand messages typically beat out complexity no matter how much wonkish nerds at think-tanks spend on market testing for whatever candidate they’re writing policy for.

“Build the Wall” was and continues to be more effective at energizing voters than “comprehensive immigration reform.” In 2008, “Universal Coverage” had a much better ring to it than “replacing the tax exemption with a tax credit to be applied to a health savings account.” There’s a separate argument that can be made about messaging and how that can matter when campaigning. As we’ve seen, voters don’t always care too much what actual legislation looks like as long as they can identify it with the campaign message. This would in part explain why Trump voters are satisfied with current policy on immigration despite there being no new wall construction.

However, there are relevant considerations that are obviously more important than messaging such as whether something is good policy. Unequivocally, universal programs are better than means tested programs and that’s why Democrats need to run on them and then fight for them once in government. Whether it’s Medicare-for-All vs. “Medicare-for-All-Who-Want-It” or forgiving all student debt as opposed to forgiving most of it, there are at least 3 reasons why (especially in this campaign) universal programs are better.

1. Universal Programs are More Resistant to Attack from Opposing Interests
   1. Nine states have approved work requirements for Medicaid, and each would have implemented those requirements if not for federal judges blocking implementation. [The Trump Administration is appealing those decisions]. As of 2017, fifteen states have passed legislation to drug test recipients of SNAP or other public assistance programs. Obamacare has been undermined by the failure of 14 states, including 2 of the 3 largest states in the union, have refused to expand Medicaid and have denied millions of people access to healthcare coverage. Meanwhile Medicare benefits have only expanded since its creation in 1965 and has continued to enjoy broad support from voters from both parties. The difference is obvious, Medicare eventually covers everyone while the other programs have formulas for determining coverage and harsh cut-offs. It is easier to oppose a program when it will never benefit you and it’s harder for monied corporate interests to fund opposition to programs that help everyone. That is why privatization of Social Security and Medicare will never become a mainstream right-wing talking point and also serves an effective scare tactic from democratic politicians.
2. Universal Programs Always Help Who They’re Meant To
   1. Hillary Clinton, Pete Buttigieg, and other liberals have made the argument that “we shouldn’t be paying for billionaires’ kids to go to college.” The implication being that public money would be used on the super wealthy to pay for things that they themselves can already afford. That falls apart rather quickly when you go policy by policy. Students take out loans because they can’t afford the cost of school, children of wealthy families are not taking out student loans because they are from wealthy families who can afford tuition and therefore universal student debt forgiveness wouldn’t apply to them in the first place because they have no student debt. The same is true of universal free-public college, most wealthy families send their children to elite private universities and would still pay tuition. When it comes to Medicare-for-All, an argument has been made that we would create a dual-system where the rich are able to afford a higher standard of care under private insurance while the masses must use a public system. That analysis misses two things; we already have the dual-system where wealthy people receive better healthcare and at least in our new paradigm, everyone has healthcare where currently that is not the case. What is most important is that in a universal system, there is no chance that those who need help won’t receive it. Even the best means-tested programs still create incentives for people to work less or stay unmarried or be generally unproductive because without public subsidies they would not be able to afford to live.
3. Politics is About Negotiating, If You Don’t Start High Then You’ve Lost
   1. As anyone who has ever bought a car or home or any product where there isn’t a fixed price knows, you don’t offer the price you’re willing to settle for. If you start with where you’re willing to settle, then you’ll either end up paying more or not buying anything at all because you have to convince the seller that they also received a fair deal. The same is true in politics, we have a bicameral legislature and it will be necessary to deal with conservatives elements in both parties (especially in the Senate) in order to pass any legislation. For Medicare-for-All to be accomplished in the next 4 years a number of extraordinary events would need to happen. Democrats would need to win the Presidency, hold the House, win the Senate, whip every Democratic vote, abolish the filibuster, and appoint a Supreme Court justice to ensure that the law can survive court challenges. That all probably won’t happen, but we can still make sure that we get the best healthcare legislation possible. We may very well end up with Beto’s “Medicare-for-America” or Buttigieg’s “Medicare-for-All-Who-Want-It” or Biden’s “ACA 2.0”. These plans would cover millions more people and make our healthcare system better, but these are plans that we should settle for. We will all be better off if we end up in the middle of Medicare-for-All and our current ineffective system. I don’t know that the same will be true if we’re in the middle of ACA 2.0 and the ACA. By promoting universal programs, we are shifting the Overton window and what is possible in regard to policy which will make it easier to eventually achieve those big progressive ideas.

This country needs big structural change and piecemeal reforms or tinkering around the edges will not make life meaningfully better for most people. Government ought to be viewed as a tool to make people’s lives better and we should not be afraid of unleashing its power to combat the inherent problems present in our political economic system.

It’s time for Democrats to put down the calculators, delete the Brookings Institute from their Rolodex, and embrace big ideas.

The post Embrace Universality, Reject Means Testing appeared first on Occasional Planet.

My local school district, the Ichabod Crane Central School District in New York’s Hudson Valley, recently held a vote on a capital improvement project with a price tag of $27,115,200. This massive project—passed by less than seventy votes—will update and modernize the district’s facilities and buildings and address long-deferred repairs to the deteriorating infrastructure of the district’s primary, middle, and high schools.

The project will address five key areas: health and safety,academics and program, physical education and athletics, building infrastructure, and site infrastructure. Upon reviewing the outline of the scope of work, my attention focused on a few of the bullet points listed under the “health and safety” category. There I discovered that the proposal calls for modest, enhanced security features for the campus’s three school buildings.These include security glazing film at the entry vestibules and the installation of bullet-resistant security transaction windows and drawers.

 Thankfully, my school district has so far escaped the tragedy of an active-shooter incident. Still, the threat is present and real. As we’ve learned from the tragedies at schools across the country, it takes just one angry, lost kid with access to deadly firearms to carry out a violent incident that becomes everyone’s worst nightmare. With that threat always present, school districts and communities are being forced to consider expensive security measures that would have been unthinkable in the past.  

 The range of security measures runs the gamut from modest retrofits, like those proposed by my local school district, to more extensive and expensive planning, such as complete building redesign, like the plan for the rebuild of the Sandy Hook Elementary School.  In answer to the public health crisis of school shootings, administrators and school boards are being forced to consider an array of new security measures, such as bullet-proof doors, replacement of entryways with a single, administrator- or security officer-monitored main entrance, safe rooms constructed of concrete, bullet-resistant window and door glass, and even building siting on raised ground and landscaping to increase visibility and control exterior access. And, of course, there’s the additional cost of human and behavioral security upgrades and training, such as generating active-shooter and evacuation plans, the hiring of additional security staff, and, in some districts, the dangerous and ill-conceived proposal that would allow teachers to be armed with firearms in the classroom.

 How did we get to the point where we have been forced to consider covering the costs of school security as a result of our schools devolving from being safe havens to places of danger that threaten the lives of children?

There are certainly many answers—both sociological and political—to that difficult question. But beyond any doubt, one of the primary answers is that the threat to our children is the inevitable result of the failure of our elected representatives in our states and at the federal level to muster the political will to pass common sense gun laws favored by an overwhelming majority of Americans, including gun owners and NRA members.

 Universal background checks. A ban on the sale of military-style weapons. These are measures that studies show will protect our children and make it more difficult for kids to harm kids. 

 What’s the result of failing to pass common sense laws that will keep our children safe?  Statistics show the story of our government’s malfeasance. Since 2009, there have been 288 school shootings. The U.S. has the highest rate of gun-related deaths,suicides, and homicides among the top thirty-four advanced economies in the world where access to firearms is restricted.

 The fact is that school-security measures come with a price tag that communities may simply be unable to afford. With all of the other costs that communities need to fund for the education of our children—facility maintenance and upgrades, teacher salaries, transportation, healthcare costs for school employees—we may ultimately be forced to face the impossible choice of choosing whether to fund improvement of the educational experience or voting to fund security measures. With that thorny dilemma poised to become reality, shouldn’t we be questioning who should be responsible for the cost of the security measures required to keep schools safe in a culture that is flooded with dangerous firearms?

 The answer may be that we need to begin a serious conversation about considering the creation of a school-safety tax to be levied on the industry that profits royally from the sales of the weapons that are harming our children. That is, the gun manufacturers.

The post Who should pay for school-security upgrades? gun manufacturers appeared first on Occasional Planet.

The Constitution is important. Full stop. It does many things, chief among them being defining and protecting the rights of people in the United States. So, what happens when America elects an executive that doesn’t fairly apply the constitution because he either doesn’t understand it or doesn’t respect it (the jury’s still out on which is worse)? The American Civil Liberties Union starts getting busy.

The inauguration of Donald Trump in 2016 was a watershed moment for civil liberties in the United States. Since the Warren Court, our constitution has been interpreted in a way that has made speech more free and rights more universal. Tinker v. Des Moines paved the way for student speech, Brandenburg v. Ohio protected inflammatory speech that doesn’t incite violence, Roe v. Wade extended a woman’s right to privacy to reproductive healthcare. Both Republican and Democratic presidents have encountered rulings they’ve disagreed with, but for the most part with some notable exceptions (Bush activities after the Patriot Act) they’ve accepted the norms that make our democracy work. Whenever a President did try to skirt the constitution and curb our civil liberties they at least made noises about “national security”. But there has perhaps never been a President so willing to abandon dog-whistle rhetoric and explicitly state his intentions to undermine our constitution.

“I would bring back waterboarding, and I’d bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding”

“Nobody wants to say this, and nobody wants to shut down religious institutions or anything, but you know, you understand it. A lot of people understand it. We’re going to have no choice.”

“We’re going to open up those libel laws, so when The New York Times writes a hit piece which is a total disgrace … we can sue them and win money”

“I’m calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the U.S.”

“When somebody comes in, we must immediately, with no judges or court cases, bring them back from where they came.”

“We’re rounding them up in a very human way, a very nice way.”

“Regardless of recommendation, I was going to fire Comey.”

President Trump’s public statements rival those of Richard Nixon who famously declared “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” But the institutions of 2018 seem to lack the intestinal fortitude of the institutions of 1974. Even with the intervention of a few state attorneys general and the 9th circuit court of appeals, we appear to be witnessing a rapid erosion of constitutional norms that has been exacerbated by recently emboldened state governments. That’s why there’s a necessity for non-profits that exist independent from government, enter the ACLU.

We asked the Executive Directive of the ACLU of Missouri, Jeffrey Mittman, how he views the role of his organization and he said, “Our job is to be a check on the government, we are the only organization whose absolute responsibility is to protect every American, every Missourian against government overreach, against violation of constitutional civil rights.” When Mittman says every American, he really does mean every American and it has not been without controversy.

Last year, the ACLU filed a lawsuit against the city of Cape Girardeau on behalf of the Ku Klux Klan because the city considered it a crime for that group to leave handbills on windshields. For many people, it’s head scratching that the same group that has been integral in the expansion of minority rights should also defend a hate group that is diametrically opposed to those rights. Mittman told us “We will defend any right as strongly as any other, so we have to defend free speech rights, but we also have to defend the right to racial equality to ends of restrictions on racial … restrictions on voting, to school the prison work, the unfair treatment of African American students…When hate crimes laws came up that said…if you say something bad, or think something bad, or write something bad, we will punish that. The ACLU said, “Wait, nope.” We can’t punish speech, we can’t punish thought. Our friends in the LGBT community, and the African American, and minority racial communities were not happy, but understood. What we said is if you commit a crime, and in the commission of that crime you say you are doing it because of that person’s race, or religion, or sexual orientation, we can as a community say, because of that history of discrimination there will be an extra penalty because of that. But to simply punish thought, or speech, or writings is not permissible.”

The ACLU is perhaps the most consistent advocacy organization in America, and it’s operated under its mission statement “to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States.” essentially without fail for nearly 100 years. It’s put them at odds with a number of Presidential administrations, but maybe none more than the Trump administration whose policy directives continue to challenge the limits of the constitution. Mittman detailed to us the work that’s been done on behalf of DACA students, Muslims that have been targeted due to the travel ban, and transgender soldiers whose ability to serve is in jeopardy to name a few. But listening to Mittman, who has been in Missouri since 2014, it’s clear that maybe the nature of his work hasn’t changed but rather the public has become more aware of problems that have existed longer than we’d like to admit.

Mittman went on at some length about racial disparities in this state, especially as they relate to education and law enforcement. There’s a “school to prison pipeline” which is essentially the disproportionate way minority students eventually become incarcerated adults that is likely related to school disciplinary policies. Mittman talked about a specific case that’s emblematic of similar experiences around the country. “In 2015 that Missouri had the highest differential between rates of discipline of white students and black students in elementary school. We represented a young, seven-year-old boy who was handcuffed. Less than four feet tall, weighed less than 50 pounds, was crying his classroom, was handcuffed, was taken to the principal’s office and left in handcuffs in the principal’s office. So, we’re working on the issue of police and schools.”

The ACLU is in the middle of a multi-year program to address this, and Mittman says the struggle is “How do we say that under third grade you should never have an out of school suspension?” he continued, “It’s just not necessary, these are young people, these are students, these are children. These are not criminals. These are not people who need to be dealt with by police officers.” Currently the ACLU is starting with five school districts in a partnership to help them look at their policies and “help them educate themselves, help them look at implicit bias training for schools, for teachers. Whatever it takes to lower those differentials.”

Now back to the President, who not only dominates media conversation but a significant portion of the National ACLU’s casework. We asked Mittman, who knows quite a bit about constitutional law, if the President can pardon himself. It seems more relevant now as the Mueller probe has progressed and many of his associates have been indicted including his former campaign manager and national security advisor. Mittman had an interesting answer “My own fundamental belief, and I think it’s fairly what ACLU would say, is going back to our earlier question, we are a system of laws not men. So, the fundamental principal will be the Constitution applies to all of us. The president is not above the law. So, if we agree on that starting point, I would hope and trust that any opinion, whether a trial court, whether the Supreme Court, would strongly ascribe to that idea that the president is not above the law.”

The ACLU is doing something that every citizen should be doing, and that’s ensuring the continued existence of liberal democracy. Whatever freedoms we have and rights we acknowledge only exist because they were fought for. The ACLU has done much of the heavy lifting in shaping how we view free speech, and it’s been a net positive for our country. Mittman said of his organization, “What people don’t know is before the 1920s, nobody would’ve said first amendment. There was a first amendment to the constitution, but it hadn’t been enforced. ACLU started around the time of World War I. Wilson was having people jailed for opposing the war. ACLU said wait a second, we have free speech right. We went to court, and now we’ve built a body of law. We’re that follow-through on what the federalists said. We’re the follow-through on the constitution…the challenges in Missouri are going to be different than the challenges of New Hampshire … [but] we know what goes on here, we are part of what goes on here, and we have the expertise in national to make it happen. They listen to us, we listen to them.”

The constitution is not a partisan issue, it’s literally above politics. It’s patriotic to support the constitution, it’s sycophantic to make excuses for its degradation. As Americans, now is the time to come together and make it known that we believe that government has to work for the people and do that work within the bounds of the people’s document.

The post While Rome burns, the ACLU rebuilds appeared first on Occasional Planet.

A simple description of Tara Westover’s “Educated” would be that is a memoir of a childhood and young adult years in a fundamentalist Mormon family in rural Idaho. But it is much more than a chronological retelling of childhood memories based on contemporaneous diaries and journals saved through the years. It is a dissertation on family dysfunction, psychological damage, and the struggle for self-actualization in the face of great opposition.

Born in 1986, Tara Westover is one of seven children in a family dominated by a father with religious beliefs and a social philosophy that many would describe as fanatic. Averse to societal norms, he eked out a living salvaging scrap metal from a junkyard that he maintained on his property in the Idaho hills. He refused to send his children to school; they worked for him in the scrapyard instead, doing dangerous jobs that repeatedly resulted in severe injuries [never to be treated by the highly suspect “Medical Establishment.”]  He viewed women as secondary and required them to be subservient. Westover’s mother obeyed. She became an unlicensed, naturalist midwife and an herbal healer. Westover’s father became obsessed with the 1992 Ruby Ridge incident, in which federal agents shot and killed Randy Weave’s family, and he lectured and preached to his family often about what he saw as the coming End of Days.

None of that sounds too bad—just highly unusual—until you factor in the harsh, unrelenting, physical and psychological abuse Tara suffered at the hands of her father, her loving but complicit mother, and especially her older brother, Shawn. Westover’s memoir chronicles all of it, in vivid and uncomfortable detail.

Becoming educated, as the title implies, is Westover’s way out. But that journey is extremely complicated for a young girl raised in a family that rejects public education, preaches the supremacy of scripture and Mormon doctrine over secular learning, and exerts enormous psychological pressure against Tara’s urge to learn beyond the limits imposed by her family. Her mother taught her to read, but that was the extent of her “home-schooling.” At 17, she managed to convince her family to let her enroll in Brigham Young University [a difficult process, because she had no high-school transcript and even lacked a birth certificate.] In her early classes, she discovered how far behind she was: Once, reading a passage aloud in class, she stumbled over the word “Holocaust,” and asked what it was. The professor thought she was joking and chastised her.

Her tenacity is remarkable—bordering on superhuman. Her academic intelligence impresses teachers, professors and peers, and she pursues higher studies, always opposed by her parents. Time and again, as her formal education moves from undergraduate to graduate to doctoral level, her family rejects her efforts and literally demonizes her—calling her possessed and evil. [Her parents, who never otherwise traveled, flew to England while she was studying at Cambridge, and stayed in her dorm room with her for a week, intending to “exorcise” her.]

Even as she begins to gain some geographical and psychological distance, and begins to be able to analyze and understand the dynamics of her family, she is constantly drawn back in, still craving their love, still wanting to belong, still stung by their ultimate rejection. And virtually every year, when she returns to her home in Buck’s Peak, Idaho, for Christmas, something happens that makes her want to flee, while at the same time feeling the need to stay.

“Educated” gave me an inside view of a world I knew little about, except through stereotypes of off-the-grid, fundamentalist Christian families. This memoir is not an indictment of Mormonism, survivalism, or religion in general. This is personal. Westover’s account includes many difficult memories, described in [often literally] painful detail. She is honest about her ambivalence, her academic insecurities, and her unending internal war between self-actualization and family loyalty. By the end of this engrossing memoir, she has educated herself—and more than just academically. She has paid a big price for her urge to learn. And while I sometimes had to force myself to read certain passages, and wanted to scream at her to not go home, to not get in the car with her brother, to tell someone what was happening to her, I couldn’t put it down. I just hope that Tara Westover has been able to use what she has learned to broker a peace with herself. Sharing her experiences with readers is an education itself.

The post Educated: A painful, honest memoir of family vs. self appeared first on Occasional Planet.

When you’re running for a school board position in suburban St. Louis and tweet out memes about banning Islam in America, what could possibly go wrong?

Well, you could be invited to speak at a candidates’ forum at the local mosque. And that’s how it came to be that the first words Parkway School Board candidate Jeanie Ames spoke to the assembled crowd at the mosque were, “I am not a xenophobic, homophobic, anti-Islam, anti-Semitic racist.”

In fact, Ames spent the better part of her two-minute opening statement trying to defend herself against charges of bigotry and racism that had arisen, in part, from her retweet of a graphic calling for the banning of Islam in America.

She has since claimed that the offending tweet — and  others — were misconstrued or taken out of context. Unfortunately for Ames, her personal Twitter feed makes the context of her remarks crystal clear: Her motto, MAKE PARKWAY GREAT AGAIN, may offer a clue as to who has influenced her thinking.

In her Twitter profile, she describes herself as a “Proud wife mommy – Free market Capitalist – Constitutionalist – Catholic – Confederate – Lily-wearing – Metal lovin – Grass Roots – American Badass.”

Yeah, she called herself a “confederate.”

On January 24, the St. Louis Post Dispatch ran this article with the headline, A self-described ‘Confederate’ is running for Parkway School Board. Residents are alarmed. The article called her out not only for wanting to ban Islam, but also for referring to Michelle Obama as a “giant rat.”

Ames’ attitudes had begun to alarm a lot of people. Some who spoke to the newspaper noted:

“Jeanie Ames’ record of racism, Islamophobia, xenophobia, and other bigotry prove beyond any doubt that she has no place on the Parkway School District’s Board of Education … All people of conscience who believe in the value and place of all children at Parkway schools should oppose Ames’ candidacy in the strongest terms.”
— Anna Baltzer of Jewish Voice for Peace

“It is quite disturbing to say the least that a person with views such as ‘banning Islam from America’ is running for the Parkway School Board.”
— Mufti Asif Umar, imam of Daar-Al-Islam Masjid a mosque situated in the school district.

What else motivates Ms. Ames? Have a look at the banner on her Twitter page.

What does Jeanie Ames really want to do for the Parkway School Board? Is she misunderstood? Have her many offensive tweets somehow been taken out of context? The people in the photo below protested outside the March 25 candidate forum because they don’t believe she’s been misunderstood. They think Jeanie Ames has made herself perfectly clear.

This is an important moment in the community. Will Ames win or lose? And what will that tell us about ourselves?

Postscript:

Many of Ames’ neighbors have yard signs for the more progressive candidates in the race. None have Ames signs. Some are coming more to the point by posting yard signs stating “Hate has no home here.”

In the end, Ames lost, getting just 12.2% of the vote.

The post “Xenophobic, anti-Islam, anti-Semitic racist.” Who, me? appeared first on Occasional Planet.

So many adults think that it is so cute, even enlightening, when a student such as Emma Gonzalez at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School calls out adult for speaking “B.S.”

“Isn’t she wise for her years? She speaks truth to power. We need more people like her.”

There is an underlying premise that as we get older, we get wiser.  Here’s the problem. That just may not be true. It’s essentially impossible to measure, because who knows what “wise” is. Also, is it possible to have more than one version of wisdom? Maybe that which bright high school students regard as insight is more accurate than what the wizened professor thinks. Or, maybe they both have views that are equally valid, but substantially different.

Adults have the upper hand by virtue of their power. There are no high school students who own television stations or cable outlets. Few have more than an individual presence in social media. For these reasons and many more, it is easy for adults to stand in judgment of high school students.

Adults hold the power over students as to what options they have for their future. Grades, letters of recommendation, determining who makes the sports team, who gets the lead role in the play, who qualifies to be hired for a job; it’s the adults who have control over the students.

There is good reason for this when kids are young. But as children get older and move more into their adolescent years, the imbalance of power becomes more questionable. The fact that adults still hold the purse strings over adolescents does not mean that the adults’ judgment is better.

This takes us back to Emma’s words about B.S. One might posit that those who have the most wisdom are those who are the best B.S. detectors. Listen to the students from Stoneman Douglas. Few dance around the gun issue. They know that putting more guns in schools, even if in the hands of security guards, only puts everyone in the building further at risk. They know that the balance of power between “good guys” and “bad guys” is less important than the number of weapons that they collectively have at their disposal.  They know that if anyone is going to have a gun, there needs to be a thorough background check in advance. They know that in a civil and civilian society, there is no need for any high-powered gun. Some even know that there are countries such as the United Kingdom and Australia where it is virtually impossible to get any kind of gun, and the rates of gun violence are virtually nil.

So, adults, let’s not patronize these students and praise them for what they understand. Instead, let’s think about where we as adults have gone wrong; where we became a society in which guns are okay, B.S. has become the currency of much of the land, and dysfunctional is the best way to describe our political system.

It’s probably too late for those of us who are adults. It seems that the older we get the more difficult it is for us to change (except for the inexorable movement towards conservatism that seems to occur with each generation).

What is needed is to find ways for today’s adolescents to not commit adultery – to not become like the adults of our generation and most past generations. Let them keep their B.S. detectors and their insight into absurd adult behavior.

This is not impossible. A few suggestions might be diminishing the role of college, placing less emphasis on credentials, and having people hold one another accountable for losing the B.S. detection skills they once had. This is all difficult, but if we are a society that almost gave Donald Trump a majority of the popular vote and which allows guns to run rampant, we need considerable fundamental change. Time for adults to stop patronizing students when “they get it right,” and let students give modest kudos to adults when they choose a language other than B.S.

The post Time for students to patronize adults; not the other way around appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Is it possible to swill a dozen Diet Cokes and read on the same day? It is. But it’s also possible to down the Diet Cokes and watch TV four to eight hours a day.

Like millions of Americans, Donald Trump apparently does not like to read. He can do it, although we don’t know much about his comprehension, or lack thereof.

Television can be a substitute for reading. In many ways, it is easier on the eyes, and the multi-media mode provides information and insight that supplements, and in some cases, surpasses what we can learn from reading. But even with hundreds of channels, our choices are far slimmer than what we can get from reading. Reading allows us to go at our own pace, to easily skip what does not seem to be of interest or relevant to us, and to easily take a second look at what might be of special interest or challenging.

It is apparent that Donald Trump is limited in the information that he receives because reading is such a strain or so unpleasant for him. Many presidents have been voracious readers, for example, Lincoln, both Roosevelts, Wilson, Kennedy, Clinton, and Obama. They also seem to be presidents who were pretty good at their jobs.

There are standard reasons as to why many people are not avid readers. Scholastic Magazine has an interesting list of “Ten reasons non-readers don’t read.” Among the top ones are:

1. Reading Gives Them a Headache or Makes Their Eyes Hurt

2. They Can’t Read as Fast as Their Peers (and Get Left Behind)

3. “They Expect to Be Tested on What They Read – and to Fail the Test”

But there is another reason that may or may not have impacted Trump, but one that all of us should seriously consider as we evaluate our educational system:

• They Have No Interest in the Material They Are Required to Read

This one is on the schools. Students have very little choice in what they are assigned to read in school. And the stakes are high; they get graded on how well the comprehend something that may be of little interest to them. Reading becomes a chore, and that often carries over to adulthood. That may well have happened to Trump, although there could be compelling evidence that he has been impacted by ADHD.

Trump’s problems with reading is hardly unique. We already know that a disproportionate number of his supporters are educationally challenged. There could be many reasons for this, but it is worth considering that many may be people who as children wanted to learn, but for whom reading was an arduous experience in school.

The lowest hanging fruit in addressing this problem is summer reading. Summer ought to be a time when kids can experience freedom from deadlines, tests, papers, grades, etc. Pick up a book about anything that is of interest to you. But no. Reading what you want to read is often accompanied by the guilt of not reading what you’re supposed to read.

Even in a hi-tech world, reading is essential. Trump may be an extreme case of aversity to reading. But it would serve us well to move away from “fun depressors” like standardized tests and and summer reading and allow reading to be fun. We might well have a more educated electorate; one that is less likely to elect a Donald Trump.

The post In defense of reading, and of not reading appeared first on Occasional Planet.