Tag: Education

The Other Steubenville

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

The New Yorker is a world famous magazine, not least famous for the very quirky sense of humour of its very prolific team of cartoonists. But it is also famous for its long, very long, essays and articles. What it is not famous for is positive and sympathetic articles, long or otherwise about things Catholic. I’m not alleging it is anti-Catholic. Let’s just say you would not think of it as a place to go to reinforce your Catholic convictions.

For that last reason it was a great and pleasant surprise to find in a recent issue (April 17) a very balanced upbeat essay on a new and very encouraging Catholic educational and social initiative in the state of Ohio, USA. Its relevance stretches well beyond the state of Ohio.

The essay, by  staff writer Emma Green, was long, indeed very long, – and fascinating to read – about a faith motivated venture, even adventure, which addresses not only a kind of black hole facing young people, particularly young males, in the essentially dysfunctional third-level US higher educational system today. Indeed it is a dysfunction paralleled in many Western societies.

What follows is an attempt at an abridgement of Ms Green’s very interesting description of this experiment.

Her essay begins with the story – so far – of a young man from Michigan, just across the Great Lakes from Ohio. His name is Brendan LaFave

Brendan grew up in a big Catholic family—the second-eldest of eight siblings living in a large house in Ann Arbor. He’s tall, with shaggy hair and an earnest manner, the kind of preternaturally thoughtful kid that adults love. He excelled at his Catholic high school, navigating calculus with ease, building sets for student theatre productions, and playing a box drum at worship events. But he also felt as if he had been born in the wrong era. His generation’s reliance on screens was making him miserable. After getting an iPhone in middle school, he spent several years “terminally on Snapchat and Instagram,” he said, which made his friendships with other kids feel shallow. “It just did a number on me,” he explained. “It caused a subtle depression.” 

Brendan had plenty of options for after graduation; he had earned a nearly perfect score on the A.C.T. (standardized test for college readiness).  But the University of Michigan did not attract him. He toyed with the idea of becoming a construction worker and just doing a lot of reading on the side. “I was very averse to the idea of college debt,” he said. “I had these ideas floating around about the spiritual life and pursuing the life of the intellect, and then working with my hands.”

As LaFave was thinking it over, he heard a discussion on a podcast. In it, a group of Catholic intellectuals discussed a new school opening in Steubenville, a small city in Ohio. Students would take classes on subjects such as the New Testament, advanced geometry, and rhetoric, and earn a liberal-arts degree in Catholic studies. At the same time, they would specialize in one of four trades—carpentry,  electrical work, heating and ventilation, or plumbing—and work toward a certificate that signalled their expertise. The school was called the College of St. Joseph the Worker.

“We’re totally trying to call the bluff on the great divorce between the head and the hands,” Jacob Imam, the college’s founder, said on the podcast. His ambition is to reverse the idea that blue-collar work is no longer dignified.  Unlike many other schools, which Imam described as keeping students contained in a “bubble,” the College of St. Joseph the Worker would expose students to the real world by having them work as apprentices, fixing up buildings and using their wages to pay their tuition and living expenses. The goal was for them to graduate debt-free.  

For Brendan LaFave this seemed to tick all the boxes. He joined the first cohort of students, in the fall of 2024.

The college currently has sixty-two students. Imam’s diagnosis of the generation he is trying to reach is that after growing up online, young men seem to be more anxious and depressed than older generations, and in the worst cases they are incapacitated: nursing porn addictions, failing to launch, flirting with Holocaust denial. The College of St. Joseph the Worker was founded as a proposition that lost young men shouldn’t be condemned or written off.

“We find them on the internet,” Imam told Green. “We bring them here. And we say, ‘How about a life in reality instead?’ ”

“Reality,” in this case, is Steubenville. 

In the past half-century, Steubenville has quietly emerged as a paradise for big Catholic families. That is Emma Green’s description. In the nineteen-seventies, Franciscan University, a liberal arts college, was established  on a hill above the downtown area.  It was founded by the Third Order Regular of St. Francis, or TOR Franciscans. Now, across the Catholic world at least, it is universally identified as Steubenville University. One of its best known professors is the prolific author, theologian and Catholic new-evangelist, Scott Hahn

But now there is another Steubenville. It is this small College of St Joseph the Worker. Its campus is in downtown Steubenville, in a handful of run-down blocks around Fourth Street. As Imam said, the college aims to give its students an education that is not just about their work but about their lives—instilling in them a sense of purpose, restoring their feeling of competence, teaching them virtue. But it also exists to help rescue Steubenville from its rust-belt fate. 

Marc Barnes, a thirty-two-year-old professor at the college, is the unofficial hype man of the downtown-revitalization effort. He first moved to Steubenville to become a student at Franciscan, in 2010. Then as now, many of the downtown buildings were boarded up. With barely any money, Barnes and roughly a dozen friends set about trying to bring some life back to Steubenville. 

In 2017, Barnes temporarily left Steubenville to pursue a graduate degree in theology in England. A friend introduced him to Jacob Imam, who was in Oxford doing his own graduate studies. Imam was different from the scrappy Steubenville types with whom Barnes had spent his twenties. Unlike Barnes, who was born and raised Catholic, Imam had found his way to Catholicism later, after growing up in an interfaith household, with a Palestinian Muslim father and an evangelical mother. He was a consummate high achiever, a collector of mentors who quickly clocked him as a kid destined for great things. When he was in his first month of college, at Baylor University, a professor suggested that he apply for the Marshall and the Rhodes scholarships for postgraduate study in the U.K. 

Barnes met Imam in a moment of soul-searching. Imam was headed toward a career in academia, but he felt queasy about participating in a debt-driven higher-ed system that can sometimes be more of a prison than a launching pad. “But I’m not inclined toward élite culture.” Barnes persuaded Imam and his new wife, Alice, to join the project in Steubenville, and the couple bought a house there in 2019. 

For years, Imam had been nursing the idea that he might develop some of these ideas into something more concrete—a new kind of college. 

Imam got initial donations from a few friends at Oxford, and eventually raised enough money to purchase the building that would become  ‘the Workshop’—a vast, open warehouse with timber-filled bays. He made his first hires and began working on state approval.

The model of this remarkable college is work, study, prayer. Every morning, the students are encouraged to attend the eight o’clock Mass at the downtown Catholic parish. They have a full academic load, taking around three courses  per quarter. 

On top of this, the students practice their respective trades. The standards are high: students may get nearly twice as many instructional hours as what’s required by the state of Ohio. Students also spend a significant amount of time on worksites. Often, in traditional apprenticeships Last year, the college formed its own construction company, on the logic that it could give students apprenticeship opportunities and make money from jobs. 

The college has so far bought up and started renovating more than a dozen buildings. The college’s students will be the ones doing this work. Just by being there, they have changed the town. 

Imam has attracted some powerful patrons, such as Rick Santorum, the former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania and Republican Presidential candidate, who has introduced him to donors in the Catholic world. Santorum said that he sees Imam’s project as part of the fight to revive small-town America. “There are thousands of Steubenvilles, small towns that were once bustling industrial hubs, that are now really struggling,” Santorum told Green. “The very thing that made all these towns across America so successful, and knitted the communities together, was that combination of family and faith and industry—the village, if you will.”

The idea to have a college where students get a liberal-arts education, do physical labor, and pay their way is not new. Congress has awarded special funding to a handful of so-called Work Colleges for more than thirty years, and some small liberal-arts schools had work programs long before that.

However, the College of St. Joseph the Worker is distinct. It does not accept federal funding, including student financial aid; like many other conservatives, Imam believes that the federal government is too involved with education, and he wants the college to retain full control over its policies and curricula. The college also views skilled labor not just as an enriching experience on the way to a white-collar job but as a vocation. A core goal is to cultivate leaders on worksites, to be “the Harvard of this sort of thing,” Imam said.

In the world of higher education, there’s long been an insistence that college is for everyone, but this has resulted in many graduates unable to find suitable jobs; the employment prospects of English majors—or even computer-science grads—are looking increasingly grim. Meanwhile, there’s an acute shortage of skilled tradesmen around the country. Young people with these skills will likely be able to find well-paid work anywhere they want, long after many laptop jobs are made obsolete by A.I.

The college’s gift shop displays copies of “Shop Class as Soulcraft,” a 2009 book by the writer Matthew B. Crawford, which argues that the skilled trades require a level of mental and intellectual sophistication that often goes underacknowledged. “Because the work is dirty, people tend to assume it’s stupid,” Crawford said. Trade school is often talked about as an alternative to a four-year degree, but the discourse can be patronizing, with jobs in construction framed as an off-ramp for the kids who can’t cut it in real college. Crawford thinks that narrative is precisely backward: “There’s a burnout, and a sense of worthlessness, that hovers in the background of the laptop class—a kind of spiritual malaise.”

Perhaps it’s more generous to see the College of St. Joseph the Worker—along with the handful of other nascent Catholic trade schools that have recently popped up, in Michigan and Illinois and California—as a manifestation of America’s populist moment. Crawford maintains that “When you know how things work, how to repair them, how to build them in the first place, I think it gives you a little bit more of an independent ground to stand on against claims of expertise.”

In Steubenville there is a bookshop called  Bookmarx (no irony intended). It is owned by John Kuhner and his wife, Catherine. Kuhner believes there will be people living in Steubenville in two hundred years. “Whether or not that means this bookstore will still turn a profit in four years—something like that is a different question,” he said. For now, his parish is lively and full of young families. His kids run up and down their block with friends their age. Sometimes, “you just feel like we’re camping out in the ruins,” Kuhner told me. “But I never feel without purpose here. And I never feel alone.”

What is a catholic school?

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment

You might like to attend the zoom launch of Our School is Catholic – So What on Thursday night at 8 pm  This book promises to be an important contribution to the debates of the value of Catholic education. It is written in an Irish context but its relevance and value extends beyond the shores of that island nation.  It deals with the curriculum framework for Primary Schools, new directions in education for relationships and sexuality, the examination system and its side effects, and much more. It is available now from www.sowhat.ie for purchase.

You can also register on the website for in-depth Book club discussions on the book during October – December. 

Topic: Our School is Catholic book launch

Time: Sep 23, 2021 08:00 PM Dublin

Join Zoom Meeting

https://zoom.us/j/94315125099?pwd=ZStLMHEzU2hJWmt0dm52aS9KczliUT09

Meeting ID: 943 1512 5099

Passcode: welcome

Aftershocks of a pandemic

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

“The parents weren’t just upset about all the screen time their kids were logging. They were upset about what they saw on those screens. For the first time, millions of moms and dads could watch, in real time, their children’s teachers teaching.”

That’s just one more aftershock from the great pandemic of the twenty-twenties.

We have all become aware of the workplace upheaval in which the world’s biggest corporations and the state bureaucracies of the planet – not to mention the real estate industry – are all grappling with the existential phenomenon of working-from-home. Pre-pandemic social communication had already made something of sea-change in our lives but the infliction of lockdown, while not perhaps being the mother of Zoom and its fellow inventions, was certainly the booster rocket which sent them into orbit, giving us meetings at our finger-tips and a new meaning to dropping in on family, friends and neighbours for a chat.

The architecture of the entire teaching-learning edifice which our world has known for the duration of what we call modern times now looks like it is in the process of a radical redevelopment, if not a wholesale demolition and rebuild. Not least among its structural features facing radical change is that which has taken care of which is perhaps its most lovable and most precious responsibility, elementary education.

Post-pandemic, millions of new families are moving to undertake the elementary education of their own children.

And why not? Are we so blind that we cannot see the logic, the justice and the beautiful privilege that the best educated generation in human history have the ability, and should have the right, to educate their own children. “Education bureaucrats, leave those kids alone!”

Barri Weiss’ Common Sense on the Substack platform spells out some of the details of this apparent landslide freedom movement in a guest post from another Weiss, Suzy by name, (sister, cousin?). In an age when the family has been put in greater danger than it has been in over one hundred years this is really good news. Not since the Marxist revolutions of the early part of the last century tried to obliterate the family, has it been so threatened. This movement is a real sign of hope. And this is not just for children but for the whole of western society. This is a revolutionary counter-revolution, a whiff of grapeshot moment of the kind in which Napoleon tore into the murderous zealots who had taken control of the French Revolution.

Throughout the western world – and increasingly encroaching on the societies and cultures of the rest of the planet – progressive elites with their bizarre readings of human nature, and what they think they can do with it, have penetrated education systems like a dry-rot penetrating the fabric of a building. That ordinary families with common sense and their feet on the real ground might take over the education of their children in their formative years is an anathema to these elites. The progressivists, academia and the teacher unions which they dominate, will resist but they must not be let undermine this most natural of movements.

These are some of the insights into this revolution which Suzy Weiss gives us in her post. The entire post is here.

In March 2020, as the coronavirus engulfed America, Kristen Wrobel got the news: “We heard on Friday that there would be no school for two weeks. Which just turned into no school.”

That was the last time her children — one in third grade, one in first —  were in a classroom.

In the beginning, they did the remote-school thing. Wrobel, a 42-year-old stay-at-home mom with a bachelor’s degree in software engineering, called it a “nightmare.” The Zoom sessions, the Italian lessons on Duolingo, the stuff she had to print out, the isolation, the tears, the nagging, the shuttling the kids between her house, near Burlington, Vermont, and their dad’s, a half-hour away.

“Everyone was freaking out all the time,” she said. 

By May, at the risk of violating state truancy laws, Wrobel had stopped fighting and let her kids log on (or not) whenever they felt like it. It was, she said, “the darkest hour before dawn.”

That September, she started homeschooling. She didn’t like all the restrictions her kids’ private school had implemented: Students seated six feet apart. Masked. In wedding tents. Outside. 

She figured she’d send her kids back to the school in 2021, after everything had gone back to normal. 

That was then. Now? “There’d have to be a revolution in schooling.” 

She’s hardly alone. Wrobel is one of hundreds of thousands of moms and dads across the nation who have decided to become the principals of their very own, very small elementary schools. 

The number of kids going to school at home nationwide has doubled over the past two years. In 2019, there were about 2.5 million students learning at home. Today there are nearly 5 million. That means more than 11 percent of American households are educating their children outside of traditional schools.

In Wrobel’s state of Vermont, homeschool applications are up 75 percent. And that’s in the northeast, where regulations are strictest. The phenomenon is exploding across the country. In North Carolina, the site for registering homeschools crashed last summer. In California, applications for homeschooling tripled from 2020 to 2021. In Alaska, more than a quarter of students in the state are now homeschooled. 

In Texas and Florida, parents are not required to notify the state, so it’s hard to know exactly how many kids are learning at home. But just one South Florida school, Jupiter Farms Elementary, saw 10 percent of its student population withdraw for this school year. Almost all of them are being taught at home.

The American Schoolhouse was in serious disrepair before 2020 — about that no one would disagree. But the events of last year tore the whole thing down to the studs. First, the pandemic. Then, the lockdowns. Then the summer of unrest: George Floyd, the protests, the riots, the mea culpas. Many local school boards seemed more concerned about teaching critical race theory and renaming schools than reopening them. Parents didn’t know what to do — what was safe, what was right, whom to trust. It was like being inside a tornado.

These were changes that rocked every American family.  So perhaps it’s no surprise that the homeschooling trend cuts across geographic, political, and racial lines: Black, Latino and Asian families are even likelier than white ones to educate their children at home. 

All of this is undermining the old, Democratic-educational complex — the powerful teacher unions and the office-holders beholden to those unions —  that has long maintained an iron-clad grip on tens of thousands of schools and the fate of tens of millions of American students. And it is forcing a long overdue reimagining of the way we educate children: the subjects they study, the values instilled in them, and the economy for which they are being prepared. 

Maria Magallanes homeschools Zola West, 7, a child who lives next door, at the Magallanes home in Alexandria, Virginia, in April 2020.(Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

For decades now voices have been crying in the wilderness about the corruption of academia and lower reaches of the teaching profession. Instead of getting better they just got worse and worse, crazier and crazier – and utterly arrogant.

Consider what Peter Boghossian had to bring himself to say in this post, also courtesy of Bari Weiss: “…brick by brick, the university has made… intellectual exploration impossible. It has transformed a bastion of free inquiry into a Social Justice factory whose only inputs were race, gender, and victimhood and whose only outputs were grievance and division.”

Shortly after Boghossian ‘came out’ and took on the ideologues ” swastikas in the bathroom with my name under them began appearing in two bathrooms near the philosophy department. They also occasionally showed up on my office door, in one instance accompanied by bags of feces. Our university remained silent. When it acted, it was against me, not the perpetrators.”

There is no doubt, the Red Guards are back and they are not just in the United States. This kind of experience, in one form or another is replicating itself all over the academic world, formerly the free world.

In recent times it was depressingly hard to see from where the light at the end of the tunnel would come that would effectively bring about the change that is needed to bring an end to this cultural crisis. What our society and our civilisation is facing is truly worrying. Perhaps this is what is needed: a new generation, educated in common sense and with a grip on what true human values really are.

Mad dogs and Englishmen

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

Noel Coward’s famous song, Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun may need to be revisited – with a little bit of reworking – in the light of a report in today’s Daily Telegraph. It reports that a British watchdog, its Equality and Human Rights Commission, has a secret proposal on its desk to compel girls’ schools in England and Wales to admit boys who present themselves for admission as girls. Or whatever. God help us. With clearly rabid watchdogs like that roaming the streets they better all say goodbye to the sun. A dark age has arrived.

Is it any wonder that the home-schooling movement is taking off at record speed?

The paper reports:

Girls’ schools would have to admit transgender pupils under proposals being considered by the equalities watchdog. The confidential Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) draft guidance, leaked to The Telegraph, reveals schools could be set to consider admissions of trans students to single-sex schools on a “case-by-case approach”. Schools were supposed to be issued with the first official national guidelines on transgender children in March 2018. However, following repeated delays, it has never been published. However The Telegraph can now reveal details which have never before been made public.

Is transgender madness a bottomless pit?

The EHCR report says that: “A refusal to admit a trans pupil to a single-sex school which is the same as the trans pupil’s sex recorded at birth would be direct sex discrimination. Admitting such a pupil will not affect the school’s single-sex status. 

“A pupil who has transitioned, or wants to, must be allowed to continue to attend the school; to remove them would amount to direct gender reassignment discrimination.”

The document also says: “An admission policy of only admitting pupils in accordance with their sex recorded at birth would particularly disadvantage trans pupils, and would be indirectly discriminatory against trans pupils, unless it could be demonstrated to be a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim.”

For good measure, in case you did not know, these (courtesy of the Telegraph again) are samples of the new language being dictated to us:

Gender-neutral terms | Checklist

Forefathers – ancestors, forebears

Gentleman’s agreement – unwritten agreement, agreement based on trust

Girls (for adults) – women

Housewife – shopper, consumer, homemaker (depends on context)

Manpower – human resources, labour force, staff, personnel, workers, workforce

Man or mankind – humanity, humankind, human race, people.

So, watch your language.

Guadalupe Ortiz, a scientist, a teacher, and more…

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters, Faith MattersLeave a comment

The Cross first came to Guadalupe at the age of 20 in the form of a tragic event – the execution of her father by a firing squad

 

Guadalupe Ortiz, the first woman member of Opus Dei to be beatified

Guadalupe Ortiz de Landázuri

The lives of saints, even the lives of great but ordinary people, who may also be saints without our knowing it, are often marked by great suffering. There is no such thing as holiness without Christ’s Cross.

This was certainly a distinguishing characteristic of a woman who will be beatified next week. On May 18, Guadalupe Ortiz, a scientist, a teacher, and much more, will be honoured in a stadium more commonly associated with rock concerts than with religious devotion.

The Cross first came to Guadalupe at the age of 20 in the form of a tragic event – the execution of her father by a firing squad.

Guadalupe bore this ordeal with exemplary serenity. Who is to say that the marks of this cross were not part of the foundation on which she later built that life of dedication to God and service to her fellow human beings, across two continents.

Read this article in full in The Tablet online.

Food for thought – about millennials

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment

This has been around for a few months but it is well worth checking out in case you have not seen it. It is a calm but very astute summing up on the time bomb which the world may be sitting on.

There is no question but that the generation we call ‘millennials’ has within its ranks some very creative minds with strong characters to go with them. But the overall assessment of this generation is for many a cause for concern.

Our only complaint about this particular assessment might be that, in true millennial spirit, the blame is not laid at their door – but at the door of their parents.

The most devastating ecological disaster of all?

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

Is this something we should be worried about? If even a fraction of what Camille Paglia is saying here is true, it is hard to argue that it is not a matter which should deeply concern us. Our universities, more than ever before, are where the minds of the future are forming themselves – and a true university will always see that the most important work being done there is the work the students themselves do. But if they can form themselves then the reverse is also true. They can deform themselves.

Cultures have become degenerate in the past. Civilizations have disintegrated and vanished. Somehow new civilizations emerge eventually – but the human cost, the loss and the suffering which human kind experiences in the trough between these two peaks can be the stuff of nightmares. Will some scholars in centuries from now, perhaps even millennia from now, find these words of Paglia – and God only knows what medium they will find them in – and say here was the Cassandra or the Tiresias of the 20th and 21st century,  Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs, (who) perceived the scene, and foretold the rest…     

Totalitarianism dressed in the garments of righteousness

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters2 Comments

“There is now an extraordinary situation where State-funded third-level colleges are openly advising would-be teachers that their career prospects depend on their religious faith.”

 

The hidden secular totalitarianism of this statement is what is “extraordinary”.

 

Fintan O’Toole’s proclaimed agenda – emphasised again in his Irish Times column today – is to deprive the citizen-parents of this country of one of their fundamental civil and human rights – that of being supported by the state in their work as primary educators of their children.

 

The Irish State funds third-level colleges to train teachers who will work in primary schools which the vast majority of the parents of this country wish to be “faith” schools, that is, schools in which their children will learn about their faith and grow in their knowledge of and commitment to the God whom that faith proclaims.

 

The State does this because it is the will of the people that it should do so. The details as to how to manage a fair distribution of scarce resources – given the religious denominations represented in the population – is another matter. But it does not lead us to a conclusion that the faith commitment of those staffing the schools is something irrelevant.

 

For that reason it would surely be extraordinary if teacher training colleges did not point out to their students that their commitment to a particular faith might be a factor influencing whether or not they might be successful in applying to a post in the majority of schools.

 

The day in which this will become irrelevant will the day in which schools will have given up on a responsibility which the majority of the citizens of this State have chosen to share with them, denying them their rights in the process. The rights of parents to have their children educated are primary. In this context, the rights of teachers to have jobs are secondary.

 

The anti-faith secularism of O’Toole and the militant new atheists is not just extraordinary. It is profoundly sinister and utterly cynical in the manner in which it is dressed up in the garments of righteousness.

Sad fate of poetry in our education system

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

Billy Collins

The point of reading a poem is not to try to “solve” it. Still, that quantifiable process of demystification is precisely what teachers are encouraged to teach students, often in lieu of curating a powerful experience through literature. The literature itself becomes secondary, boiled down to its Cliff’s Notes demi-glace. 

These are the words of a teacher who confesses that 16 years after enjoying a high school literary education rich in poetry, I am a literature teacher who barely teaches it. So far this year, my 12th grade literature students have read nearly 200,000 words for my class. Poems have accounted for no more than 100.

This is a shame—not just because poetry is important to teach, but also because poetry is important for the teaching of writing and reading.

Andres Simmons is an American and he is writing in The Atlantic. He explores  the fate of poetry in the modern classroom – and the fate of the students deprived of a good education through poetry, deprived of one of  the richest and enriching means of expressing our understanding and feelings about the human condition that there is.

In an education landscape that dramatically deemphasizes creative expression in favor of expository writing and prioritizes the analysis of non-literary texts, high school literature teachers have to negotiate between their preferences and the way the wind is blowing. That sometimes means sacrifice, and poetry is often the first head to roll.

Yet poetry enables teachers to teach their students how to write, read, and understand any text. Poetry can give students a healthy outlet for surging emotions. Reading original poetry aloud in class can foster trust and empathy in the classroom community, while also emphasizing speaking and listening skills that are often neglected in high school literature classes.

He admits that one of the biggest problems is that teachers either shy away from the proper method of introducing their students to poetry or lack the skills to do so.

Either of these failures leads the temptation to disembowel a poem’s meaning and diminish the personal, even transcendent, experience of reading a poem. He quotes Billy Collins who characterizes the latter as a “deadening” act that obscures the poem beneath the puffed-up importance of its interpretation. In his poem “Introduction to Poetry,” Collins writes:  “all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope/and torture a confession out of it./They begin beating it with a hose/to find out what it really means.”

Sad fate.

 

The creeping statist menace

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

When I saw a headline in the current issue of The Week it looked like they had got an article about Irish Education Minister, Ruairi Quinn. It said, “You are a bad person if you send your children to a private school.”

That is more or less what Ruairi Quinn, with his ideologically-driven Labour Party and the social engineers in his Education Ministry certainly seem to think. Just this month he has unveiled more legislative proposals to cut the ground from under those evil parents who dare to attempt to form their own judgments as to what kind of school might give their children a better chance in life.

Quinn is proposing, among other things, to put a cap in the number of children any school can accept from families of past pupils of that school. In other words, the great statist leveling machine – regardless of whether that leveling might be down as well as up – trumps parental choice, experience, judgment and loyalty to the old school tie.

The quote was not in fact from Quinn. It was from across the Atlantic, but it surely came from the same soviet ideology to which Quinn subscribes where the family, individual preference, and parental responsibility are always sacrificed to the socialist pipe-dream of an egalitarianism totally divorced from human nature.

Jack Jennings on The Huffington Post dew our attention to the Council for American Private Education’s statistics showing us that there are 33,366 private schools in the US – 25% of the total. Because they tend to be much smaller than publicly funded schools, they cater for just one in ten of the school-going population. Nor are they all expensive boarding schools for the elite, the Post told us. The vast majority have a religious affiliation, and the bulk of these are Catholic.

This freedom of choice really annoyed Allison Benedikt on Slate.com. My take on this is simple, she said, “You are a bad person if you send your children to private school.” That parents choose to send their children to these schools because they live in urban areas with bad schools, or because their kids are gifted or have learning issues, or because they want small classes and personal attention and courses in modern film and Mandarin, cut no ice with her at all.  You know who else wants those things? She asked. “Everyone.”

When affluent parents pull their kids out of public schools, her argument went on, those schools lose the clout and resources they deserve. So don’t run away from the schools poor families are forced to depend on. “Send your kids to school with their kids,” and then fight to make things better for everyone.

Poverty is blamed for everything in this world view, ignoring all the other multiple factors which contribute to quality – or the lack of it – in education. In other words, sacrifice your kids to this social ideology which tells us that the state and not the family is the heart and soul of society. The state in all things knows best.

Rod Dreher, on TheAmericanConservative.com, answered her, describing her line as “the educational equivalent of Soviet economics”. Am I supposed to believe I have a moral obligation, he asked, to give my kids a “crappy” education, “when I know something better and higher is available?” For liberals, he continued, all that matters is that “we are united in the state, no matter how stupid, ignorant, and poor it makes us”.

Another commentator pointed out that Benedikt was also mistaken about her basic premise. John Carney on CNBC.com said competition improves education and numerous studies show that when public high schools have to compete with private schools, they raise their game in every way. So parents who send their kids to private schools aren’t doing something wrong – “they are performing a verifiable public good”.

What hope is there that Ireland might escape from the grip of this wretched ideology? Little at present, unfortunately. It appears that Irish social public policy, in health and education particularly, is captive to a clique of unreconstructed ‘sixties and ‘seventies apparatchiks who would have felt perfectly at home in the soviet block 40 years ago.

An Eastern European observer of the Irish scene recently observed that in terms of the onslaught which he has seen the Irish State making on Irish institutions still maintaining a Christian ethos, the Communists in his country 40 years ago were very much in second place. They haven’t gone away, you know.