There are other closely related disciplines that really go into very different matters. These include such pairs as history and sociology; comparative literature and English literature; American studies and American history. But let us consider only the profound difference between an economic and sociological approach to social problems.
There was a time when the major advisors to political leaders on various social problems were social workers and sociologists. The tradition reaches back to when Jane Addams advised the Governor of Illinois at the turn into the Twentieth Century about how to deal with problems of urban poverty. FDR was served by Frances Perkins and Harry Hopkins, although Hopkins eventually was given much broader responsibilities. That tradition perhaps reached its apex during Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty where the major influence was Frances Piven, and the team of Richard Cloward and LLoyd Ohlin, as well asa other students of the sociologist Robert Merton, many of whom were social workers, and who offered up one program after another that was designed to make a difference to people in poverty by offering them one service piled up upon another. These programs were largely unsuccessful because they were to be measured by their outcomes but the input, like school lunch programs, while laudable in themselves, were never enough to make a difference in the overall condition of poverty, while the civil rights legislation Johnson also passed did make a difference because they changed the status of black citizens, making them into an ethnic group rather than a caste.
Read MoreSo difficult and profound is the nature of education, and so uncertain its results, since education has to do with the nature of the way people think more than what they know or what they can do, that it is not surprising that the goal of education is replaced by something else. Using history to ponder the complexities of social causation is replaced by learning the chronicles and traditions of a nation so as to implant patriotism; using math to learn how to think abstractly and logically is replaced by the mastery of times tables and algorithms. More dramatically, learning is itself replaced as a goal of education, its time taken up with the variety of services that are useful to the population that attends school, such as how to drive an automobile or protect against pregnancy. Schools can therefore become schools in name only, even though they are regulated by state education departments rather than by some other agency. That is what happens when schools serve non-educational functions for reasons of convenience, such as providing vaccinations for all students, free lunches for poor children, or day care for seriously disabled children, or warnings about not to talk to strangers. These are health and safety programs, not educational programs, even if it is also the case that children who get glasses may see the blackboard better and so learn more. Many social services make it easier to educate students, and there is no reason why these services should not be provided in schools, given that children of school age can be found there en masse, but social services are not the same thing as education itself.
Read MoreTrump is settling into the background noise (as we can only hope), while the real players are in the Congress and the Cabinet. Trump may hold a triumphal self-promotion event in the Rose Garden to celebrate getting an Obamacare repeal bill through the House of Representatives, but that is only a stunt because a new bill will be crafted in the Senate that may look very different from the bill Speaker Ryan got through the House. Remember that Trump’s election was itself a fluke, not a trend, much less “a movement”, as he likes to put it. Journalists like to tie his election to Brexit, which had its distinct sources in the failures of the European Union, and to tie it to Marine Le Pen, but look what happened to her.
So we have to look elsewhere than to Trump to find out what is happening in government, and an insight into, at least, how politicians argue about health care policy was available yesterday at, among other places, George Stephanopoulos’ Sunday talk show on ABC. Politicians and journalists, first of all, when they talk about policy issues, by and large do not these days begin with axiomatic statements that they then apply to the particulars of Ryancare. They do not argue about whether people do or do not have a right to health care, even though, by the way, Ryan made it clear that if people don’t want insurance, they shouldn’t be forced to get it, and so people have no right of coverage, even if they do have a right of care, which means that they can always go to emergency rooms where the costs will be picked up by insurance companies and state governments. But Ryan does not too much refer to first principles because outright saying that healthcare is a luxury purchase rather than a right might make him seem hard hearted. So he prefers to appear as someone who is just making health insurance better.
Read MoreThe distinctive goal of an institution is whatever is the primary goal of the institution, whatever other functions it may carry out, and even if its budget and talk seem more devoted to other activities than those that enhance that distinctive goal. The distinctive goal of the military is to strip or counter the ability of the enemy to perpetrate organized violence through the use of its own abilities in perpetrating organized violence, never mind that the military also dallies in winning over hearts and minds and is an icon of patriotism. Other institutions, like Hollywood, also win over hearts and minds, and patriotism can be tied to vigorous, loyal dissent as well as to risking life and limb on a battlefield.
It is the same with education. Local suburban school boards may be preoccupied with making a campus shine even though their students will do well whether the campus looks good or not; local urban Parents Associations may talk a great deal about a learning environment when what they mean is that the school is safe enough for their children to attend. But a school without instruction in subject matter is a recreation program by another name, and so schools have to offer some version of the usual courses as well as the other things that motivate students to attend school so that they can be known and qualified as schools and thought to be doing the things schools are supposed to do. A college curriculum without liberal arts requirements is a training academy, and you couldn’t sell it to parents as a real college education unless you included those requirements, even if students don’t like to take those courses and even if the parents and students say that what they really want are the vocational preparation courses.
By that light, the distinctive task of education can be defined, in general, as structured instruction for the purpose of the development of disciplined thought about any subject matter. Plato thought that there was a single discipline of thought which pervades all thinking, and for which we retain the title of “logic”. Aristotle thought that there were many disciplines of thought, the rigor or “logic” of which depends on the subject matter and the audience which was to be convinced of the rightness of one or another view. This distinction between logic and logics still obtains. Some people develop large habits of thought, such as how to read texts or do statistical analysis, and some people learn particular disciplines, like economics and psychology and religious studies, and some people learn subject matters, like Southeast Asia, or mass communications, or African-American studies, and pick up smatterings of whatever disciplines seem to apply as well as a healthy dose of some particular discipline so as to provide tools for the study of the particular subject matter.
Read MoreVoting is an ineluctable part of citizenship in a modern representative democracy. But Jefferson thought that it was very difficult to be a good citizen who casts a responsible vote even if he also thought that every yeoman farmer (who was white) should have the vote. Jefferson proposed universal elementary education so that citizens would be literate enough so that they could evaluate whether the candidates would represent their interests. That would enable a lot of people to vote and at the same time vote sensibly. The history of voting behavior in the United States, however, suggests that there are a great many things that interfere with the voter offering up in his or her vote his or her best judgment about what is good for his or her faction and for the nation as a whole, and so the promise of democracy as a system of government which justifies itself as having been empowered by the people is called into question.
Read MoreThere is something peculiar about the notion that teaching is an occupation. Everybody does it: every parent and every employer tries to be calm while explaining to a child or a worker what it is they aren’t doing quite properly or how to do a task better. If explanation is provided with patience, then children and workers are likely to have a more positive attitude towards their tasks—though, on the other hand, if a lesson is reinforced with a spanking or a dressing down, then children and employees are likely to learn how important it is they learn their lesson well. Teachers are similarly divided between those who think that sticks or carrots, whether in the forms of grades, or informal praise and criticism, are the ways to advance student learning. Presumably, and contrary to the teacher unions, anyone of good will and patience and an education a little bit superior to that of their students, could be a teacher.
Read MoreFor those of us who participate in the Hot Stove League of presidential politics or, to switch the metaphor, who await the arrival of our spring planting seed catalogues in mid-winter, it is never too early to estimate the horseflesh that will compete in the Derby (to add a third metaphor to a single opening sentence). My early judgment is that there are many capable Democrats, seasoned by executive or legislative experience, but that none of them have the added oomph of an outsized personality that Trump seems to have made the only qualification for a Presidential nomination or victory, and that may be Trump’s only contribution (if we are so lucky) to American political history. Let us review the tout sheet.
Read MoreI want to propose a philosophical question and then answer it with a bit of counter-intuitive sociology, and then address why people persist in availing themselves of the usual philosophical conclusion. The philosophical question is the age at which children take on moral responsibility, the so called age of consent. The usual moral answer is that children reach the age of consent when they are capable of managing their own lives, at least in the sphere in which their ability to give consent is at issue. They are supposed to be able to evaluate information and their own emotions and so give informed consent to their own action and the action of others. The law in most states sets sixteen as the age at which people can agree to sexual relations and twenty one as the age at which people can purchase alcohol. But it proves impossible to give an accurate definition to this leaping off point for adulthood. Why a particular age for one thing and a different age for another? What changes in a person that they become morally responsible or is it just that age is just a rule of thumb for developmental processes recognized to happen but not very well understood?
Read MoreDemocrats read special congressional elections, such as the soon to take place runoff in Georgia’s Sixth between Ossoff and Handler, as tea leaves by which to forecast the 2018 Midterm elections. They have set high hopes on taking back the Congress because the Congress will do nothing or because Trump will do something awful in the meantime. How could anyone who voted for him (aside from his true believers) not be disappointed by the actuality of his Presidency and so overcome whatever were the motives that led them to vote for him in 2016? Moreover, there is the ever looming prediction that sooner or later the demographics of the South will catch up with it and return it to the Democratic column because the South is so far better educated than it was in the past, has put its regional issues, especially those of race, aside, and Hispanics and Blacks and retirees from the North will all contribute to swinging the South to being part of what will become a permanent Democratic majority. So Democrats look forward to the deliverance of the country to them. But I am not sure it will happen and I want to explain why.
Read MoreThere is a family I have never met that I came to know quite well over my years as a college teacher. They are the Greenwalts, once of Birmingham, Michigan, a wealthy bedroom community outside Detroit, who were the subject of a documentary entitled "But What If The Dream Comes True?" that appeared on CBS in l970. Unlike other family portraits of the time, such as that of the Louds, where a hand-held camera picked up the wife telling her husband to move out, the portrait of the Greenwalts was not given to titillation or uncovering family ghosts. Nor was this a video blog pretending to be the real life of a celebrity with all but selected warts edited out. Its method was that of a standard documentary: interviews with the protagonists and film on the settings in which they lived their lives. Its purpose was an exploration of the American character, and its narrator, Charles Kuralt, brought his usual mixture of amusement and appreciation to an hour-long human interest story that was and is more than a sidebar.
Read MoreGabe Pressman, then as for a very long time after that a reporter for WNBC-TV, came up to Columbia University in 1959 to interview undergraduates, of which I was one, about Charles Van Doren and the quiz show scandals. Pressman was surprised to see how protective the students were of Van Doren. Pressman said that it was his job to cover the story. It was the opinion of many undergraduates that looking through the window slats at someone's national humiliation was not a moral way to earn a living, much less to further one's career. That episode, I think, suggests why Robert Redford was overly glib in his handling of the Van Dorens in his movie Quiz Show, whose appearance, some twenty years ago, reminded me of events that, until the movie, I had remembered with sadness rather than anger.
Read MoreDogs show themselves to be comfortable. My dog lies on his back under the air conditioner, the breeze going through his whiskers and onto the hairless part of his undercarriage. He has just been walked and so has relieved himself and he has been fed. His social nature is also satisfied in that I am present in the room with him while he stares out into space doing nothing but being comfortable. He exudes his comfort even though he doesn’t know he is comfortable, is not self-aware of his comfort. Maybe the dog is close to Nirvana, though I am not big on thinking it is better to be unconscious rather than conscious of one’s state. People, for their part, know when they are comfortable and knowing so is itself a pleasure and a satisfaction. I am ever more conscious of this self sufficiency as I get older even though I don’t think there ever was a time for me or for anyone else when we did not both sense and know when we were comfortable. I wake up in the middle of the night, aware of the silence, of the fact that I am breathing comfortably, that my bowels are untroubled, that the temperature is just about right, and that my thoughts can wander whichever way they care to. It is like when my wife slept next to me before she died though not as good as that, my listening to her unlabored breathing and touching her warm skin though not with so much pressure as to wake her.
Read MoreIn one sense, the government is operating as it is supposed to in its response to the Syrian atrocity. The National Security Council will offer up to the President a number of practical ways to respond to the Syrian use of chemical weapons. These will be well considered by the foreign policy professionals. President Trump, for his part, has fulfilled his role by announcing a change of policy based on his gut response that chemical weapons require a response even if just a few days before he had said that Assad’s regime is not his concern. That changed sense may or may not reflect what the American people think and they will form their own judgment, partly on the basis of how successful are the military efforts that are likely to be made. Will the loss of American pilots lead the American people to think a military option was bound to be a failure? Will the Russians dumping Assad lead the American people to think a military policy was a success? These are the moments when a President wins or loses, his own judgment and reputation and style of governing in the dock.
Read MoreThe Book of Genesis tells stories that concern a time before the existential events that make up the Book of Exodus where, among other things, the idea of law as providing guidance for how people are to conduct themselves makes its entrance. The Book of the Covenant had indeed provided a kind of international compact whereby families that resembled those of the patriarchs were supposed to regulate their relations with one another through establishing rules of compensation for damages, but the editors of the Five Books of Moses chose to include this passage in Exodus, as if to indicate that the Book of Genesis was to be truly prior to the concept of law. But if that were the case, how were the people of the Book of Genesis “supposed” to behave, that term itself rushing us to impose the imperative of law--”should”-- on the pre-legal condition. Was it supposed to be that mere custom and godly edict would be enough to explain how people behaved and behaved themselves? Not so, because the pre-legal people of Genesis used their minds to consider their interests, however difficult it may be not to assume that they were making legal type judgments. When Jacob learns that his sons had killed the people who had offered to circumcise themselves as well as intermarry with Jacob’s tribe because one of them had taken one of their sisters for a wife, Jacob does not excoriate his sons for having been vengeful or otherwise done evil, but simply concludes that the tribe will have to move on now rather than settle there. That can be taken as an ironic understatement, meant to foretell that those descended from the Old Testament families would always, sooner or later, have to move on, or that Jacob was making a silent judgment about their actions-- though I have done so myself in an earlier reading of this story of the rape of Dinah-- but, rather, that Jacob was simply not given to the moral reasoning that would come with the arrival of law.
Read MoreHere is a dystopia that came awfully close to coming true and which shows how history can be normalized by rhetoric and so come to be just the substance of the familiar and the everyday.
Remarks at the Dedication of the Berlin Center for Judaic Studies (1994):
In the Spring of l950, when the Fuhrer was taken from us, worn down by his years of service to the European peoples, it would have surprised the world that the international system he put in place would still be in place, stronger than ever, half a century later. His dramatic and memorable declaration of l945, "The Channel is deeper than the Atlantic", had allowed the British to accept the bitterness of their inevitable defeat: their armies decimated in Africa; their cities devastated by the Luftwaffe; their population demoralized; and a grand army about to be lifted by the then newly invented jet transports in an invasion by airbridge over the now militarily meaningless Channel. Let the British and their American and Commonwealth allies control the intercontinental oceans, the Fuhrer was saying. They shared a similar bourgeois way of life-- and a similar set of economic problems. The Continent, however, would achieve its rightful unity as the Federal Republic of Europe, a destiny which had eluded it since the collapse of Christendom as a unifying ideal some five hundred years before. Fratricide in Europe was finally over.
Read MoreThe two hearings that have dominated the news at the beginning of this week, the appearance of the head of the FBI to announce to the House Intelligence Committee that there was an ongoing investigation of the connections between the Russians and the Trump campaign, and the appearance of Judge Gorsuch at the Senate Judiciary Committee before a vote takes place on his nomination to be a member of the United States Supreme Court, is that neither of these hearings was necessary. Both were occasions that simply demonstrate that Congress thinks it is doing business when it holds hearings. These people love any occasion when they are able to sound off, although it is also possible that most of them couldn’t absorb information if it was presented to them only in the form of documents.
Read MoreIt is certainly possible for Liberals and Conservatives to engage in a public policy debate about what items should be collectively purchased, like armies, through government taxation, and what items, like luxury cars, should be a matter of individual purchase, money for the item directly out of the consumer’s pocket rather than out of the tax dollars paid into the general fund for the government to spend as it wishes. There are difficult cases. Should the upkeep of a car be included in the welfare budget for a rural person who needs a car to get around, much less to get a job? Should everyone pay for parks even if only some people use them? The issue of what is the proper kind of purchase arises at the moment with regard to building infrastructure. Should it be by the government through what would at the moment be very low interest bonds? Or should it be by private investors who use tax incentives to go into the business of building toll roads? I would prefer direct government purchase of roads, and that is the Liberal preference, though until recently it was also the Conservative preference, Eisenhower having financed the interstate highway system in the Fifties with government money, even if the building of the railroads some seventy-five years before that was only indirectly financed by the government because the government provided free or very cheap and very broad rights of way to the railroad barons of the time.
Read MoreWars in the modern age are fought to preserve and protect the ability of a nation’s population to pursue its own purposes rather than the purposes of its enemies. The Nazis thought their way of life was endangered by the Jews and the governments they controlled and the Soviets thought their country was threatened by the capitalist world that engulfed it. That is different from previous times when wars were fought to expand territory or capture natural resources. In fact, international law now holds a war of aggression to be illegitimate, while wars of self defense are legitimate. What counts is whether decisions people make as to their vocations or how they are subject to criminal law are matters which their own nation controls. We fought World War II to allow fans to call the umpire blind, though I don’t know that German soccer referees were not subject to similar abuse.
We also fight social wars, which means campaigns to allow people to continue with their ordinary way of life, getting up to go to work and take a vacation in the summer, without the intrusion of disease or crime, much less foreign invasion. That is the case with homeless shelters, which are referred to as programs rather than as wars, though they share with other social wars, such as the War on Poverty or the War on Cancer, the idea that resources will be mobilized so as to confront a problem or a threat to ordinary life that will eventually be overcome. Smallpox was eradicated, as was polio. Homeless shelters allow people to negotiate what is for them the very burdensome task of making it through the day, no other purpose able to supplant that one, while most people can take their households to be the site from which they can negotiate their purposes rather than their sole purpose becoming the maintenance of a household.
Read MoreThe reason Republicans don’t care how the Congressional Budget Office scores the Republican healthcare plan to replace Obamacare is that they are under the illusion that the free market, if left to its own devices, will come up with ways to lower the cost of insurance and so allow more and more people to keep coverage. Let insurers sell policies across state lines, which means that they will offer policies that are so bare bones as to be useless, but people will have become “free” to choose the plan they prefer. The truth of the matter, to the contrary, is that the idea of the free market failed to explain or prevent other economic problems, like the Great Recession and what to do about the ten percent of the population that probably can’t hold down places in the work force, and the market model is just as wildly inapplicable to medical care. Even back in the days of horse and buggy medicine, when the town doctor could do little but set bones, see you through a bout of an infectious disease, or tell your family that you were dead, doctors engaged in a sliding scale of fees, charging their poorer patients less than they did their wealthier ones, accepting a few chickens as remuneration for attending a farm family. The poor depended on charity wards and free clinics or went without. All this at the same time that late nineteenth century capitalism was developing a system of standard prices openly advertised as such so as to rationalize merchandising. You didn’t haggle over the price in the Sears Roebuck Catalogue. It was different at the other end of the ladder. George Bernard Shaw, in “The Doctor’s Dilemma” shows Harley Street physicians out to make a buck by selling useless nostrums and surgeries for made up diseases to their patients because they could get away with it. Going to a doctor was like going to a spa is today for the self-pampered rich. The best that could be said of it was that it did no harm.
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