Tough Choices or Tough Times

The first Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce responded to the threat of globalization in 1990. The trend of manufacturing moving offshore to the lowest cost suppliers was obvious and portended a decline in wages or, worse, unemployment for America’s factory workers. The first Commission’s report, America’s Choice: high skills or low wages!, took its cue from American industry in proposing to “abandon low-skill work and concentrate on competing in the worldwide market for high-value-added products and services.” The Commission concluded that improved primary education is the key to the benefits program.

Now, after 15 years of continued outsourcing and declining test scores, the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce was convened and recently issued its report “Tough Choices or Tough Times.” The surprising conclusion: We must improve K-12 education.

According to this report “the first Commission never dreamed that we would end up competing with countries that could offer large numbers of highly educated workers willing to work for low wages.” For such a distinguished panel, their lack of foresight is surprising. In the 1980s US companies were already hiring Asians, Indians and others (usually college-educated in the US) to fill engineering jobs due to the lack of American engineers. By the mid 90s we were hiring Chinese engineers educated in China and Indians trained in India to work here. It was a small step for the mass of educated persons in those countries to decide to stay at home while working for US companies. Hence tech centers in Bangalore and Guiyang.

But, that aside, and passing on the false assumptions I mentioned in the last post, this new report contains much that is worth consideration.

The primary observation is that industries producing the most important new products and services can capture a premium in world markets that will enable them to pay high wages to their workers. This has long been the American model. It depends on maintaining the worldwide technological lead, year in and year out, and on innovators, entrepreneurs and robust capital markets including venture capital. The challenge is staying ahead of the rest of the world when many new products and services can be readily duplicated in lower-cost countries. Success depends on “a deep vein of creativity and innovation that is constantly renewing itself” and a workforce that is “comfortable with ideas and abstractions, good at both analysis and synthesis, self-disciplined and well organized, able to learn very quickly and have the flexibility to adapt quickly to frequent changes in the market.” Yes, indeed!

Clearly, an educated population is an important ingredient in the American economic model, and the current educational system is doing a poor job. The report presents several radical recommendations for reform of the US system; following are the best ideas, in my humble opinion.

The first is a structural change to a model that resembles Finland’s. (See my post “Finland the Model” 2/6/07)

New Educational System

.........................11 -- -- 12 ..EXAM ---
.......................Secondary School --- Select University


K -- -- -- -- --10.. EXAM
Common School

........................11 -- -- 12 ..EXAM ---
......................Vocational School --- Open College

The key change is a set of Board Exams, the first at the end of the tenth grade covering the core subjects to find out whether the student has learned what he or she was supposed to learn. The standards will be set at the level of exams given by countries that do the best job educating their students. The report claims that “when all of our recommendations are implemented, 95 percent of our students will meet this standard.” This is another case of unrealistic expectations, but never mind.

Students who do not achieve the passing grade will be allowed to take remedial courses and retake the Board Exam, until they pass. (Realistic?) Students who score above the passing level will be qualified to go to a vocational school or community college. After 2 years of study they may take a second Board Exam that could admit them to an open college (eg the Cal. State system).

Students who score above a higher level on the first exam can stay in secondary school to prepare for a second Board Exam that may qualify the student to enter a selective college or university. Those who score below the qualifying level on the second Exam may be eligible to enroll in an open college.

I heartily approve of a model that accepts the reality that a traditional college education is not the best choice for everyone. Vocational schools, trade schools, technical schools and community colleges will become the route of choice for the majority of Americans who want to work in high skill, outsource-safe jobs that pay a solid middle-class wage.

The report recommends an effort to recruit a new teaching force from the top third of the high school students going on to college, rather than the bottom third. This can be achieved by changing the shape of teacher compensation, which is currently weak on cash up front and heavy on pensions and health benefits for the retired teacher. The first step is to make retirement benefits comparable to private sector firms and use the money that is saved to increase cash compensation. The report says these changes would enable us to pay beginning teachers about $45,000 per year and to pay up to $100,000 per year to the best experienced teachers in fields like science, mathematics and special education.

The next step is to create high performance schools modeled after the high performance management systems employed in American industry. The schools would be operated by independent contractors, some of them LLC’s owned and run by teachers. In the new system, it would be relatively easy for teachers to reach out to other teachers and form organizations to operate schools themselves, much like doctors, attorneys, and architects form partnerships to offer their services to the public. The schools would be funded by the state and have complete discretion over the way their funds are spent, staffing schedules, organization, management, and program, as long as they provided the curriculum and met the testing requirements imposed by the state.

The primary role of school boards and district offices would be to write performance contracts with the school operators and monitor their operations, cancel the contracts of those providers that did not perform well, and find others that could do better. Parents and students could choose among all the available contract schools, taking advantage of the performance data these schools would be obligated to produce.

Another proposal greatly expands the definition of school in a direction it is already heading. It proposes to provide additional funds for schools serving high concentrations of disadvantaged students enabling them to stay open from early in the morning until late at night, offering a wide range of supportive services to the students and their families. This is where I become uneasy. Babysitting and social services may be appropriate government expenditures, but it is not an educational function, and these services require a different set of skills. These are not the new teachers that we are recruiting from the top third.

On balance, I think that the report contains more good than bad ideas. I strongly support the new structure emphasizing Board Exams and providing a robust vocational path. I think we should recruit more intelligent teachers and pay them better, trading off benefits for salaries. I am enthusiastic about privatization of public education suppliers. These changes are all important and should be pursued. However, they do not comprise a panacea.

When there are kids who do not show up at school, disturb the class, pay no attention, do no homework and refuse to study, with parents who do not care... well, Aristotle could be the teacher and he won't make a bit of difference. These social forces are most important and it is unreasonable to ignore them.

Shock and Remonstrance

Forget the Oscars. (They were goring.) The buzz among the lower education crowd is about the nominees for best horror story, documentary category. The first two stories were shocking. Two reports issued last week by the US Department of Education assessed the performance of 12th-grade students and raised sobering questions about two decades of educational reform.

The first report on standardized test results showed that 12th-grade reading scores have been dropping since 1992. On the math test fewer than a quarter of the 12th graders scored proficient.

The percentage of students scoring at the Basic level on the reading test was 73 percent, below the 80 percent in 1992. The percentage of students performing at or above the Proficient reading level decreased from 40 to 35 percent. In math 61 percent of high school seniors performed at or above the Basic level, and 23 percent performed at or above Proficient.

David Driscoll, the Mass. commissioner of education, called the study results “stunning,” adding “I think we're sleeping through a crisis.”

David Gordon, Sacramento County school superintendent, spoke out about the achievement gap between whites and blacks that has barely diminished in the last 15 years. “It's clear to me from these data that for all of our talk of the achievement gap among subgroups of students, a larger problem may be an instructional gap or a rigor gap, which affects not just some but most of our students,” Gordon said.

The second report on the classroom grades of graduating seniors showed that, compared to students in 1990, the 2005 high school graduates had much higher grade point averages. The average GPA rose from 2.68 in 1990 to 2.98 in 2005. Higher grades yet lower standardized test scores. What’s up?

“What we see out of these results is a very disturbing picture of the knowledge and skills of the young people about to go into college and the workforce,” said Daria Hall, of the Education Trust, a nonprofit dedicated to improving education for poor and minority students. Hall said the studies provided clear evidence of grade inflation. “What it suggests is that we are telling students that they're being successful in these courses when, in fact, we're not teaching them any more than they were learning in the past,” she said. “So we are, in effect, lying to these students.”

The third report in the horror trilogy offers the hope, however tenuous, of salvation. “Tough Choices or Tough Times” is a sobering report from the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce. “Anyone who hopes to hold a job in the next several decades should read, if not memorize, this extraordinary report” wrote Norman R. Augustine, former CEO of Lockheed Martin Corporation.

This is a significant report containing many revolutionary ideas. William Brock, Secretary of Labor in the Reagan Administration, described the New Commission’s recommendations: “This proposal is radical? Yes. Hard to achieve? Of course. Essential? Absolutely. Our nation's schools are failing to educate our children, and that has to stop, else we condemn our own kids to ever lower incomes. We must act, now!”

The report is so full of tantalizing ideas that it deserves another blog post, tomorrow. Here I’ll only list my reservations, consisting of a number of false premises and dubious conclusions.

The report features a pyramid diagram of the US workforce in ten years time. “Prototypical US Industry” shows the preponderance of US workers (~85%) in 10 years at the top of the pyramid employed in Creative work, if only the policies recommended in the report are adopted. But the premise ignores another “pyramid,” the bell-shaped one peaked at 98, which shows that only a minority is intellectually capable of Creative work. No educational system, even one designed in heaven, is going to change that fact.

Step one of the recommendations rests on the assumption that “we want to send everyone, or almost everyone, to college. Now set up a system to do it.” This viewpoint is consistent with the Prototypical US Industry vision, but is out of touch with reality and with US needs. As Charles Murray noted in his Wall Street Journal articles (Jan. 16-18), there is an “explosive increase in the demand for craftsmen. Finding a good lawyer or physician is easy. Finding a good carpenter, painter, electrician, plumber, mason --- is difficult, and it is a seller's market. Journeymen craftsmen routinely make incomes in the top half of the income distribution while master craftsmen can make six figures. They have work even in a soft economy. Their jobs cannot be outsourced to India.” (See my post “No Child Left behind,” 2/3/07).

Step 2 involves “building a high-quality full-service early childhood education system for every 3- and 4-year-old student in the United States.” The assumption is that children need to be in a formal school setting from age 3 onward. Yet the top achievers in the world from Finland start formal schooling at age 7 when kids are just about mature enough to begin learning in an organized setting. (See “Finland the Model, 2/6/07).

Here in Palos Verdes the cry for reducing kindergarten class size has reached a crescendo. A parent explained why. “Today’s kindergartners are learning how to use calcalulators. They’re not just learning their A-B-Cs and 1-2-3s said Terri Mitani. “How damaging do you think it is to a child’s self-esteem when they feel rushed?” Next year they will want universal pre-school with laptops for the 3-year-olds, better to protect their self-esteem.

Step 3 aims to recruit future teachers from the top third of college students whereas now they largely come from the bottom third. I approve of this goal but reject the underlying assumption. Throughout the report the focus of learning is on the teacher – just give us better teachers and we will conquer the world. Any parent knows that the burden of learning is on the student who needs to work very hard to achieve anything substantial.

The report contains many politically correct assumptions that detract from its seriousness. These objections aside, I do think it has some great ideas about how to really reform the K-12 education system. I’ll take them up tomorrow.

Global Warming Hysteria is Child Abuse

Global warming concerns are keeping children awake at night was the headline. In England, half of young children are anxious about the effects of global warming, often losing sleep because of their concern, according to a new report today.

One in seven of the little darlin’s said their own parents were not doing enough to improve the environment. They feared the possible submergence of entire countries. Thanks very much, Al Gore!

“By raising awareness amongst today's young, hopefully we are improving our chances of reaching a solution” explained Pete Williams, a spokesman for the survey. “While many adults (even Brits) may look the other way, this study shows that global warming is not only hurting the children of the future, it's affecting the welfare of kids now.” Thank you, Pete, keep scarin those kids.

Meanwhile, the Hollywood mafiosa are poised, that’s the word, to bestow an Oscar or two on Al and his science fiction movie. And those rascally Asians are finding a way to make a buck or two zillion.

Andy Mukherjee in Bloomberg reports: “Governments in rich nations are spending billions of dollars to buy a clearer conscience over climate change. Are they getting their money's worth?”

If you are one of those who stay awake at nights wondering what you can do to prevent the polar caps from melting, there’s a growing menu of choices for your largesse.

Easy Being Green Co. says it will mitigate your cat's flatulent contribution to global warming for $8 per year. The same company could also make your granny carbon-neutral at $10 a year, according to a report in The Australian.

Then there's Carbon Planet Co. If you’re hopping a flight between Sydney and Canberra, and feeling bad about the damage you are doing to the ecosystem, you can buy carbon credits worth $23, for which the company will guarantee to keep a ton of carbon dioxide out of the air for 100 years.

Now for the serious stuff. Michael Wara of Stanford U. explained in an article in the journal Nature this month: “Countries that must purchase emission credits to atone for their higher-than-mandated production of carbon dioxide are paying a tiny group of chemical manufacturers in China and India massive sums to reduce industrial gases and methane.”

China and India are getting a prize for producing lots of hydrofluorocarbon-23, one of the greenhouse gases under the Kyoto Protocol. Six Chinese companies have consented to be paid $986 million by Euro countries to destroy the HFC-23 they are producing and only spending $31 million on incinerators, thanks to the elaborate trading mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol. DuPont Co. in the USA does it for free.

Gujarat Fluorochemicals Ltd., the first company from India to join the game, reported that it had tripled its revenue in the last quarter and shareholders have earned 662 percent on the stock since March 2005, when Japan, Italy, the UK and Netherlands agreed to pay the company to destroy HFC-23. (Attention, son John) Italy alone may pay 12.8 billion euros over the next four years to buy emission credits. The UN loves this subsidy from the developed to the developing world to get them to clean up their industrial byproducts.

I do not think that Americans should love it. Now there is something we can do about it. The PatriotPost has launched an important petition to “Stop Albert Gore and Reject the UN's Global Warming Treaty.” Gore is trying to re-energize the Clinton-era movement advocating Kyoto compliance -- the biggest UN power-grab in history. Sign this petition, please!

They already have over 30,000 electronic signatures and want to deliver 100,000 signatures to the Senate by the time Al Gore reaches the podium at this Sunday's Academy Awards.

The petition reads as follows:

We urge the United States Senate to reject the 1997 United Nations Kyoto Protocols Treaty purporting to address global warming by constraining economic growth in the United States while allowing unmitigated growth in 129 other nations, including two of the largest world economies in China and India.

We reject the Orwellian solutions proposed by Albert Arnold Gore and others who claim that the Kyoto Protocols must be adopted to stop global warming. The science of climate change is very imprecise, and current trends in climate change may have little or nothing to do with production of so-called "greenhouse gasses" such as carbon dioxide.

Albert Gore's solutions will only impede the advancement of scientific and technological innovation, and would impoverish hundreds of millions of people around the world.

Friends, send this to your friends -- let's flood the site with our signatures.

Is “Teaching Profession” an Oxymoron

“At a time when disappointing student performance, stark achievement gaps, and an ever-flattening world call for retooling American schools for the 21st century, the most daunting impediments to doing so are the teacher collective bargaining agreements that regulate virtually all aspects of school district operations.” Thus begins an important new report by Frederick M. Hess of the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute and Martin R. West of the left-leaning The Brookings Institution.

A Better Bargain: Overhauling Teacher Collective Bargaining for the 21st Century lays out one piece of the strategy for fixing our underperforming schools. Living in Palos Verdes, it is tempting to think that the real problems are down the hill in the LAUSD. Up here there is a raging battle over the number of hours kids spend in kindergarten. The present schedule has an overlap of morning and afternoon sessions that allows for significant savings in salaries and classroom space. The Teacher’s Union wants to eliminate the overlap, and the savings, for the sake of the kids. Is it true that kindergarten class size must be reduced or is this yet another case of no-teacher left behind ?

A letter to the editor of the Palos Verdes Peninsula News pleads for the change: “The rigorous, chaotic schedule our kindergartners are subjected to is astounding.” I have to ask, why rigorous? Why chaotic? Kids are subjected to? These are 5 year olds. What are they doing to our kids in kindergarten? It seems that the problems are everywhere.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs lambasted teacher unions last week at an education reform conference. In a discussion of technology in the classroom (what else?), Jobs shocked the audience by saying no amount of technology in the classroom would improve public schools until principals could fire bad teachers.

Jobs compared schools to businesses with principals serving as CEOs.

“What kind of person could you get to run a small business if you told them that when they came in they couldn't get rid of people that they thought weren't any good?” he asked.

“Not really great ones because if you're really smart you go, ‘I can't win.’”

Mr. Jobs elaborated on the source of the problem.

“I believe that what is wrong with our schools in this nation is that they have become unionized in the worst possible way,” Jobs said. “This unionization and lifetime employment of K-12 teachers is off-the-charts crazy.”

Hey, what does Steve Jobs know?

Hess and West note that “teacher collective bargaining agreements are vestiges of the industrial economic model that prevailed in the 1950s, when assembly-line workers and low-level managers were valued less for their knowledge or technical skills than for their longevity.” At a time when effective teachers are demanding to be treated as respected professionals, teacher unions are an anachronism.

Hess and West also spread the blame to the superintendents and school boards who sign off on the union contracts.

A Better Bargain charts a new course, recommending five key changes in collective bargaining agreements:

1. Teacher pay should reflect the scarcity and value of teachers’ skills, the difficulty of their assignments, the extent of their responsibilities, and the caliber of their work. Pay for value.

2. Pension and health benefits should be like the rest of us get (if we're lucky), which will entail shifting to defined-contribution plans better suited to the new economy and a professional workforce.

3. Tenure should be eliminated from K–12 schooling. (See Steve Jobs.)

4. Personnel should be assigned to schools on the basis of educational need rather than seniority.

5. Work rules should be weeded out of contracts, and contracts should explicitly define managerial prerogatives. Principals need to be CEOs.

These necessary changes are only feasible in conjunction with a reform strategy committed to a world-class K-12 education system based on principles of accountability, competition and transparency.

Accountability: Results-based accountability is needed throughout the system, from administrators to teachers. One key step is the construction of reliable statewide databases that track individual students’ academic progress over time so that teacher pay and professional development can be linked to classroom effectiveness.

Choice and Competition: Enhanced school choice and competition are essential to heighten incentives to improve student performance. In particular, state officials should eliminate obstacles to the creation of charter schools that operate free from many statutory and contractual restrictions.

Tough-Minded Governance: District officials must shine light on inefficient contract provisions, push for fundamental changes in contract language, and fully exploit permissive or ambiguous language where it exists. In addition, civic leaders and citizens must support management practices that may create, at least initially, disgruntled unions and increased labor unrest.

Mayor Mike Bloomberg of New York believes “the desire to learn has disappeared down the bottomless well of centralized urban public-school bureaucracies.” Bloomberg proposed greatly increased autonomy for school principals, and he wants teachers to prove they deserve tenure, an idea so obvious that it probably has no chance. The liberal mayor of America’s biggest city is willing to preserve tenure (a bad idea) but has no chance of introducing reasonable accountability.

American K-12 education is a monolithic, over-regulated yet over-protected system with dysfunction in every major subsystem. In my post “NO Child Left Behind” (2/3/07), the capabilities and responsibilities of the students were highlighted. The kids and their parents have primary responsibility for learning, but we spend a substantial portion of our government budgets on teachers who need to hold up their end.

It is about time for the many fine teachers to stand up and demand to be treated like professionals with requisite rewards and accountability. It is past time for the few underperforming teachers to find other employment.

And it is time for the elected school boards and the PTAs to join together and demand accountability, excellence and fiscal responsibility in this most critical profession.

Three Worlds

One thing about a gout attack is how it focuses your mind. The cold I was whining about is suddenly a mere inconvenience. Debating with liberals: Who cares? Equinox is but a dream. Since I wasn’t able to limp off to Starbucks for my daily dose of puppy love and conversation, I’ve occupied my mind with a splendid new book by Harvard professor emeritus Owen Gingerich called God’s Universe. (Thanks to Greg Johnson for the recommendation.)

Now that I’ve taken an 800 mg IBU I feel up to writing about it. Gingerich explores a question that has fascinated me since I first realized it was a question, specifically: “Dare a scientist believe in design?” In the physics world the heroes have been believers and the majority of current physicists believe in God. Gingerich is a believer, also of design, but is skeptical of Intelligent Design, which he sees as a political movement opposing the trend of atheist-promoted materialist philosophy that is taking over the biological sciences. (Francis Collins notwithstanding)

One of the greatest attractions of a life in science has always been the possibility that an increased understanding of nature will reveal more about God the Creator and Sustainer of the cosmos. To Gingerich (and me) the universe is a more coherent and congenial place if it embodies purpose and reveals a grand design.

Anyone who has looked at the world seriously sees the “rich context of congeniality shown by our universe, permitting and encouraging the existence of self-conscious life.” I’ve written about the remarkable fine-tuning of physical constants that make a world inhabited by life a possibility. The more you know about it the more convinced you become of a master plan.

Francis Collins abandoned atheism during the course of his epic work mapping the human genome. Astronomer Fred Hoyle said that nothing shook his atheism as much as the discovery of how the stars overcome the gap at atomic weight five and the very special resonance that makes carbon possible. (But then physicist Steven Weinberg said, in a debate about science and belief, that most people are not entitled to be atheists because they haven’t thought enough about the matter. He reminds me of the angry liberals I wrote about in the last post.)

The question that intrigues me the most concerns the design that God used for the universe? We know about the Big Bang and the creation of stars and that a very particular set of forces and precise physical constants are parts of the design. I want to go beneath the surface to look at the design at a deeper level. I can think of three unique possibilities.

The grandest design, to me, is what might be called the hamburger helper world. In this design, God supplements the remarkable natural laws and the astoundingly precise physical constants with a circumscribed pathway from the Big Bang to human life. Some call this additional help a cosmic blue-print, I prefer to think of it as a life map that nature follows because God made it so. In this model God made the catalysts and unknown pathways that enable life to be born. For believers this is a marvelous tribute to God’s omniscience.

The hamburger helper world is attractive also to naturalistic philosophers and scientists who appreciate the absurd impossibility of the journey resulting from unaided chance. Materialists assume that natural catalytic processes and natural pathways guide the random processes. Just replace “God” with “nature” and it works fine for them.

A second world-design at God’s hand has been called the “multiverse,” that provides another way around the improbability problem. For a sense of the problem: The probability of a small protein being created by random chance is one part in 10 to the power 351. To see how small that is, note that the number of seconds since the Big Bang is only 10 to the power 17. (Pierre Lecompte du Nouy, Human Destiny, 1947) But any gambler knows that when something is really improbable one has to try it many times to have it happen. Thus if there is a near infinity of universes (the multiverse) then by random chance one is likely to evolve into the one we inhabit. We’re just astoundingly lucky!

Some physicists like to think that each of the multiple universes has a slightly different set of physical constants. String theorists take that viewpoint and hope that their “theory of everything” will emerge in one of the universes, and hope it is the one that we live in. Surely God could have designed the world to work as a multiverse, maybe as an entertainment for the Angels. But Einstein thought that God would not play dice with our world. Who knows?

Our third world-model involves God’s intervention at critical points, what Christians call miracles. Newton favored this world model but Leibniz disagreed: “When God works miracles, He does not do it in order to supply the wants of nature, but those of grace.” Atheists say that such a design proves the non-existence of God, since an all-powerful Being would not need to interfere with nature’s course to get His way. I regard that as an uneducated opinion and find the idea of God’s participation to be infinitely charming.

Critical events might include the inflation period that needed such fine control; the origin of life that looks to be impossible on its face; the creation of human sentience and conscience, when we got our Souls. Some, like Michael Behe, believe that micro-molecular machines (eg. the flagellum motor that drives the E. Coli bacteria) cannot (yet) be explained by natural means. Behe sees this as an example of non-Darwinian mini-macroevolution.

Scientists should, of course, search for the natural, non-miraculous paths; it’s what we do for a living. And whenever a natural explanation is found and proved, that is a triumph of the human intellect and it makes the third world-model less potent.

I do not know which model of the world God used and neither does anyone else. But I think that the greatest glory of science is trying to know God’s mind through the study of His wonders. Walt Whitman proclaimed: “A leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars.” And stars are child’s play compared to the complexity of DNA and the human genome. What a grand adventure!

Liberal Tolerance is a Myth

Since publishing my post “No Child Left Behind” (2/3/07), I’ve been engaged in an email exchange with a liberal friend. Here is a sample of the debate between the Tolerant Liberal and the Conservative Neanderthal. (That’s me). You be the judge.

Tolerant Liberal: Bill says that “Many agree that the K-12 education system is failing the lower half of the intelligence distribution, preferentially inhabited by low income children and minorities (Blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans).”

It is this kind of statement that really gets me angry. Why in the world was it necessary to add the phrase after the comma? The fact that you've brought income and race into this discussion makes me very suspicious that your real goal is to perpetuate a system where the advantages of the advantaged carry on from generation to generation.

Conservative Neanderthal: Are you angry because what I said is untrue? Or maybe it’s because I am not allowed to say it. When you say that my real goal is to perpetuate a system... you base this on a misunderstanding of my motivation, which is to fix a system that fails the disadvantaged.

You do not know me. Conservatives think that liberals are wrong, but liberals think that conservatives are evil.

Tolerant Liberal: Why isn't it your goal to fix a system which fails all below-average students, whether disadvantaged or not? Is it, perhaps, because the educational system doesn't fail white students who are below average in intelligence but above average in socioeconomic status? And, liberals say the same thing about conservatives.

Conservative Neanderthal: You don't like it that my goal is to fix an educational system that fails the disadvantaged. I think that is a fine goal. The disadvantaged have special needs. You can worry about the advantaged.

Further, you proved my point (Conservatives think that liberals are wrong, but liberals think that conservatives are evil) by the comments you made. I still do not think you are evil, just wrong.

The Neanderthal was tempted to add and stupid after just wrong, but I restrained myself. This is the way so many arguments progress. We try to explain why the liberal position is wrong but they say we are mean, evil, Holocaust deniers!!

Oh yes, the ad hominem attack is such a common tactic that liberals use it with abandon and extravagance, even in the major newspapers. The Boston Globe’s Ellen Goodman used the evil card in discussing global warming. “Let's just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future.”

Nice. Goodman notes the evil of ordinary Americans who, in Pew Research Center surveys, place global warming only 20th on the list of 23 policy priorities, below terrorism, tax cuts, crime, morality, and illegal immigration. Goodman also notes that only 23% of college-educated Republicans (but 75% of Democrats) believe the warming is mostly due to humans.

So now the majority of Americans who have doubts about the human responsibility for global warming, not to mention the critical need to do something humongous about it, may be compared with Iranian Ahmadinajad and the rest of the Holocaust deniers. It’s just Ellen Goodman practicing that good old liberal tolerance.

Our friend Dennis Prager agrees that Goodman “reflects a major difference between the way in which the Left and Right tend to view each other. With a few exceptions, those on the Left tend to view their ideological adversaries as bad people, i.e., people with bad intentions, while those on the Right tend to view their adversaries as wrong, perhaps even dangerous, but not usually as bad.”

It reminds me of the animal rights organization PETA. Those tolerant liberals used their “Holocaust on your plate” campaign, which equates the barbecuing of chickens with the cremating of Jews in the Holocaust, to attack the food industry (those evil Neanderthals). All of this merely trivializes the horrors of the Holocaust and the evil of Holocaust deniers.

We conservatives do not believe that (most) liberals are evil, just utterly, impressively wrong. We want liberals to talk about their ideas, confident in our belief that normal people will eventually realize what claptrap it is. But liberals fear what we say and try to silence us by innuendo, satire (No one expects the Republican Inquisition) and calling us names. It’s like they are reliving their glory days in the school yard. (Note the infatuation with pre-pre-school.)

What liberals mean by tolerance is forbidding the Pledge of Allegiance in schools because “under God” may be offensive to atheists. To most liberals, tolerance means calling those who disagree with them evil. The unfortunate consequence is that progress on the important matters that face America is impossible when one side is using rational argument while the other side is throwing stones.

Game Over: the Science is Settled

“Action would have to be radical -- but climate change can be slowed” wrote Alan Zarembo, Times Staff Writer on Feb. 5, 2007. House Democrats have responded with a joint solution to the global warming crisis and the global war on terror with the roll-out their new weapon.

The Pelosi Fighting Vehicle (thanks Ted) was named in honor of the new House Majority Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, who is leading the way for effective change in government. Al Gore championed the effort claiming it a victory for both our military and the environment due to anticipated reductions in global warming and dependency on foreign oil. Sources quoted Mr. Gore as stating “This is the most important technological advancement since I invented the Internet.”

Mr. Zarembo cautioned that, however laudatory the Democrat initiative, even more will have to be done to avert a global cataclysm. The recently released UN report warns that there is so much CO2 in the atmosphere that even if concentrations held at current levels, the effects of global warming would continue for centuries. And to stabilize atmospheric levels, CO2 emissions would have to drop by 70-80%.

And how are we to do that, exactly?

“All truck, all trains, all airplanes, cars, motorcycles and boats in the United States — that's 7.3% of global emissions” said Gregg Marland of Oak Ridge National Lab. The Pelosi Fighting Vehicle will help, but all motorists will need to switch to bicycles to have a measurable effect. And Nancy Pelosi will have to forget about her B757-class plane for her coast-to-coast junkets.

Closing all fossil-fuel-powered electricity plants worldwide and replacing them with windmills, solar panels and nuclear power plants would make a serious dent — a 39% reduction globally, Marland said. His calculation doesn't include all the fossil fuels that would have to be burned to build the greener facilities, though. Let’s add that up: 7.3% + 39% = 46.3%. Sadly, not enough.

If the world returned to the Stone Age, CO2 concentrations would still rise. In fact, Robert Socolow of Princeton University said that even if the entire world stopped burning fossil fuels altogether, atmospheric carbon wouldn't approach pre-Industrial levels for several hundred years. Undeterred, Socolow declared: “The U.S. is going to have to decarbonize.”

J.R. Dunn noted in The American Thinker that “the apocalyptic vision of global warming serves a deep need of the environmentalist credo, the dominant pseudo-religious tendency of our age in the prosperous West. In fact, the apocalyptic is the major fulcrum of environmentalism, the axis around which everything else turns.”

G.K. Chesterton, in Orthodoxy, explained the phenomenon: “A man who ceases to believe in God does not believe in nothing; he believes in anything.” Western Civilization’s secular left needs the demon of global warming to go along with its horde of devils.

In his fine (and scary) new book America Alone, Mark Steyn talks about the “Great Satin” myth. If America were a conventional superpower, the world would worry about it as a threat to France or China or Gabon. “But because it’s so obviously not that kind of power the world has to concoct a thesis that the hyperpower is a threat not to merely this or that rinky-dink nation state but to the entire planet, if not the entire galaxy.”

Of course, American lefties fall into line with their global brethren. Recall Al Gore’s accusation: “We are altering the balance of energy between our planet and the rest of the UNIVERSE.” Well gollleee! John Kerry calls the US a “pariah.” Democrats really don’t like us, but they surely like that good ole religion, environmentalism.

National Journal has released a new “Congressional Insiders Poll” which asked members of Congress this question: Do you think it’s been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the Earth is warming because of man-made problems? The results were interesting. Only 13% of congressional Republicans say they believe that human activity is causing global warming (down 10% from a year ago), compared to 95% of congressional Democrats. You want to talk about religious faith!

So crucial is the apocalypse to environmentalism that there has been a whole string of them, one after the other. In the 1960s various forms of pollution from car exhausts, household plastics, power generation and DDT were leading to a promised chemical doomsday.

In the 1970s overpopulation was predicted to overstress the Earth's carrying capacity, use up all available resources, and lead to the collapse of civilization before the end of the 20th century.

The 1980s saw a reprise of fears of nuclear destruction in the guise of a “nuclear winter” when firestorms created by a nuclear strike would generate smoke so thick as to block out the sun, causing a collapse of the Earth’s ecology.

Ozone depletion was the next environmentalist flurry, coming along around the same time there were predictions of a looming Ice Age and serious proposals to coat the entire polar caps with soot.

The predictive ability of the environmental religion seeems to be rather poor.

But important lessons learned from previous environmental panics have been carefully applied by the enviro-wackos to the global warming campaign. A skilled cadre of scientists, activists, and publicists has devoted entire careers to nothing else. It has become an industry that, with financial elements such as “carbon offsets,” can easily support itself. (Did you hear about the Chinese hydro-fluorocarbon scam?)

As intensity gathers for action, there is no telling how much mischief the global warmistas will cause. The DDT ban resulting from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring places her in an exclusive circle shared only by Karl Marx as a writer whose work alone caused vast amounts of human misery.

The universal famine predicted by Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb led to a “triage” proposal wherein certain “failed” nations would be completely isolated from the rest of the world to bring about a “die-off” of their “excess” population, a process that would have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of millions. This was a serious policy issue discussed in the New York Times and by the elite. The most popular “failed” nation always seemed to be India, one of our rising economic powerhouses.

I have had recent unnerving discussions with several acquaintances who still believe in Ehrlich's nightmare world. Lord protect us from the new religion.

Finland the Model

In a world flattened by globalization, ideas (both good and bad) travel across international borders at the speed of the internet. Thus, when trying to reform the US education system, it behooves us to look for best practices wherever we can find them. My friend Burt from Omnilore suggested looking at Finland, the country that has been ranked first in both educational achievement and economic strength.

Burt says: “Finland completely blew apart their educational hierarchy some ten years or so ago. The national educational administration is nil. All the important decisions on how and pretty much what to teach are made by the local school administration with very heavy inputs from teachers (everyone belongs to a strong teachers union!) and somewhat by the parents.” I was intrigued to look further.

Finland's education system has received the highest marks in the latest international comparisons. PISA - the Program for International Student Assessment – is an appraisal of 15 year olds in the 40 most industrialized countries organized by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). PISA is intended to “assess the knowledge and skills needed for full participation in society, rather than mastery of a curriculum.” With the average score set at 500, the latest (2003) results were revealing and sobering for Americans. Some highlights:

MATHS
Hong Kong-China: 550
Finland: 544
South Korea: 542
Netherlands: 538
Great Britain: 506
Germany: 503
Poland: 490
United States: 483

READING
Finland: 543
South Korea: 534
Canada: 528
Australia: 525
Great Britain: 506
United States 495

SCIENCE
Finland: 548
Japan: 548
Hong Kong-China: 539
South Korea: 538
Australia: 525
Macao-China: 525
Great Britain: 519
United States: 491

It is clear that the US is not doing very well, especially considering what we spend on education. It is also clear that when we want to study best practices, Finland and South Korea are countries to examine. Furthermore, The World Economic Forum has ranked Finland the most competitive economy in the world, ahead of the United States, for four of the past five years. How are they doing so much so right?

Lest we forget, things were not always so rosy in Finland. Fifty years ago, Finland was known for little more than the wood pulp from its endless forests, a poverty-stricken land of poorly educated loggers and farmers on the edge of the Arctic Circle. Finland's schools at the end of World War II turned out some of the worst educated young people in the industrialized world but now graduate the best.

What are some of the characteristics of the Finnish system? The first difference we find is that Finnish kids enter school at age seven, when pupils are just about mature enough to begin learning in an organized setting, much later than kids in the US and Europe. This places greater responsibility on families, with a strong culture of reading in the home. Burt says that many kids in Finland learn to read from watching American TV programs with Finnish subtitles. Perhaps that could be tried in America through the use of the mute button and captioning.

In Finland, children remain in a local “comprehensive school” for nine years where the core subjects are very broad, including languages, sciences, maths, humanities, psychology, religion and philosophy. At age 16 they take a very rigorous national examination. Based on this examination children are allowed to enter either an upper secondary school intended for more academically-able students, or a vocational school, which focuses on workplace skills.

Finland’s Educational System


.......................... 16 -- -- --
.......................... Secondary School -- University
7 -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 15
Comprehensive School
........................ 16 -- -- --
........................ Vocational School -- Polytechnics


Vocational school graduates may enter the workforce directly after graduation, usually at age 18-20. Upper secondary school concludes with a nationally graded matriculation examination. Passing the examination is a prerequisite for university education. The system is designed so that approximately the lowest scoring 5% fails and also 5% get the best grade, exactly the distribution I suggested in my last post (“No Child Left Behind” 2/3/07).

There are two sectors in the tertiary education: universities and polytechnics. There are 20 universities and 29 polytechnics in Finland. The focus for universities is research and they give a more theoretical education. The polytechnics are not academia; they focus on more practice-oriented teaching and development instead of research. For example, physicians are university graduates, whereas nurses are polytechnic graduates.

In this egalitarian and meritocratic system, discipline a not a problem since “the door is open in both directions, so if they don't want to be there, no one is forcing them to stay.” Yet in practice, Finland has few dropouts in stark contrast with England which has one of the highest drop-out rates in the industrialized world and the US where dropouts are much too high among certain groups. Finland’s system is worth a further look.

Pekka Himanen, a brilliant young philosopher who advises the Finnish government, calls his country’s system the virtuous circle.

“When people can fulfill their potential they become innovators,” Dr. Himanen argues. “The innovative economy is competitive and makes it possible to finance the welfare state, which is not just a cost, but a sustainable basis for the economy, producing new innovators with social protection.”

While we look at the Finnish educational system, please do not be seduced by the socialist context. For example, Finland's social spending constitutes 25 percent of its GDP, the equivalent of Four-plus Trillion dollars in the US, much more than our entire federal budget. Finland’s unemployment stands at 8.6% compared to 4.5% in the US. Finnish pensions have risen by only 3% in real terms since 1993, ten times more slowly than wages. The public health system is overcrowded with older Finns: "You wait a long time to see a doctor, and then you don't see him for very long."

Finland’s population of 5.3 million is largely homogenous, with a 6 percent Swedish minority and no significant immigration. Finland is not America, but we could learn something from their approach to education.

No Child Left Behind

I have many friends who are or were teachers, administrators or school board members and they generally complain about No Child Left Behind. The NCLB Act of 2001 is a federal law that aims to improve the performance of schools by increasing the standards of accountability. Who could argue with the need to increase educational performance in light of the ongoing dismal performance of US students on international tests?

Yet, many educators object to the specific requirements and implementation of the program. NCLB requires States to create an accountability system of assessments, graduation rates, and other indicators. Schools have to make adequate yearly progress by raising the achievement levels of subgroups of students such as African Americans, Latinos, low-income students and special education students to a state-determined level of proficiency.

NCLB requires that by the end of the 2005-2006 school year all teachers will be “highly qualified” as defined in the law. All students must be “proficient” by the end of the 2013-2014 school year.

Schools identified as needing improvement are required to provide students with the opportunity to take advantage of public school choice. Congress has appropriated a substantial increase in Title I funding to enable school districts to implement the parental choice requirements. (from Wikipedia)

I’m still searching for an objectionable provision of the law. But, as always, the devil is in the details.

In a recent series of articles in the Wall Street Journal (Jan. 16, 17, 18, 2007), The Bell Curve author Charles Murray described how “education is becoming the preferred method for diagnosing and attacking a wide range of problems in American life,” with NCLB as a primary mechanism. Murray objects to the dirty little secret that “education's role in causing or solving any problem cannot be evaluated without considering the underlying intellectual ability of the people being educated.” Intelligence is the most significant factor yet the one that nobody mentions.

Murray begins with a truism that is nonetheless commonly denied: “Half of all children are below average, and teachers can do only so much for them.” The first part is a law of nature: Like the distribution of heights, weights, and athletic ability, intelligence is distributed from low to high in a bell-shaped curve with 50% below and 50% above the mean. But unlike heights and weights, there is very little one can do about basic intelligence. As Murray put it, “We do not live in Lake Wobegon.”

Furthermore, academic accomplishment is dependent on intelligence, as well as motivation, and intelligence sets the limits. Murray uses the example of a girl in the 99th percentile of intelligence, corresponding to an IQ of 135, but getting a C in English. She is underachieving, and someone who sets out to raise her performance might be able to get a spectacular result. Many of us have had similar experiences with our kids.

What about the boy sitting behind her getting a D-? His IQ is 90, at the 25th percentile? Better instruction and increased effort are not going to enable the boy to “follow an exposition written beyond a limited level of complexity.” If the course is adequately rigorous and the grading is honest, it may not be possible to give him more than an E for effort.

Of course, we hope the boy becomes functionally literate, as that will have an effect on the jobs he can hold. “But still he will be confined to jobs that require minimal reading skills. He is just not smart enough to do more than that.” Do we help the boy by holding up unrealistic standards? Do we really believe that the great middle class of intelligence, the 50% from 90 to 110 IQ, should take college prep courses and attend traditional colleges?

Murray points out that performance of public schools may well be reflecting the innate ability of the students. For example, in the National Assessment of Educational Progress 2005 tests, 36% of all fourth-graders were below the “basic achievement” score in reading. It sounds like a terrible record. But 36% of fourth-graders also have IQs lower than 95. If the proficient level (“basic achievement”) requires the innate ability of a 96 IQ, the results are not surprising.

So, what does proficiency in NCLB mean, and what does it require? Remarkably, it appears that no one has asked what IQ is necessary to give a child a reasonable chance to meet the NAEP's basic achievement scores?

Why has such an important factor been ignored in policy discussions? High intelligence is a gift, like good looks or athletic ability, and those with high IQ are not superior human beings, just lucky ones. By and large God’s gifts are distributed. Take the short, chubby, older gentleman with a 45 golf handicap: wouldn’t it be nice if he had an IQ slightly above the mean? Be fair. But political correctness and the law have made any discussion of the most important factor in educational achievement all but impossible.

The US Civil Rights Act, as interpreted in the 1971 United States Supreme Court decision Griggs v. Duke Power Co., prevent American employers from using cognitive ability tests as a controlling factor in selecting employees whenever (1) the use of the test would have a disparate impact on hiring by race and (2) where the test is not shown to be directly relevant to the job or class of jobs at issue. Since IQ tests fail the first requirement they are disallowed. Schools have largely adopted the same restriction, except in special cases. And academic rigor, or even classroom discipline, are sometimes rewarded with law suits brought by unhappy parents.

Murray is making the case for a more realistic, more practical approach to education policy. The Bell Curve set out to prove that American society has become increasingly meritocratic, wherein incomes and other positive social outcomes are distributed more and more according to intelligence and less and less according to social status. That is a trend to be applauded.

The Bell Curve evidence came largely from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth, a federal project that tested over 10,000 Americans in 1980, with follow-up interviews regularly thereafter. Each participant completed an intelligence test and was then evaluated for subsequent social outcomes (high-school graduation, success in college, level of income, likelihood of being in jail, likelihood of getting divorced or being on welfare, and so forth). As a rule, a person's intelligence turned out to predict such trends rather well, and when intelligence was statistically controlled, many differences among ethnic groups vanished.

Thus, when considering education policy, whether it be No Child Left Behind, the expansion of colleges or the promotion of charter schools and vocational schools, it would be well to include all pertinent factors, most especially the intellectual capabilities of the customers.

Consider the information in the following table that pertains to education policy and expectations.


Grade .....IQ......% Pop....Pop M.....Ed. Potential........Job Potential
A........ >125........5.........15........Prof. School.......Professions, Science
B........ 110-125....20........60..........College.............Sales, Engineering
C..........90-110.....50.......150........Jr. College...........Clerical, Crafts
D..........75-90......20.......60........High School...........Trades, Service
E.......... <90........5........15.........Vocational.........simple & supervised

The first column is a model grade scale reflecting increasing information processing demands (from E to A) for appropriately rigorous school courses. The student populations expected to possess the requisite levels of ability are in the second and third columns. Thus the middle group of student abilities (90–110 IQ) should be expected to achieve a middle grade of C in legitimate courses aimed at the general population. The top 5% of the population is expected to excel and earn “A” grades while the bottom 5% should not pass such courses. Note that in America there are millions of people in each category. Is it reasonable to expect the bottom 25% of the students to perform adequately in such courses? Is it fair?

The education potential of each group is listed in the fifth column. Generally speaking, an IQ of 110 or more (25% of the population) is needed to be successful in a traditional four year college. This is a threshold, but particular disciplines (eg. engineering and most of the hard natural sciences) require much higher levels of intelligence. Yet more than 40% of all persons in their late teens are trying to go to a four-year college. This is a serious mismatch of expectations and reality, not to mention marketplace demand.

All the above says nothing about the quality of the lives that should be open to everyone across the range of intellectual ability. As Murray points out, there has been “an explosive increase in the demand for craftsmen. Finding a good lawyer or physician is easy. Finding a good carpenter, painter, electrician, plumber, mason --- is difficult, and it is a seller's market. Journeymen craftsmen routinely make incomes in the top half of the income distribution while master craftsmen can make six figures. They have work even in a soft economy. Their jobs cannot be outsourced to India.”

Many agree that the K-12 education system is failing the lower half of the intelligence distribution, preferentially inhabited by low income children and minorities (Blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans). The fallacy was in ever expecting that group of kids to be able to compete or even be comfortable in a traditional college prep school setting. Far better would be to segregate the top 25% of students in classrooms and courses away from the much larger group that do not have the smarts to compete in traditional four year colleges and in high skilled occupations. For their sake, the lower 75% would be better served taking courses suited to their abilities and then moving into career programs at trade schools or community colleges.

Then when the college educated car salesman needs to paint his house, he may be able to find his former classmate who, with a crew of minimum wage workers, charges $10,000 for a weeks work. And next week the painting contractor may visit his salesman friend at the Porsche dealership.

Let us close with Murray by looking at the upper end of the IQ distribution. Do they need any help? I have several friends with kids in high school sporting averages of 4.4 or higher. Since all A’s equates to 4.0, the extra 0.4 comes from getting A’s on advanced placement courses. One friend’s daughter had a full semester of college courses finished before she graduated high school. It sounds good, but what it means is that the courses are too easy for her, even the AP courses.

Bright high school students are not being challenged, and many will find college to be a cold deluge. A recent report by the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce recommends creating state board exams that students could pass at age 16 to move either on to community college or to a university-level high school curriculum. The system as constructed is failing the majority of students across the spectrum of intelligence.

If “intellectually gifted” is defined to mean people who can stand out in almost any profession short of theoretical physics, then research about IQ and job performance indicates that an IQ of at least 120 is usually needed. That number demarcates the top 10% of the IQ distribution, or about 15 million people in today's labor force--a lot of people.

People in the top 10% of intelligence produce most of the books we read and the television programs we watch. They invent our new pharmaceuticals, computer chips, software and every other form of advanced technology.

The top 10% of the intelligence distribution has a huge influence on whether our economy is vital, our culture healthy, our institutions secure and our nation safe. “Our future depends crucially on how we educate the next generation of people gifted with unusually high intelligence.”

But we live in an age when it is unfashionable to talk about the special responsibility of being gifted, because to do so acknowledges inequality of ability, which is elitist. Our gifts bring along obligations to be worthy of them and the most important and most difficult to achieve is wisdom. The encouragement of wisdom requires a special kind of education. Most of all it requires recognition of one's own intellectual limits and fallibilities -- in a word, humility. Humility requires that the gifted learn what it feels like to hit an intellectual wall.

The encouragement of wisdom requires mastery of analytical building blocks including the details of grammar and syntax and of logical fallacies. The encouragement of wisdom requires being steeped in the study of ethics, starting with Aristotle and Confucius, and an advanced knowledge of history. It is not enough that gifted children learn to be nice. They must know what it means to be good.

The gifted should be taught to be judgmental since they need to learn how to make accurate judgments. They should not be taught to be equally respectful of Aztecs and Greeks. In short, Murray is calling for a revival of the classical definition of a liberal education, serving its classic purpose: to prepare elites to do their duty. I can think of only a few colleges (Chicago, Hillsdale, Dallas, Liberty, Biola, Thomas Aquinas) that serve such a purpose.

Murray’s goal here was not to complete an argument but to begin a discussion; not to present policy prescriptions, but to plead for greater realism in our outlook on education. In order to make the massive changes that our educational system requires, honest and brave people will need to slay the basilisk and do the right thing.

Please do not think that my emphasis on intelligence and school performance means that I am an apologist for the teaching profession. I believe that the large majority of students underachieve in school and there is plenty of blame to go around. A system based on teacher tenure and lacking pay for performance is seriously flawed. However, the students and their parents must shoulder the major portion of the burden and the blame.

The right to a free education comes with responsibilities: To behave in class, to respect your teacher and classmates, pay attention in class, to do your homework and study. These are listed in order of importance and should be non-negotiable, but in many schools the poor teacher cannot even rely on the first priority. School boards, principals, teachers, mayors, PTAs and parents must stand up and demand discipline even if it means fighting parent-initiated lawsuits, the government and the ACLU.

Finally, the schools need to start again to teach what is important and worry less about student’s self esteem. In 1989 the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics issued a report that influenced a generation of teachers to “let children explore their own solutions to problems, write and draw pictures about math, and use tools like the calculator at the same time they learn algorithms.” Consequently, only 50% of 10th graders pass the math part of state assessment tests and our students get slaughtered in international competitions. Fuzzy math, following the last fad called “new math,” has crippled students by de-emphasizing basic drills and memorization in favor of allowing children to find their own ways to solve problems. A back-to-basics movement in math and reading (phonics) is imperative.

Skeptic or Cynic

Michael Shermer, Executive Director of the Skeptics Society (SS) and editor of Skeptic magazine, was the guest speaker at our Omnilore luncheon yesterday. After browsing the SS web site and reading his statement in Edge (“Before Darwin,… everyone believed that life was designed by God. Today less than half believe that in America.. That's progress.”), I was skeptical of finding much to agree with in Dr. Shermer’s speech. I was pleasantly surprised. He is no grumpy curmudgeon or cynic.

The SS investigates claims on a wide variety of subjects including evolution, creationism, global warming, atheism, religion, etc. and the recent issue of Skeptic magazine features 9/11 conspiracy theories (Bush did it. I was happy to hear Shermer say that was total bunk.) The SS adopts the philosophical perspective of Baruch Spinosa: “I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.” What’s not to like in that?

Shermer described his upbringing as an Evangelical Christian (like “AMWAY with Bibles”) and his conversion to atheism (or agnosticism?). When asked about the afterlife his position is -- “I’m for it!” -- but he clearly does not believe in it.

Shermer is especially interested in the origin of our moral sense. Most people would say it comes from God, but Shermer insists that we must search for a natural cause. By making it a scientific question he rules out any possibility of a supernatural explanation, by definition. His latest book The Science of Good and Evil is the third in a series addressing these issues.

That God gave us morality cannot be a hypothesis for a scientific study, says Shermer. He quotes the physicist Wolfgang Pauli: “That’s not right. It’s not even wrong,” and notes that it is similar to the claims being made about string theory. On this last point I am in complete agreement with Shermer: String theory is not even wrong.

Shermer explains our moral sense from the perspective of evolutionary psychology. Having just finished the Omnilore Evo-Psycho course, I knew that his model employed the “memes” of Richard Dawkins to describe ideas as undergoing a Darwinian process of survival of the fittest. It started out 5-7 thousand years ago when small groups of hunters-gatherers used the embrace or shun as a method of reinforcing moral or discouraging immoral behavior. Thus our moral sense was born and developed, if you can believe it.

Another primary interest of the SS is Intelligent Design (ID). According to Shermer, ID proponents use the argument from incredulity: If I can’t understand it scientifically, there must be no natural explanation. That argument has been made by some who can’t explain how the Egyptians made the pyramids. Shermer says that when ID-ers are unable to find a natural explanation for the creation of DNA they claim that failure as evidence for a designer.

Or, like Sir Fred Hoyle’s panspermia theory, they claim that DNA was delivered to the Earth from an extra-terrestrial source. He (mockingly) explained that even if a Martian intelligence was the creator of DNA, then the question becomes: Who made the Martian? and so on. Here I felt that Shermer was being unfaithful to his SS principles (“not to ridicule”) particularly since he knows that Hoyle’s theory is much more sophisticated than he portrayed it.

After his quite entertaining talk, Shermer took questions from the gathered Omilorians. I asked this: Can you conceive of the possibility that there is NO natural explanation for the creation of the universe? Shermer had a bit of difficulty with this innocuous question. He noted that this is a question dealt with by cosmologists and that he was not in their pay grade. He claimed my question contained a double negative. He did not answer the question and I said so. I repeated it: Do you admit the possibility that there is no natural explanation for the creation of the universe? After a bit more hem-haw he said, Yes. I was gratified that this atheist spokesman would admit that a creator might exist. He is not quite wrong.