Grantcoulson's Blog

     With only a little encouragement, tomorrow I will post an outline of how I started a learning center (centre–if Canadian) which became, much to my astonishment, financially viable. One comment will do, but maybe I’ll go with no comments.

    This is from today’s column from Thomas Sowell. Again, he makes comments which are true about any government enterprise and the concepts are easily applied to the social sciences.

     “As far as those elites are concerned, it would not be "social justice" to allow some people to get medical care that others are denied, just because some people "happen to have money."

     But very few people just "happen to have money." Most people have earned money by producing something that other people wanted. But getting what you want by what you have earned, rather than by what elites will deign to allow you to have, is completely incompatible with the vision of an elite-controlled world, which they call "social justice" or other politically attractive phrases. The "uninsured" are another big talking point for government medical insurance. But the incomes of many of the uninsured indicate that many– if not most– of them choose to be uninsured. Poor people can get insurance through Medicaid.

     Ironically, it is politicians who have already made medical insurance so expensive that many people refuse to buy it. Insurance is designed to cover risk. But politicians have mandated that insurance cover things that are not risks and that neither the buyers nor the sellers of insurance want covered.

     In various states, medical insurance must cover the costs of fertility treatments, annual checkups and other things that have nothing to do with risks. What many people most want is to be insured against the risk of having their life’s savings wiped out by a catastrophic illness.

     But you cannot get insurance just for catastrophic illnesses when politicians keep piling on mandates that drive up the cost of the insurance. These are usually state mandates but the federal government is already promising more mandates on insurance companies– which means still higher costs and higher premiums.

     All this makes a farce of the notion of a "public option" that will simply provide competition to keep private insurance companies honest. What politicians can and will do is continue to drive up the cost of private insurance until it is no longer viable. A "public option" is simply a path toward a "single payer" system, a euphemism for a government monopoly.”

    Now back some of the concluding comments on education from, the not-yet-published book Shadow Dancing on the Grave of Hope:

     I am often asked how thousands of intellectuals can be wrong for so long, especially in the face of decades of contradictory evidence.  I point out the similarities to the economic policies of the Soviet Union where years of economic nonsense eventually led to collapse.  Unfortunately, the effects of a bankrupt education system are less evident and many students succeed in spite of it.  Some schools have also operated in ways outside the mainstream of child-centered, exploration theories of education and, consequently, have produced much better outcomes. The educational will never collapse because the money, from outside, will keep coming. The Soviet Union would still be in business if it could have just had enough outside financing to "bridge the gap". Ask any socialist.

    "A small number of prolific professionals with strong beliefs can write a great deal and quote each other’s ideas.  This creates a circular knowledge base that may appear to be research, but which can, in fact just be ‘bull’." Bonnie Grossen, American Educator, Fall, 1996.

    In 1844, in response to the "look-say" teaching methods of Horace Mann, Samuel Stillwell Greene, principal of the Phillips Grammar School in Boston, had this to say, "Education is a great concern; it has often been tampered with by vain theorists….It is to be advanced by conceptions, neither soaring above the clouds nor groveling on the earth, –but by those plain, gradual, productive, common-sense improvements, which use may encourage and experience suggest.  We are in favor of advancement, provided it be towards usefulness…" Life is indeed the same thing over and over.

        Basic Assumptions

    Behavioral education is based on many assumptions which, to no one’s surprise, are the opposite of those used in ordinary education.

1.  Behavioral education assumes there may be transfer between writing, speaking and typing on a computer keyboard, but that a skill learned in one set of circumstances and with one kind of output behavior will not necessarily be shown to the same level of competence in different circumstances.  We must teach behaviors, not knowledge and teach skill transfer and not expect it or test for it.  We must teach skill transfer.

2.  Student’s abilities are somewhere on the normal curve, their position is unchangable and results of all testing will reflect this unchanging position. Behavioral education maintains that almost all students will learn most common tasks of everyday literacy equally well provided that they are well taught.  I was once a teaching assistant with a section of about 20 students in a class with six more sections.  My students’ marks were higher, but were lowered to bring them in line with those of other sections to conform roughly with the "normal" curve.  Jaime Escalante in Los Angeles taught his students calculus so well that the statistics of the testing company "proved" they were cheating.  They were not, as the success of future years was to show.  Remember replication?  The assumptions of the normal curve also produce the notion that if the average of the group is all right, the teaching is acceptable.  No student benefits from this assumption.

Cheerio and ttfn,

Grant Coulson