Harry

Welcome to Education Optimists, a new blog written by my colleague Sara Goldrick-Rab, and her husband Liam Goldrick. Sara is in the EPS department at Madison, and Liam is Policy Director at the New Teacher Center. My prediction is that you can expect smart, well-informed, and heterodox commentary there. To start you off, here is Sara’s warning about the new TEACH grant program, which offers a $4000 per year grant to students willing to commit to getting an education degree and then spend 4 years teaching in high poverty schools in a particular subject area:

Beware: If a student does not fulfill the terms of the grant it is automatically converted into an unsubsidized loan, with interest accruing starting when the loan began.

One can easily imagine many ways a student could fail to fulfill the terms of the grant.
Here are but a few examples:

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I know that last week was children’s television week at CT, but I thought I’d just note that the Richard Greene version of The Adventures of Robin Hood is finally out on DVD in the US (it’s been available for years in the UK, and a few episodes have been available on region 1 in dollar stores for a while, but not the whole first series), and is almost free at amazon. This was Lew Grade’s first real foray into making ambitious television, and was written, in large part, by blacklisted and self-exiled Hollywood writers (I met Norma Barzman several times when I lived in LA; I was somewhat in awe of her and am only glad that I didn’t know then that she wrote for Robin Hood, or I would have been an embarrassing wreck. Like most Europeans of my generation I’m intensely grateful to the blacklisters for sending all those talented and decent people to start up TV for us). Watching it today, it holds up amazingly well — the film quality is excellent, the scripts are wry and well-plotted, and the acting is excellent (for a kid’s show) with major future stars turning up in nearly every episode. It compares very favourably with Disney’s Davy Crockett, which I also watched with my girls. Robin is a socialist, of course (very much in the Bows Against the Barons mould) and never commits violence in excess of what is needed, whereas Davy Crockett is full of morally dubious bloodbaths, and scripted….lightly. Highly Recommended — whether you have kids or not, frankly.

The first parts of two rather mournful pieces on Radio 4 this week. A sad account of the last few years of Kenneth Williams (they all had it in for him, especially, apparently, Philip Larkin who, cruelly, managed to convince him out of his faith in God in his last years, an act which confirms the suspicion that his moral character was as bad as his poetry was good) presented by Rob Brydon. And a much kinder, so far, discussion of the SWP presented by Geoffrey Wall who says that, as an ex-member he can “ask the awkward questions” which, in part 1, he singularly refrains from doing. One can only presume that part 2, in which he asks how they managed to provoke the Euston Manifesto, things will get more exciting.

Oh, and if you want cheering up, and have reached a certain age (about 20 years older than my chronological age, which, culturally, is about where I belong), the Saturday Play was fabulous. David Jacobs got a promotion!

I was part of a conversation about No Child Left Behind the other day. Like most people, I have plenty of negative things to say about NCLB, but because the event took place in our School of Education where most students will never have heard a good word about NCLB, and because, frankly, I hear a lot of criticism of NCLB which is completely off the rails, I thought I’d say something positive about it. For excellent criticisms of NCLB see Richard Rothstein. For my muted two cheers (the text of the talk I gave) see below the fold. I’ll follow up in a couple of days with an explanation of why one of my students was completely unfairly impressed with my powers of foresight.

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A few Thanksgivings ago my wife heard the analytical marxist’s wife and elder daughter quietly bemoaning to one another the absence of “that iced pie that Harry always brings”. No, not mince pie, but the glorious confection presented below. I gather that it is under threat from healthy living — The Independent says that sales of Mr. Kipling’s Bakewell tarts are declining alarmingly. Well, I quite like Mr. Kipling’s Cherry Bakewells, but they are a pale imitation of the easy-to-bake home made version. And in America, no-one seems to have encountered it before, but everyone seems to love it. If you adopt it, you can call this one the crooked timber bakewell tart, if you like. The lemon icing, by the way, was my eldest daughter’s touch — she suggested it when she was 5. Precocious little bugger.

Its simple. Start with a basic flaky pastry crust in a 10 inch pie pan, and bake at 350 for 10 minutes. Smear 6-8 ounces of raspberry jam evenly over the base of the crust (the higher quality the jam the better the outcome, I promise). While the crust is baking, make the cake mixture. Pour the cake mixture over the jam, and try to cover the jam. Bake at 350 for another 20-30 minutes. Allow to cool. Then cover with an icing made from the juice of one lemon and enough powdered sugar to make a thick paste. Alternatively, skip the icing, and serve hot with Bird’s Custard, or cream.

For the cake mixture:

4oz (1 stick) butter
4oz (1/2 cup) sugar (granulated, or bakers)
3 eggs
6 oz (3/4 cup) self-raising flour
several drops of almond essence

To make the cake filling, cream butter and sugar, beat in the eggs, add almond essence (tastes vary — I like to really taste the almond essence but not everyone does), then mix in the flour.

One last thing. Lots of recipes say to use ground almonds instead of flour, or to go half and half. I’ve never found that works, producing a slightly greasy taste in the cake. If anyone can explain what I’m doing wrong….

Via Lindsey, I read this paper by Simon Blackburn (pdf) which appears, again, in Philosophers without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life edited by Louise Antony, and containing essays by 20 or so atheist philosophers. The collection is well worth reading. Its not as though it can have been difficult to find atheist philosophers who are willing to talk about their views, but netween them the contributors display a nice range of attitudes toward religion, including deep respect, envy, and outright hostility.

Blackburn’s chapter is, for the most part, an argument against versions of respect for religion that hinge on interpreting the claims of religious believers as not being the kinds of claim that can be true or false, and he makes that argument rather well. The point in dispute, though, is whether we can truly respect people who have what we regard to be false beliefs. He thinks not:

We can respect, in the minimal sense of tolerating, those who hold false beliefs. We can pass by on the other side. We need not be concerned to change them, and in a liberal society we do not seek to suppress them or silence them. But once we are convinced that a belief is false, or even just that it is irrational, we cannot respect in any thicker sense those who hold it—not on account of their holding it. We may respect them for all sorts of other qualities, but not that one. We would prefer them to change their minds.

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Apparently, in Montana two people can marry, and presumbly live out an entire marriage, without ever meeting (as long as they are not incarcerated). They can just, like, text each other or something. Facebook should get in on this.

A Nobel prize-winning scientist once described Basketball to me (in his impeccable Yorkshire accent) as “a dreary game played by physical freaks in which nothing happens till the last minute”. I enjoy regaling my students with this story, and explain that cricket is the only real sport. But, apparently, I’m wrong (about cricket, not basketball). The Boston Review contains a 27-year-old letter from John Rawls explaining why baseball is, in fact, the best of all games. (Hattip Tom Hurka — sorry, Tom, I couldn’t resist)

As I said the other day, I had an interesting assignment of responding to Wendy McElroy’s talk “Don’t vote: it’s a waste of time and its immoral”. When my colleague Lester Hunt asked me to respond he was a bit disappointed to find that I don’t think there is a strong obligation to vote – in fact, when I gave him the 3 minute summary of my views he said “But that’s perfectly sensible” and looked rather depressed. So, here goes with a very rough account of what I said in response to her arguments (beefed up a bit to compensate for the fact that you didn’t hear her arguments, though there are brief accounts in the college paper, here and here).

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I’m responding tonight to a talk by Wendy McElroy entitled Don’t Vote — Its Immoral, and it Wastes Your Time. I haven’t yet read the talk, so like everyone else I am trying to work out my response with a bit of guesswork (I’m going by what she says here, and using some license to work out my own thoughts). I’ll post my own comments later, but for the moment, I’m dismayed to see the reaction the publicity for her talk has provoked. Here is my colleague Lester Hunt’s account (he has borne the brunt of it) and here is the article from the local paper, followed by a remarkably anti-intellectual set of comments. There’s nothing like this sort of reaction to disarm a respondent — I find myself wanting to defend her in my comments. But it’s ok, I won’t.

I didn’t find entries on Sir Alec Clegg (a brief mention here), the late Gordon Hainsworth, Sir Peter Newsam, or my dad. (Clegg was only one of the heroes of my childhood home — I am glad to see that the other has a nice long entry). There is, indeed, an entry on Otto Clarke but his entry is far, far, shorter and less informative than the entry on his considerably less accomplished son. (My dad’s non-entry is infinitely shorter than the one for his considerably less accomplished son, which JQ nicely salvaged from my daughter’s attempted sabotage).

I’m not really criticising the wikipedians, but the lacunae do show up a problem, which is that there will be a tendency for people whose accomplishments, however considerable, precede wikipedia’s birth to be much less well documented than those whose accomplishments, however minor, postdate its birth. Any more names of the missing?

Adam Swift and I have just posted a short critical working paper at the Center for the Study of Social Justice website. It’s a response to papers in Ethics (July 2007) by Elizabeth Anderson and Debra Satz (both, I’m afraid, behind a paywall, though I notice that the free sample issue is the one with Adam’s and my paper on parents rights, so I can’t resist encouraging people to read that), both arguing for a principle of educational adequacy as the correct principle of educational justice. Before reading their papers I had thought of adequacy as a straightforward strategic retreat by educational progressives, a retreat that makes strategic sense in the US because many States have constitutional provisions that are plausibly interpreted as demanding adequacy for all (and litigation, not politics, is the most promising way forward). But both Satz and Anderson argue for adequacy on principled grounds; they think that educational equality is a misguided goal, and also that adequacy is a good goal. There’s a great deal of good stuff in both their papers, so I strongly recommend them (if you can get at them). Satz is especially good on what adequacy, understood the right way, demands for low-achieving children, whereas Anderson is especially good on what it demands for children bound for elites; basically, her argument is that an adequate education for them requires that they have a lot of interaction with children from other social backgrounds so that they are well prepared for their roles in the elites they will join (which are justified, in Rawlsian terms, by their tendency to benefit the less advantaged). Our paper doesn’t dispute the importance of adequacy as part of the picture, and an urgent one at that, but responds to their anti-equality arguments, showing that they depend on (wrongly) interpreting equality as the sole principle of educational justice (in fact it is one among several principles, and not necessarily the most important); but also arguing that adequacy does not offer the right guidance in some circumstances. Comments welcome.

Rowan Williams doesn’t need me to defend him, having, preumably, better placed and more powerful friends (one in partiuclar). But here goes anyway. One of my several Anglophile (and this one a rare Episcopalian) in-laws just sent me (approvingly) this piece from the Sunday Times, and added the following, rather lovely if a little unlikely, quote, recommending a different version of multiculturalism from that to which he takes the Archbishop to be committed (which, I gather from googling, comes from Mark Steyn):

In a more culturally confident age, the British in India were faced with the practice of “suttee” — the tradition of burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands. General Sir Charles Napier was impeccably multicultural:

”You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: When men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”

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My dad rather cleverly put a condition on me getting a regular delivery of Thunder (home of Adam Eterno, the man who couldn’t die, and quickly gobbled up into Lion and Thunder, and, eventually, Valiant): it was that I also get regular delivery of the distinctly old-fashioned Look and Learn. A clever move: I loved it. You still can’t see much of Thunder on the web, but Look and Learn has it’s own wonderful website now. Incorporating the magnificent Arthur Mee‘s Children’s Newspaper. Hours of fun to be had by all boys and girls (as long as they have firmly entered middle age). (First three months of Adam Eterno, here, by the way).