I heard the interview the other day on the radio, when a surrogate for the Trump campaign said that “facts” don’t matter. Everyone has their own facts. We used to say that everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not to their own facts. In the new world of Donald Trump, everyone has their “facts.”
Now Margaret Sullivan, a media writer for the Washington Post, writes that this view of a “post-truth” world is common among Trumpsters:
On live radio Wednesday morning, Scottie Nell Hughes sounded breezy as she drove a stake into the heart of knowable reality:
“There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore, of facts,” she declared on “The Diane Rehm Show” on Wednesday.
Hughes, a frequent surrogate for President-elect Donald Trump and a paid commentator for CNN during the campaign, kept on defending that assertion at length, though not with much clarity of expression. Rehm had pressed her about Trump’s recent evidence-free assertion on Twitter that he, not Hillary Clinton, would have won the popular vote if millions of immigrants had not voted illegally.
A shouting match erupted at an election postmortem session, where aides from both campaigns met to discuss the election. The Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan and Callum Borchers talk about what happened. (The Washington Post)
(The apparent genesis of Trump’s claim was Infowars.com, a site that traffics in conspiracy theories and is run by Alex Jones, who says the 2012 massacre of 20 schoolchildren in Newtown, Conn., was a government-sponsored hoax.)
What matters now, Hughes argued, is not whether his fraud claim is true. No, what matters is who believes it.
“Mr. Trump’s tweet, amongst a certain crowd, a large — a large part of the population, are truth. When he says that millions of people illegally voted, he has some — in his — amongst him and his supporters, and people believe they have facts to back that up. Those that do not like Mr. Trump, they say that those are lies, and there’s no facts to back it up.”
Yes, it’s a fact: I heard it live, as did Rehm, Politico’s Glenn Thrush, and the Atlantic’s James Fallows, who wrote about it, citing a recording of the show.
The links are in the piece, as is an audio recording, as are many more examples. For those of you who are English teachers and grammarians, notice the sentence construction: “Mr. Trump’s tweet…are truth.” Even that is offensive.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Long article today in the LA Times re a woman who has been banished from the tRump tweet site for disagreeing with the Fuhrer.
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for all you teachers out there:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/163G79vq-mFWjIqMb9AzYGbr5Y8YMGcpbSzJRutO8tpw/edit
This is a link to links to various “crap detectors”. Kids should love it because their are tools to see if photos have been doctored, twitter followers are fake, etc. Give them the tools and let them analyze the media to which they are exposed.
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We are living in an Orwellian society. We have always been at war with Eastasia.
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This post-truth talk sounds a lot like the postmodernist ideology preached in many liberal arts colleges and universities in the 80’s onwards. Liberals may have a hand in this pernicious relativism too.
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I think you’re right. I’ve been saying this for a long time. It’s not the whole story, but I would argue that it played a role in creating our post-truth politics. The consequences have been disastrous!
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debneill: Agreed. It’s a philosophical issue that goes back to Kant et al, and beyond. We had to work it out in the academy, but were working WITH the problems we had assumed wrongly about it. So we spent decades in what amounts to a philosophical maze.
Relativism, however, inadvertently (in most cases, I think) eked into our commonsense thinking–and so here we are. We assume (covertly) truth all of the time, but then someone raises the issue OVERTLY (like Hughes), and we run like chickens.
The vacuum of truth, however, is the playing field of the opportunistic bully-fascist. Fortunately for us, it’s not the first time in history that this has occurred.
But it’s pretty fundamental–truth/falsity is already functional in everything we do:, including for the person who claims so blithely: it isn’t so. But if there were no truth, I could not say with any verity that you or I or they were even born. Working that out in a philosophical argument, however, has been from the point of view that our own experience of self-correction and working out concrete truth/falsity, good/bad, correct or not (it’s how we live our lives every day), doesn’t count–thanks to several other philosophical screw-ups. See my other post. I didn’t want to go there, for obvious reasons, but I think perhaps it’s time–to tell the truth about truth, and in experiential terms?
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Agree. Also has something to do with the age of advertising & marketing… which I always felt everything to do w/ phrases popping into policy like “not just impropriety but the appearance of impropriety”. I’ve always felt phrases like this, while seeming to declare a higher standard, are actually weasel-words which open the door to stretching facts/ truth to include impressions, appearances, emotions.
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I see this tendency going hand in hand with denial of scientific conclusions, for instance — global warming, evolution, evidence that Earth is 4.6 billion years old.
Science is a tool for establishing an agreed upon reality. Without it, then common grounds for discussion, even for society, becomes untenable.
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I’m so glad science is still fullnof questions! That means there are so many more things to learn!
Even maybe some real answers to the origins.
If you read Dawkins and Gould, for example, you may have noticed they asked more questioned that what they answered.
Science keeps asking the question, “but what if…?” For good reasons!
Re global warming: realize that in the mid 70’s scientist were predicting a new ice age around the corner…
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Rudy,
The earth was cooling in the 1970’s like the scientific community reported, and would naturally be continuing it’s natural cooling cycle if it weren’t for human pollution altering the chemical balance of the atmosphere.
Before the Clean Air Act of 1970, the particulates put out by burning coal had a cooling effect on the atmosphere that overpowered the warming effect of the carbon dioxide that it was also releasing. When the Clean Air Act removed over 90% of the cooling particulates from the pollution, it allowed warming carbon dioxide to shoot world temperatures up, like it has done since the 1980’s.
So the scientists didn’t get it wrong. They were just observing the natural cooling trend before the 70’s, and how the trend has reversed due to human pollution.
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Now teaching our students to know the difference of fake and real news just took a bad turn.
“When the president does it, that means that it’s not illegal.”
And what ever the president says or does is okay because there are no facts to support it or debunk it. It must be okay since everyone believes it because it was said by ‘name your person’.
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Cheryl: Print out my other post–the argument is there that high school students can understand, and in terms of their own experience. The other thing is, “no one is beyond the law” not even the president. This is why we have a tri-part government. The executive branch executes; but does not make the laws. The Congress does; and the courts interpret them into and by their history. It’s a dialogue among all of us. “The president IS the law” is NOT, even ANTI-democratic. In fact, it’s the foundation of fascism. The fascist does whatever they want regardless. What counts for the fascist is fear, keeping everyone off-balance, and the constant exercise of brute power–that’s why blood-letting, torture, killing, terrorism is so important to their “success.”
If I am “preaching to the choir,” please forgive. But if you are teaching your students about such things, you are doing human history the greatest service of all.
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Catherine,
Never fear to preach to the choir.
A great social scientist, Robert Merton, advised me about 40 years ago that people don’t really hear you until you have written or said the same thing about 1,000 times. That’s a challenge.
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Diane: LOL on that one. But again–so true (ahem).
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You’ve just explained Paul Krugman : ).
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Suddenly, our great country is becoming a horrifying blend of “Brave New World” and “1984.” Together, we must refuse to accept that 2 + 2 = 5, no matter how many times they send us to Room 101 and bring out the rats.
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This darkness lurks under the surface of all societies. Well before this election, I saw Nazi sensibilities in some of my colleagues and students. Even the Left has its anti-truth, totalitarian tendencies. The upshot is that the struggle for truth is eternal; there will never be a final victory.
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Well said. And you don’t have to say “even” the left. All political suasions include ideologues so impatient to see their visions realized that they entertain breaking some democratic principles to get there.
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Yet one more thing to blame intrump – yet again wrong. Truth and fact have left political life a long time ago.
FACTOIDS – a claim often enough repeated that us is accepted as truth. If you want to know more about its use, read Dan brown’s the Da Vinci Code.
Take an honest look at the political ads over the past 20 years, and you can see it happening. It does it matter what level, local, state and national: so many lies have been accepted as truth – because too few people do their own fact checking and mindlessly repeats what they heard.
This is a true bi-partisan happening, btw.
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Rudy,
If you look at the fact-checking sites, you will see that Trump spouted far more lies than the Clinton campaign.
According to Politifact, during the campaign, only 30% of his claims were rated true, mostly true or “half-true.” The majority of his statements were rated mostly false, false, or pants on fire. 70% of what he said was untrue.
http://www.politifact.com/personalities/donald-trump/
By contrast, 75% of Hillary Clinton’s statements were rated true, mostly true, or half-true.
26% were rated mostly false, false, or pants on fire.
Donald Trump is a world-class liar.
Give credit where credit is due.
Don’t say “everyone does it.”
Trump does it best. Lying to people.
Only
And the article is not about what happened in the past: it is about a world-view that facts don’t matter.
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They are all liars wake up. Here is a short list of lies : 1) If you like your insurance you can keep it. (Obama) 2) I firmly believe marriage should only be between a man and a woman (Obama). I am in full support of the TPP. (Hillary) only to later say she wasn’t in favor of it because of all the backlash she received. I did not have sexual relations with that woman (Billy Boy). I did not purposely delete over 30,000 emails (Hillary). The list goes on and on. You only acknowledge the lies of candidates who have an R in front of their names. Wake up and take off those Democrat blinders. Both parties answer to the same people. They are all liars thieves who answer only to their masters. The fix is in! You have been fooled into believing they represent different things when in the end they represent the same exact thing which is more for them and less for us.
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There is a difference between changing your mind on a policy you previously supported and LYING.
Here is an example:
“President Obama was born in Kenya and I have proof.” – LIE
“Ted Cruz’ dad conspired to kill JFK” – LIE
“Hillary said I did not purposely delete 30,000 e-mails” – mistake by The Real One and not an intentional statement designed to deceive us because of course, Hillary never actually said that.
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There is a difference between changing your mind and deciding not to keep promises.
The best definition of hypocrite? One who pretended to be what he/she never intended to be.
Changing your mind is an honest process. Making promises to sway people to vote for you is self serving.
Obama like all politicians did the latter.
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Rudy,
I believe in changing your mind. I was all in favor of testing, charters, choice, competition, and over time, I concluded I was wrong. Those things don’t make better teachers, and they actually undermine education by narrowing the curriculum, prioritizing scores on multiple choice tests over thoughtfulness. If you have not done so, I hope you will read my book “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education,” in which I publicly declared I was wrong.
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Rudy, reads truth? Loved that book and “Reign of Error” BTW!
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Rudy reads yes. I know that surprises you. I read BOTH sides of arguments, a concept which obviously you are not familiar with.
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Yes, Obama . What a bad president….so unlike the man who changes his mind in the same sentence, who sits up at night and tweets, instead of preparing for this complicated job he just got but never wanted…he just wanted to win.
Hey, Rudy, THE ELECTION IS OVER!
You won. You got who you wanted…but so did we — A man who defines liar… so lets end the “bad Obama” and “bad hillary- shillery-killery stuff. I men, I know she gave a speech to Goldman Sachs, but he put the 3 top executive banksters from GS into top positions, including Sec’t of Treasury. Boy, I am so relieved that she is not the next president.
and FYI This new guy is scaring the crap of our NATO allies, and just today, made our relations with China more dangerous: Donald Trump Thrusts Taiwan Back on the Table, Rattling a Region http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/03/us/politics/donald-trump-taiwan-china.html?emc=edit_th_20161204&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=50637717
“A single protocol-shattering phone call with Taiwan’s president raises fears of igniting tensions in Asia and emboldening China”….. Yay Trump…go Trump! But maybe, tomorrow he will change his mind… senility does that!
… and Rudy, do you get a pension?
Because if you do here is some news for you from your GOP legislators who want to sneak a pension cutting bill, not an appropriations bill.
Got this today!
We’ve heard from reliable sources that high-paid lobbyists, working in concert with retiring Representative John Kline, are redoubling their efforts to get the “composite bill” inserted into the end-year Appropriations bill – just as they did with the Multiemployer Pension Reform Act at the end of the 2014 congressional session. In fact, we’ve heard that this bill could pass as early as Wednesday, December 7th.
Write and call your members of Congress now to stop this betrayal and urge them to stop this draft proposal that would destabilize the multiemployer pension system. Tell them that attaching Representative Kline’s composite proposal to an end-year vehicle would be a betrayal of workers and retirees – and that you will not forget this when it’s time for the next election.
Like MPRA, this draft composite legislation was developed by Representative John Kline (R-MN), the retiring chair of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. Where MPRA gave license to trustees to slash the benefits of retirees, this ill-conceived proposal would allow the trustees of healthy multiemployer pension plans to switch to new inferior plans that don’t provide guaranteed benefits to workers or retirees. Even worse, the bill would allow plan trustees to divert money from the old plans to the new plans – increasing the chances that well-funded plans could fall into underfunded status, threatening the promised benefits of both workers and retirees.
Don’t let Congress “pull another MPRA” by sneaking another piece of legislation into a must-pass omnibus appropriations bill. Urge your members of Congress to stop efforts to attach the Kline composite bill to any end-year legislation.
Stand with workers and retirees by telling your members of Congress to oppose the Kline composite proposal, which could undermine the retirement security of millions of workers and retirees who count on their pensions.
Around this time two years ago, Congress attached the Multiemployer Pension Reform Act to must-pass omnibus legislation – without congressional hearings or input from the workers and retirees who would be affected by the law. MPRA allowed certain severely underfunded pension plans to cut – in some cases by as much as 70 percent – earned pensions for workers and retirees, placing their retirement security in jeopardy.
We can’t let this happen again. Tell your members of Congress to protect workers and retirees byrejecting any proposal that would further undermine the nation’s multiemployer pension system.
Thank you,
Karen Friedman
Executive Vice President and Policy Director, Pension Rights Center
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You may need to check your eyes. I have never, in any way, shape or form stated that I wanted trump.
So the rest of your tirade is ignored.
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Would not Rudy agree that lies are lies, and they come from both the DNC and the GOP?
Rudy, what think you?
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Lies are lies and the quantity or quality makes no difference. When we have to make up stuff about the opponent, the argument is lost. Every president, no matter how bad he is perceived, has done good things.
Tell me why I should vote for YOU, what YOU are planning to do. Few political adds have told us that kind of information. And it’s getting worse every cycle.
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Euphemisms are used often to mask actions that the public would oppose if they were accurately named.
For example, let parents “choose” sounds way better than “we want to eliminate your public school.”
I am a “reformer” sounds better than “I plan to close your school, fire the staff, and hire inexperienced teachers.”
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IF that is the intent, I agree. Call it what it is. And tell me WHY you think the changes are considered necessary.
Since I started working in my current job, we closed six buildings. From an objective point of view, they were too expensive to operate – too few students.
Few could honestly argue those facts. The reasons to keep the schools open? Totally emotional.
Good memories
I went there
My sibling went there
My grandparents went there
Understandable feelings. Memories are made, lifelong friendships were formed.
But from a purely financial point of view? Too costly by far. Our tax base is not wealthy, so a tax increase was not feasible.
No one was out to destroy neighborhood schools even though some argued that.
The academic performance was not lower/higher than the rest of the district. It was caused purely by demographics.
So when people look at other forms of education, my first question is about improvement. Will your new model be an improvement over what is currently happening? If so, if it does improve learning for my kids, why should I NOT agree?
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Rudy,
You really don’t know how many good schools were closed–schools that enrolled desperately needy kids–to make room for charter schools, which then did not enroll the same kids.
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I know how many schools were closed and why in the district where I work.
On a national basis? Of course not. But even on a national basis I venture that many were closed because of the same reasons I outlined.
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No, Rudy, you are wrong. NCLB and Race to the Top both required districts to close schools with low scores and call it a “turnaround.” Some districts found ways not to do it, but the policy was based on test scores, not shrinking populations.
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Rudy,
You keep complaining about lack of “balance” on this blog, and you are right.
This is not The NY Times. It is not CBS or NBC. It is my personal blog. My posts reflect my views, my knowledge, my experience, my history. The comments are those of readers.
I support public education. I oppose privatization. I support the teaching profession. I support the right of working people to bargain collectively. I believe that working people should earn and collect pensions.
You have the right to disagree. You don’t have the right to expect me to give equal time to views I don’t share. There are many other blogs that represent views different from mine.
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Diane
Thank for keeping me well informed over the years. But I am having difficulty posting comments. Whenever I try to add more information to the discussion about the importance of Putin’s political advisor to the Russian propaganda machine, I am told that I have already posted that comment, when it never posted. What am I doing wrong?
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DR Phil,
Beats me. Keep trying. I am not delaying your comments.
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Thanks. I’ll rewrite and try again. Does your site only allow three post at a time?
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Also, is there a limit to how long the comments can be or the number of links included, it doesn’t seem to like more than a few paragraphs or a couple of links at a time. Thanks.
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Rudy: Oppositional again, on principle. Or in philosophical terms, it would be good if you would distinguish between (a) sophistic [political-only] and (b) authentic philosophical and commonsense communications? Or, on the world scene, between a lying politician and a truly wise statesperson? It seems it’s a one-horse world you live in.
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Shorter Rudy:
Everyone breaks the law. I see so many people jaywalking – there are no cars in sight and they don’t wait for the light to change. Why, even my nice old lady neighbor did that.
Therefore the fact that I am murdering my enemies should be no problem. We are all just law breakers and there is no longer any morality. No relativity. I am no worse by murdering than my neighbor is for jaywalking!
This is the new Republican philosophy!
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You must read different republican literature than I read.
Or are you one of those who can predict the future?
A union meeting was called this morning. A lawyer representing the different unions had a lot to say. When asked when all those things would happen, he told the group that, well, nothing is sure yet, we do not know anything for sure yet… but, just in case it might happen, you need to fold on some of your current demands, even though we are about to win those, you should give up, just in case you MAY HAVE TO ASK FOR OTHER THINGS in the future.
And I wonder how much the unions pay this joker.
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Please watch that old lady reference.
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Sabrina Siddiqui a writer at the Guardian, was on Chris Hayes last night. She said something that I had been feeling for quite some time. Trump surrogates were put on air and given voice no matter how absurd their claims. no matter how they like Trump interjected while others were talking . The media (CNN in Particular) allowed surrogates with no particular expertise to ramble on. Putting them on par with the opponent on the other side no matter how absurd the claim. .The public losing the distinctions between truth and fiction in the process.
A kill switch on the mic would have been helpful and the format should have been more like the Gong show. When a surrogate was totally out of line they should have been removed from the show permanently. What was done was usually weak rebuttals by the shows hosts who most times had poor command of the subject matter.
When you have a candidate or President who threatens the first amendment by singling out reporters and news organizations. They should agree to blackout him and his supporters. Except when necessary . Many Presidents had misgivings about their treatment by the press. What Trump has done goes far beyond any accepted norms .
Yesterday we had a NC Congresswoman tripping over-herself after equating the KKK to Trump Protestors. These people are depraved deplorable s
Of course most of the Press (TV Journalism in particular. ) is owned by Corporations who unlike those on this blog have little to lose and much to gain by Trump. So the clown show will continue.
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Joel,
My neighbors believe that jets’ contrails are “chem trails” sprayed by the government to poison the citizenry. They think Hillary is an ISIS agent. How can they believe such ludicrous ideas? I think it’s because they didn’t learn much in school, and they don’t read reliable sources now. It seems to me that a truly robust and effective exposure to the facts of science, history and civics, as well as “tourism” through other social classes, races and cultures via good literature, could inoculate people from crazy beliefs. I also think literature can have a civilizing effect and take the brutal edge off the sentiments of these Trump supporters. But it seems to me that schools don’t make a truly dedicated effort to do what I just described. You hear them talking about empty skill sets, as if you can create a mind that is immune to such folly simply by exercising it on random tasks and not filling it with anything in particular. What do you think?
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You are right, ponderosa, but virtually everything you attribute to that widespread ignorance is largely attributable to 1) the fiscal austerity public schools withstood from the 1970’s to the ’90’s, which was followed (2) by curriculum shrinkage/degradation caused by the test mania of the so-called reform era.
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I agree that NCLB fosters a myopic focus on skills, but, as E.D. Hirsch points out in his new book, “Why Knowledge Matters”, progressive ed ideology had thoroughly permeated American schools by the 60’s, ed schools had become “theological institutes of progressive education” (true of my ed school), and the knowledge-base of public school graduates had already dropped around 1970 and never recovered –as evidenced by tests of verbal ability, which correlates with general knowledge. So NCLB’s privileging of skills-over-content found fertile ground in the progressive-conditioned minds of teachers and principals. I think it behooves us as teachers to reexamine the fundamental ideas that we all take for granted. Most of us are progressivists without even knowing it. We don’t know there’s an alternative because we were shielded from it in ed school.
Facts have a liberal bias. It seems to me that it’s dumb of liberals to disparage the teaching of facts, but that’s what our progressive ed brainwashing leads us to do. We should be facts’ champions!
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Ponderosa,
Facts don’t have a bias.
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Ponderosa: Yes–it’s one of the “spaghetti against-the-wall” propaganda talking points of the Right: Higher education is full of liberal bias because liberals believe in exploring facts, and in scientific method, and (heaven forbid) asking their students (all of them) to use their critical consciousness to understand, and even critique them in dialogue with others. (I have to say: it’s risky. “It’s an experiment; and we have a democracy, gentlemen, if we can keep it.”)
But the corruption of either party is secure when everything is seen through a (static and limited) political lens, or of this or that ideology, where you can ask and think about questions, but not THOSE questions, and worse: assuming that the other guy’s arguments are ideological in the same way that your own is. With that assumption, it becomes a power-struggle where the one with the most brute-force wins. Why don’t they just start the cutting it off–here, at the neck?
I have no problem with legitimate conservatism or liberalism. But the academy is (still) where both can be explored openly? (If it doesn’t support such questioning and discussions,then it is also corrupt.) And THAT questioning and discussion is a far piece from being involved in liberal bias. They are after higher education, too, you know. I guess that sounds like conspiracy theory; but it may be the case that there is one going on.
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I think there was a conscious effort to steer schools away from the role of creating inquisitive citizens in a Democracy as Diane has said , while giving them a skill set that enabled them to learn what was necessary for employment. To what I have called in letters to the editor worker drones and obedient ones at that.
But frankly my generation is one of the most fortunate in history having had the benefit of the historical circumstances they grew up in after the war. . Many of us boomers have had pensions healthcare and good wages. Their sense of entitlement,while they would deny these benefits to others borders on sociopathy , Forget their objections to Sanders and a progressive agenda .
They will allow Social Security and Medicare to be gutted as long as their benefits are preserved.
But here is the thing . If education is failing than it failed long ago because Clinton ,won the under 45 vote (perhaps other demographics involved ) while Trump the over 45 vote
So if schools failed this happened long ago . .
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Joel,
I guess what I’m asking is, do you agree with the principle that general knowledge is necessary to think straight about the big issues? I think it is. I think my neighbors’ heads are filled with a haze. They have the most indistinct notions of where Syria is, what Islam is, how big the world is, what the proportion of belching smokestacks to land area of Earth is, what kinds of people the coastal elites really are, what the real reasons for the flight of good jobs are…so much is a haze. So they cannot assess the plausibility of ludicrous propositions the way you and I can. If I’m right, then the remedy is not more skills training, it’s more knowledge.
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Diane,
When I say “facts have a liberal bias” I mean that that the facts more often than not –not always –buttress liberal positions (e.g. that climate change is real, or that homosexuality is not perverse choice spurred on by Satan).
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ponderosa
Education can not hurt .
” I also think literature can have a civilizing effect and take the brutal edge off the sentiments of these Trump supporters” It is hard to argue with that statement. As it is a fundamental part of education as a function of promoting Democracy and developing empathy for other human beings .
But i think there are other dynamics here . Being a coastal elite (not really) I do not run into as many with tin foil over their heads .Most are racists to one degree or another , some are even simply republicans whose economic interests will best be served by Ryan and team
But is that the dynamic we have to alter or is it those voters who voted for Obama twice and then Trump that we have to reach .Is it the young voters who stayed home. The Obama voters who stayed home.
“what the real reasons for the flight of good jobs are”
You had to bring that up because that is one of those areas where everybody brings there own set of facts to the debate and it is up to each of us to decide which sets of facts form a more coherent theory .It is also true that we bring our own biases to the debate as to how the results affect us.
The same goes for the Immigration debate, from an economic stand point. If your job is being affected by the wage wedge of Immigration be it low end or higher end H1bs . You carry a different set of bias.
As Dean Baker likes to say free market economics would dictate that the trade in high value professional services like Physicians, layers, and Editorial writers, should be just as important as the free trade of jobs of Blue collar workers or Programmers .
Trump may be lying through his teeth on trade and jobs. But it is no coincidence his message is similar to Sanders.
By the way good luck with your neighbors . I have stopped talking to the Trump supporters I know ,
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Ponderosa, re your 4:25 comment. I assume your hazy neighbors are adults, who left K-12+ long ago. They could have had their heads stuffed full of general knowledge/ facts & forgotten them long ago. Heck, if they’re 65, the map of large parts of the world have changed borders & names & govtl régimes since they left school. Education starts w/ learning facts/ knowledge & continually builds on that base, but it’s just a base. Education is equally about learning to analyze, reason, practice skills, & stay curious & open to new information.
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Teachers are also being turned into robots who follow scripted curricula. Any deviance from the program is discouraged by using techniques of harassment.
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I caught Sabrina, too, Joel. Another reason why I like Chris Hayes.
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EXACTLY! This is why I blame the media for Trump winning. The media treated his candidacy as a joke for so long. NOW they come out and say that his tweets are erroneous. They should have been doing that 18 months ago. They just let his surrogates go on and on and ON lying, and hardly EVER called them on the lies. A spectacular failure of journalism, all in the name of ratings and money.
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Giving’em too much credit. They simply don’t know what they’re doing and don’t understand the reasons for their successes and failures. They don’t even fully understand how they’ve been wildly misinterpreted by so many and all the damage they’ve caused.
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From Diane’s post: “Now Margaret Sullivan, a media writer for the Washington Post, writes that this view of a ‘post-truth’ world is common among Trumpsters: On live radio Wednesday morning, Scottie Nell Hughes sounded breezy as she drove a stake into the heart of knowable reality: ‘There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore, of facts,’ she declared on ‘The Diane Rehm Show’ on Wednesday. . . . ‘What matters now, Hughes argued, is not whether his fraud claim is true. No, what matters is who believes it.'”
I heard this and other quotes also. And yes, it is a stab at reality, but quite shallow as it really (ahem) suffers from it’s own internal incoherence. After all, to fail to know the difference between truth and reality and to think that whatever you want to think or believe defines reality regardless is a classic definition of insanity.
Here’s the truth issue in brief: First, without truth/facts/reality, there are no lies either. And if we know anything, we know THAT to be untrue. Second, Hughes’ is implicitly making a truth claim: “. . . no such thing as facts/reality.” To which we can ask: “Is that so?” or Really? (ahem again). In philosophy, this truth claim: that there is no such thing as facts/truth/reality, or that we cannot know it on principle, is referred to as a “performative contradiction.” It’s the really-shallow underpinning of the philosophical position of relativism. And we cannot claim relativism unless we also claim that relativism is true. So that the “performance” is to make a statement at all AS FACTUAL; and the contradiction is the implication in your own performance: that what you are saying is true; factual, and so actually refers to some reality or other. In other words, such a claim as “no truth/facts/reality” is basically incoherent, even insane, just on the prima facie of it.
I also heard someone say”everything is interpreted (and so not true). Well, everything IS interpreted. However, that fact (ahem) doesn’t mean we cannot find out and know if our interpretation is correct or not. THAT’s the question of verity; and it’s why we need to collaborate with one another OUTSIDE OF ECHO CHAMBERS so that we all can (1) hear everyone’s interpretation and (2) use our critical skills to get to those things we then can know, in the vast majority of our judgments, are facts, true, and real.
So that the “stab at reality” is also at the basic commonsense of ANY culture insofar as it IS a culture, at the hallmarks of reflection, reasonableness, collaboration, and SCIENCE’s empirical method itself), and at the willingness of those involved to abdicate their intelligence to the pied pipers among us.
Further it’s not far to go from intellectual relativism (no truth/facts/reality) to moral/ethical relativism (there is no true-real GOOD/bad that we say and do). What’s left after the force of the truth in a discussion is just brute power; and Trump and his sycophants (and handlers) are gathering it very fast as we speak.
Here’s the thing: anyone who has experienced making a mistake and then correcting it, or experiencing insights and growth about what is right and wrong, good and bad, or disciplined their child in terms of knowing what IS good or bad, true or not, has the factual evidence that, in many cases, what we BELIEVE is NOT ALWAYS TRUE AND GOOD. The assumption in such experiences of self correction (life-long for most of us) is the same implicit truth assumption that underpins the performative contradiction above: that there is no such thing as truth.
The above is just philosophy 101. But It doesn’t take a philosopher to know this: Critical thinking, remembering that we have made mistakes and self-corrected; checking one’s beliefs and others’ statements against the facts, regardless of what we might want in the heat of things, and going through such changes is what grownups do. And philosophically, Trump, Hughes, Kelly Ann, and “Trumsters” who take this stuff as given are babies and adolescents in their thinking. As adults spouting such idiocy (insanity) this group is dangerous. Each harbors in themselves the hallmarks of fascism (as history well-tells us). They might be walking around with drivers’ licenses, but they are far, far from grown up.
Just ask Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956) or Hannah Arendt (The Origins of Totalitarianism). They can tell you how important truth is to any political climate. Truth is what is supposed to occur in the air when “freedom of speech, press, assemble” are assumed. A friend of mine stopped writing freely on the internet; and when you doubt that you should express your thoughts because of the potential knock on the door, you know the political climate has taken a very bad turn. It’s political framework is fascism and its present name is: Trump.
THEY are the ones who lie and who want to confuse those who assume truth but don’t think about its implications. It’s the ultimate con job–just believe what I say, and not them, because there is no truth anyway. And so, sans truth, Trump et all can much easier get everyone’s belief (or so they think): ‘What matters now, Hughes argued, is not whether his fraud claim is true. No, what matters is who believes it.'”
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Great comment! I especially like the paragraph about brute power. When truth, science, and rational inquiry are denigrated a “might makes right” philosophy becomes more likely to attract followers. Raw power is certainly part of the appeal of Trump, and he will amass as much power as we allow him to.
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When dealing with a Cobra you need a mongoose .Listening to Schumer reading his remarks is discouraging. “Raw power is certainly part of the appeal of Trump”.
I will again refer back to Lofgren
“How do they manage to do this? Because Democrats ceded the field. Above all, they do not understand language. Their initiatives are posed in impenetrable policy-speak: the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The what? – can anyone even remember it? No wonder the pejorative “Obamacare” won out. Contrast that with the Republicans’ Patriot Act. You’re a patriot, aren’t you? Does anyone at the GED level have a clue what a Stimulus Bill is supposed to be? Why didn’t the White House call it the Jobs Bill and keep pounding on that theme?
You know that Social Security and Medicare are in jeopardy when even Democrats refer to them as entitlements. “Entitlement” has a negative sound in colloquial English: somebody who is “entitled” selfishly claims something he doesn’t really deserve. Why not call them “earned benefits,” which is what they are because we all contribute payroll taxes to fund them? That would never occur to the Democrats. Republicans don’t make that mistake; they are relentlessly on message: it is never the “estate tax,” it is the “death tax.” Heaven forbid that the Walton family should give up one penny of its $86-billion fortune. ”
God replace Schumer with Warren as the first step in taking back the country.
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Joel,
You make an excellent point about the messaging. There is no reason for Democrats to cede that, especially as it takes no real money, but just acts of will among all Democrats.
They can start by never again mentioning social security and medicare “reform”. Like school “reform” (another place where Dems have bought into the bad language) it needs to be junked now by every Democrat forever.
It is medicare PRIVATIZATION. Public school PRIVATIZATION. Social Security PRIVATIZATION. or maybe there is a better word. But the Dems — led by Bernie and Warren I hope — should start using those words so frequently that people are sick of hearing them. And then they should use them another ten million times.
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NYC public school parent
Yes we do agree
But you may be a bit to mild.
Your are not privatizing social security and Medicare <
You are throwing Granny out on the street and telling her to Drop Dead
You are not reforming schools, you are killing them.
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too mild
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Joel, this is such an insightful post. It is the message of what I’m presently reading, Solmaz Sharif’s debut poetry collection “Look”, where personal war-time experience is interspersed with the language of the US Dept of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms. The very title “Look” is a term of art: “In mine warfare, a period during which a mine circuit is receptive of an influence”. Opening words of title poem, “It matters what you call a thing”.
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Whan I com here and read such intelligent, cogent conversations, where OBSERVABLE REALITY rules, I can forget for a moment the insanity that is unfolding before my eyes.
Thank you.
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The Democrats need whoever came up with the idea to call support for legalized abortion “Pro-Choice”. Boy did that drive the right wing nuts and they kept trying to say pro-abortion, but the pro-choice label stuck and is still sticking.
The right wing decided it was better to join than fight, and were no longer anti-abortion but “pro-life”. But even that wasn’t enough to stop the power that came with the two little words: Pro-CHOICE.
I guess the anti-public school folks took that lesson to heart and adopted the “choice” word. The democrats need to re-learn it themselves. Stop being defined by the Republicans and start explaining what Democratic policy is really about in a few well-chosen words.
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Pro choice is a Goebels trick. He was the champion of euphemism. Killing all the Jews sounded much nastier than “final solution.” Nice. Clean. No emotion. Business like.
Abortion is such an ugly word. So let’s call it pro choice. Nice. Clean no emotion. Business like.
Desensitizing is what is done through the use of euphemisms.
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Rudy,
But pro-choice IS pro-choice. There are plenty of people who would never have an abortion themselves who are pro-choice. Pro-abortion would mean that you want to PROMOTE abortions. Promoting abortions is something that Hitler might do. Americans who believe in having abortion rights are pro-choice. Notice we aren’t advertising “hey, isn’t it great if only more women could have abortions?” No one is saying “free gift with every abortion you buy”. Nope. We are saying if you choose to make the personal decision to have an abortion, you don’t have to go to a back alley to have one. CHOICE.
In fact, the same people who are pro-choice are pro-giving aid to women who have babies and aren’t working! They are the ones who believe that if you HAVE a baby and can’t work, you will get financial aid.
That’s why we are not hypocrites. CHOICE. We are giving women the choice to have the baby and have some support, or not. It’s ironic that you want to force women to have children and take away the things that allow that child to thrive.
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Pro abortion and promoting abortions is exactly what is happening. PP is doing exactly that. You might want to start paying attention to the speeches of their director.
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Rudy,
You just posted — in complete seriousness — that Planned Parenthood “promotes” abortions.
I cannot think of any reason for you to be posting on this blog except to troll. You don’t live in the reality community. You belong with the rest of the Trump supporters like the one who knew that he had to shoot up a DC restaurant to get to the bottom of the Hilary Clinton child-kidnapping gang.
There is no point in arguing with someone who insists that facts are whatever your great leader tells you. Why are you even here?
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NYC Parent,
We are moving on beyond debating the election. No more comments about Hillary, Bernie, and perfidious Democrats. Lots more to discuss.
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I belief in good, clear educational systems. A number of Western European countries have proven that faith based schools and “public” schools can and do coexist in positive ways. Fed from the same tax dollars. Held to the same standards. Held to the same accountability.
No one is afraid that their kids will catch some deadly disease.
These countries, btw, are even more secular than the US.
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Rudy,
I recently conferred with a Dutch scholar who told me that only qualified educators were permitted to open and run schools. Vouchers in the US can go to anyone, including small church groups that have no certified teachers or businessmen who think they can make money. Are you ok with that? Is that your idea of good education? Louisiana has church schools where children are taught that humans co-existed with dinosaurs.
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What of the following paragraph was unclear??
“I belief in good, clear educational systems. A number of Western European countries have proven that faith based schools and “public” schools can and do coexist in positive ways. Fed from the same tax dollars. Held to the same standards. Held to the same accountability.”
IF the same standards and accountibility is present, what does it matter?
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Rudy, then you oppose vouchers because many states do not apply the same standards and accountability to voucher schools. DeVos opposed accountability for charters in Michigan and blocked a bill to hold them accountable. So you oppose them too. We agree.
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I am against vouchers for schools that do not meet the applicable standards. IF and WHEN non-public schools meet the same standards for quality and accountability I would have no problems with vouchers.
At the same time, I would like to see the standards for teacher training programs updated and improved. Some states require certifications for the different subject areas (Iowa, for example). If I graduated from a reputable school (Say, Harding University) in a different state, I can get a probationary license in Iowa, but I am required to take the necessary courses to receive the necessary certifications. IF the standards were nation wide, two things would happen. 1) ALL teachers would have the same stringent education, and 2) teachers can start right away.in their home state (should they so desire).
One of the things countries have in common where educational outcomes are better IS that national standard for teachers.
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Btw – trump is not “my great leader.” He is not mine he is not great, and he is no leader.
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I love this site where teachers and parents, real folks interested in what is afoot, come to discuss and understand what is afoot in the world, s Diane presents the most crucial issues.
Recently, coming to the same conclusion that you have come to, I assumed that Rudy was a trump supporter, because the things he says all too often, (but not always) have no evidence in facts, and are pure opinion; often what I read from him, matches the BIG CON of the GOP and the dreadful rhetoric of that charlatan who is now our ‘leader.’
Rudy, suggested I fact check, because he did not vote for Trump. Maybe, he did not vote because he bought the hate news about Hillary-killery-shillery. Thus, in this way, Trump got to be king.
LOL, he tells me–a journalist (me) who writes at a site, where the publisher warns ‘opinionaters’ (and trolls) that TRUTH is the rubric, and they will not be allowed to post misinformation; the argument that everyone is ‘entitled ‘ to an opinion and that the first amendment gives them the freedom to spit out lies at will, holds no place at this serious news site, where Robert Reich also writes. The 1st Amendment is very specific about the freedom it describes… to complain and protest GOVERNMENT actions.
Oped News, I cannot post anything without a link to the facts. Here, I expect truth to reign, and eventually trolls find another place to plague.
Rudy is obviously very bright, and from time to time, posts some really interesting valid arguments, but of late, it appears that he has bought the con, and believes the fallacious argument that ‘both’ sides need ‘air -time’.
Paul Krugman wrote a great essay on this idea that we all have to listen attentively and give credence to utter fiction, when it is presented as the “other side.”
I suggest that you ignore anyone who cannot tell truth from fiction. I do not think he is a troll, just a very opinionated man who is more than likely accustomed to a verbal style where his ‘opinion’ trumps truth….gee I like that alliteration.
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“Rudy is obviously very bright, and from time to time, posts some really interesting valid arguments, but of late, it appears that he has bought the con, and believes the fallacious argument that ‘both’ sides need ‘air -time’”
You know, of course, that is what the “progressive” people used as an argument about radio time, right? When I moved here, I used to listen to Al Franken on, if I remember correct, Radio America. And HIS complaint was that there were not enough “progressive” radio stations, that there should be “equal airtime…” So here is a hero in the eyes of many a Democrat, and when HE uses the argument it is justified. When I use the argument (not so much for air time, but for CORRECT, NEEDED and FACTUAL information rather than a cherry picking of negative stuff, I am using a fallacious argument??
I remember thinking at the time of Franken’s complaining that as “conservative” radio was sponsored by those who believe and support those views, that seemingly the “progressives” do not seem to believe in their cause enough to support like programs.
Ms. Schwartz, what I argue for is to stick to OPINIONS rather than character assassination. You can argue against the position taken by Devos, Duncan whatever you want, but by maligning their character, you are not really advancing your case.
show me REASONS rather than INSULTS as to why you are against DeVos, Duncan et al. You might, just might, make believers out of more people.
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Reason: a person who has no respect for public education is unfit to be Secretary of Education. She is a lobbyist who buys the policies she wants.
Reason: a person who is Secretary of Education and imposes his favorite but untested remedies for seven years without success is a failure
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Catherine,
I take aim at the hackneyed idea that they just need to use “critical thinking skills”. What are these? Do they really exist? Can they be taught? It seems to me when people say “critical thinking skills” they usually mean the habit of being skeptical. But many Trumpistas are extremely, reflexively skeptical. They don’t believe anything the New York Times or climate scientists tell them. The habit of skepticism isn’t sufficient. What’s lacking, it seems to me, is a realistic mental model of what the world IS, against which they can compare the various crazy propositions they read on Facebook. With such a model, while you may not like Hillary, you would see that it’s quite unlikely that a secular, wonky, Wellesley-educated white woman would never carry water for medieval, gay-bashing, misogynistic ISIS. Ergo schools’ top priority must be to teach kids what the world IS and abandon the fruitless effort to teach chimerical things like “reading comprehension skills” or “critical thinking skills”. This requires an overthrow of the now-discredited, hegemonic progressive ed orthodoxy.
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Ponderosa: Yes. A brief set of responses below to your questions:
You say: “I take aim at the hackneyed idea that they just need to use ‘critical thinking skills’. What are these?”
ME: Yes–you are right: it depends on what that means.
YOU: “Do they really exist?” ME: Yes. YOU: “Can they be taught?” ME; Yes. Reasonableness and its practice are intimately related to “thinking skills”, but a further issue.
YOU: “It seems to me when people say ‘critical thinking skills’ they usually mean the habit of being skeptical.”
ME; Skepticism is only a moment in the process of being truly critical–if you mean by “skeptical” the “art” of raising questions and paying close attention to what doesn’t “sound” right at first, and THEN (hugely important) asking for further development of the issue–so that we can understand fully. NOT merely being controversial (on principle) or ending with just not “believing” what’s being said because you don’t like it or it doesn’t meet with your bevy of “isms.”
YOU: “But many Trumpistas are extremely, reflexively skeptical.
ME: Exactly. It’s a gross corruption of application of the use of all three terms: “critical,” “thinking,” and “skills.” Although I guess you could say these folks are quite “skilled” –at using the truncated tools of ignorance.
YOU: “They don’t believe anything the New York Times or climate scientists tell them. The habit of skepticism isn’t sufficient.”
ME: The other side of skepticism is the moment of trust/belief. Similarly, though, if ended there, this becomes blind belief. (There’s excellent theory on this). But the Trumpster tends to run back and forth from skepticism to adoration–and to blind belief in and of the adored. The complex issue is that we need to work through those moments of trust-belief (in the beginning), like when reading such papers as the NYT, but also bring a healthy dose of questioning (skepticism) to it. Bothare needed moments to arriving at understanding fully whatever is the concrete issue at hand.
That movement of mental moments is not only an abstract prescription, it’s the method of consciousness–it works when we are developed enough to actually be critical and reasonable in our own lives. And it’s the basis of whatever self-correction we actually do EVERY DAY of our lives.
But that’s sometimes the method of the Truncated Trumpster (though it could be developed–everyone is capable of thinking well).
Alas. What goes for thinking in that camp is not thinking at all. The initial moment of belief/trust, has to be in a dynamic relationship with the moments of questioning of the skeptic in us to get to the understanding that is the fundamental aim of the process when it is working well. So they belief/trust Trump, and are (as you say) overly and always skeptical of whomever he tells them to hate–like the Crooked Hillary or The Press. (I’m waiting for the attack on Palin.)
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Catherine,
While I have a lot of respect for philosophy, I think cognitive science has some important things to say about “critical thinking”. Per Hirsch’s new book: 1. understanding collapses if we cannot create a “situational model” in our heads of what’s going on. 2. The ability to create that situational model depends on memorized prior learning embedded in the long-term memory. Can’t you just Google the relevant facts about say, the plausibility of finding a good replacement for Obamacare, and then do your critical thinking? No, because the active thinking “desktop” in our brain can only handle about seven items at once. Good thinking about a topic demands freed up space on that “desktop”. That means a lot of the relevant facts need to be “on tap” in long-term memory banks. Thus the idea that you can just teach a critical thinking process to kids and let them pick up facts on an ad hoc basis does not fly. In theory, it seems we should just be able to teach a method for thinking. But in reality, this has never worked, and the cognitive science explains why. Ergo schools must build the foundation of critical thinking, and that foundation is a robust knowledge of the world and how it works.
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Ponderosa: I agree with what you say. The habit (or practice) of critical thinking, and the process that it’s made of (the two “moments” (and more) is just that–a process. I never suggested we could ignore that process all of our lives, or its development of content, and then, voila, at once become critical and discerning. The mind continually processes meaning and then tries to put it all order so that, when we need it, the content comes forward. The more meaning and memory (especially qualified meaning) you put into that process (as you suggest), the more you are able to be discerning about what, in fact (. . . ) is important to leave in and leave out, or put aside in each situation. (It’s what the Press didn’t do, or rarely did.)
The process, of course, is distinct from, but in the concrete, is also intimate with the content. No question, no content. No content, no question. That’s meaning and knowledge accumulation, however. Then there is the further discernment, reasonableness, evaluation, critical judgment, decision, about what we will actually say and do–and more.
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“….while you may not like Hillary, you would see that it’s quite unlikely that a secular, wonky, Wellesley-educated white woman would never carry water for medieval, gay-bashing, misogynistic ISIS…”
I wish that were true that education would help that. But there are plenty of well-educated Hillary haters who believed their own version of that — that someone who had worked her life to make things better for the most vulnerable Americans was the most corrupt tool of Wall Street and war-mongering Democrat ever.
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I do not know what “people mean” when they use the term critical thinking skills,, but I know what those skills are, and HOW TO GET KIDS TO LEARN THEM.
You use the words ‘teach’! I do not teach anything…. I show what I know– I help the emerging intelligence to learn what I know how to do.
Bloom’s Taxonomy of CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS is a place to start,
The very first skill that a human being learns is to compare and contrast.
Now, if that human has no prior knowledge then there insetting in the ‘file cabinet of his brain,’ to compare it with. If what they are seeing before their eyes is something new, then they cannot analyze it, and predict an outcome.
Thus, if a human has never learned about how dangerous it is when a charlatan is elected to high office, then they cannot know that the lies will flow like water.
If they never learned in school, that the first amendment was created so that th people could protest when the government was doing ‘bad stuff’, then they do not ‘get it’ when their new President, sys they should be jailed for burning the flag.
Compare and analyze , then hypothesize and predict.
If the guy we elect, thumbs his nose at the laws of the the land ( and does not distinguish between bragging about assault he committed, and ‘locker room talk”)
and if he wants his kids to run the show,
AND NAMES HIS KID BARON,
and takes his daughter to serious meetings,
and wants to keep his business dealings with foreign governments secret,
and… well,
those of us who read history know that we haveA MAN WHO WOULD BE KING, and we can predict the moment, when he declares martial law and declares himself THE DICTATOR.
Of course it depends on PRIOR KNOWLEDGE, like seeing the rise of such a dictator in Germany, and in other times in history when he people were hurting an along came a bamboozler with the means to FOOL THE PEOPLE with FAKE NEWS..ie LIES.
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NYC public school parent
“that someone who had worked her life to make things better for the most vulnerable Americans ”
Was that Mother Teresa you were talking about .
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Despite the best efforts of teachers of facts, laws, and established theories, people inevitably see and believe what they want to see and believe. The counter-intuitive aspect of science aside, the path of least resistance is just too tempting. Critical thinking based on facts is hard work; jumping to inane conclusions about “chem” trails is just much easier and more emotionally appealing. Ask any level headed chem trail denier if they can explain the chemistry of jet contrails and even they would be hard pressed to explain why water is emitted as jet exhaust.
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RageAgainst writes: “Despite the best efforts of teachers of facts, laws, and established theories, people inevitably see and believe what they want to see and believe. The counter-intuitive aspect of science aside, the path of least resistance is just too tempting . . . .” The example is the misinformation out there about chem-trails.
To Rage: I know exactly what you mean . . . I suggest that most, if not all, teachers also do. However, isn’t that the fundamental challenge of teaching? Besides teaching content, at the bottom of good teaching is, first, fostering the heart-full openness of mind that comes with being a child; and second, setting the conditions for closure NOT to be “inevitable.” So that we come away from our formal education knowing that having an open but also critical mind means that we become crucially aware of the potential difference between what we might want or believe or think already, or want to believe, and what is, in fact, the case (or again, factual, true, real).
In a purely psychological context, and though I understand and share the “sigh . . . ” that goes with your statement of inevitability and “path of least resistance” which is really a path to ignorance and even flirting with insanity, I know it not to be true–not for all, and certainly not while there are teachers in the world who understand the importance of education in this fundamental sense. (BTW, it’s gone with the draining of curricula that would foster such openness and critical thought.)
And as we have discussed here before, the whole idea of democracy depends on the “demos” being immersed in a culture of education. And so the purely psychological opens out onto the philosophical (an approach to and basic assumptions about knowing/knowledge/reality) and the political-cultural where we all happen to live. Don’t give up.
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Ponderosa, the desktop/ long-term memory-base is a good framework to discuss curriculum development, grounded in what we know about how the brain works. But I have reservations about how you apply the metaphor.
First, defining the a priori foundation required for critical thinking as “a robust knowledge of the world and how it works.” While certainly an ideal to strive toward, this to me is more descriptive of how I imagine the mind of God– hardly equivalent to having ‘a lot of the relevant facts’/ ‘prior learning embedded in the long-term memory’.
For example, I imagine myself, a lit BA, approaching an article on global warming. Scientific general knowledge bank relatively weak: I lean on a few very basic pillars of physics & mathematics, buttressed by life observations, to help me flag blatant errors. Far more important are the habits of reasoning and analysis I learned to apply throughout my education. My ‘foundation’ is not a lump of facts, it is a meta-facts structure composed of questions that need to be asked in order to assess whether purportedly factual statements can be reasonably assessed as true. Having learned via an intertwining of facts & analysis, I refresh or update forgotten facts as needed for full comprehension– as a matter of course.
This critical meta-structure starts very early. Wise parents asked what do you think? Why do you think so? Early exposure to for-lang, suggesting different ways to say things. A 7th-gr soc stud class where we studied how similar facts were assessed from different viewpoints via a spectrum of wkly news mags.
Perhaps I’m being obvious, & you intend all this in promoting the Hirsch approach.
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Bethree5:
I tend to think reasoning power deploys automatically in most people. Our brains are designed to reason. The reason they don’t reason well, often, is because they’re hobbled by lack of knowledge in certain domains. Brains are not born with knowledge; they are born with thinking skills. Kids problem-solve and think in sophisticated ways all the time about the things they know about –video games, iPhones, Machiavellian social dynamics –these abilities were not imparted by school –but kids are hobbled by lack of knowledge when it comes to thinking about the advisability of skateboarding without a helmet, what that German speaker just said to them, the pros and cons of intervening in Syria, etc.
Consider these three studies (cited in Hirsch’s new book):
Recht-Leslie –“bad readers” who played baseball understood an article about baseball better than “good readers”. Knowing about baseball, not “reading or thinking skills”, made their brains work better on this task.
Schneider –Low IQ soccer players scored just as well as high IQ soccer players on comprehension of texts about soccer. Domain knowledge, not thinking skills, makes you smarter in that domain.
Arya –third graders who are familiar with a topic can understand complex texts about that topic as easily as simple texts. Knowledge, not “complex text reading skills” (a mythological skill that underlies the Common Core), enables one to tackle a complex text.
The folly of modern American education is that it aims to give kids what they already possess –a functioning brain –while neglecting to give them what they lack –the knowledge that optimizes that brain’s innate powers.
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bethree
Asking “what do you think?” is the problem. What a person “thinks” about the white stuff coming out of jet engines, or what they “think” about global warming is often irrelevant to the facts. We should be asking, “what do you know?” instead. The “what do you think” mentality lies at the root of the failed constructivist approach that has derailed much of science education. It is completely counterintuitive to “think” that water is produced inside flames. It is beyond the common intuition of anyone to propose the idea of the emission and absorption of the infrared spectrum by carbon dioxide molecules produced by burning fuels. The weak science foundation you describe is very common; having a strong science background will replace the “thinking” with knowing. I blame this on a combination of bad textbooks that fail to discriminate between the trivial and important facts and ideas, bad teachers that do the same (using bad textbooks), bad tests that do the same, and the mental laziness and lack of curiosity that seems to be a common affliction.
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Ponderosa, I like this post very much, & expect I will have to read Hirsch’s new book. I think you have established the nuance I was looking for.
Those who bring LIFE EXPERIENCE (not ‘knowledge’, as in memorized book-learning) to the work are able to move immediately beyond reaction (I like it or I don’t) to the analytical (is there something about the chord structure &/or lyrics of this ballad that allow it to be re-interpreted to broad audiences in successive cultural eras? What is Sinatra doing differently here from Al Jolson or Billie Holiday or Judy Garland?, etc)
You are far closer in this example to what should constitute the foundation of general knowledge. That knowledge needs to be practiced in the physical realm. Facts are retained if used to perform and practice hands-on actions. I will learn multiplication tables & rudimentary geometry as they help me physically measure the area of my classroom and my neighborhood. I will understand and remember the periodical table as it relates to lab experiments. I will remember the for-lang vocabulary that helps me describe my family and my interests in that tongue. As I engage in these actions, my interest will cause me to attain further needed facts on my own.
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Rage, you have taken my ‘what do you think & why?’ out of context, I was describing parents of small children who elicit their kids’ impressions & reactions & encourage further thinking– as opposed to many parents who do not think or ask about their kids’ thinking– or worse, the some who do, & put youngsters on the hot seat, then proceed to apply disapproval while telling them what they should be thinking (I had a grandfather like that).
Helping students learn to distinguish between what they think & what they know/ can show a basis for is a gentle process which evolves in early primary grades. One first has to get them thinking & discussing/ exchanging reactions. Best way to squelch that process out of the box is to demand ‘proof’ of 5 & 6 yo’s, & distribute approval for evidence-based responses… tho a review of CCSS-ELA suggests that approach.
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bthree5: I think you are on target here–the key is “gentle process.”
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I agree! Thanks Catherine!
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Correction of omission in the above: “The assumption in such experiences of self correction (life-long for most of us) is the same implicit truth assumption that underpins the performative contradiction above: that the claim that there is no such thing as truth is false.
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The post-truth regime has been evolving and expanding for a while now, and government mendacity has played a big part. Remember the WMD’s in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq? That bit of fake news – facts regarding its transparently falsity were widely available at the time – was spread by the New York Times, under the byline of then-star reporter Judith Miller. Thirty-plus years before, it was “Quadaffi’s Hit Squads,” another bit of distraction for the masses. The list is endless, and this week we went full meta post-truth, with Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post running a nasty piece smearing independent web sites as conduits for Big Bad Vlad’s propaganda: fake news about purported fake news…
Trump has harnessed aggressive ignorance to his own and the nation’s anti-historical ADHD, combined with the Always Be Closing relentlessness of a salesman.
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Michael: Yes, yes and yes. that’s why fakery at high levels, and the more recent open attack on the WHOLE IDEA of truth/facts/reality is so very VERY dangerous–not only to the whole underpinning of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights (and not to mention habeas corpus?<–good grief!) but to our personal freedoms that we all, for the moment, still enjoy–like writing on this blog. We’re way beyond Kansas now, folks.
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To Joel Herman, at 5:02 PM: Yes, please, agree w/you–NO Schumer at the top–we need the outspoken Elizabeth Warren at the helm (hope she continue to harangue Wells Fargo/Stumpf). & ridiculous, overwhelming re-election of Pelosi & Hoyer.
That having been said, do these DINOs never learn? (Rhetorical question)
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Trump supporters must be fans of Mark Twain who said, by way of Pudd’nhead Wilson’s calendar, “Tell the truth or trump – but get the trick.” Trump certainly won the trick. Twain also knew what he was saying when he wrote: “Never tell the truth to people who are not worthy of it.” Another lesson taken to heart by the Trump machine. Twain predicted our own times when he also wrote about truth: “Truth is mighty and will prevail. There is nothing the matter with this, except that it ain’t so.”
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“When I use a word,” Humpty Trumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Trumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”
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No society that based its decisions on lies has survived. Humanity from its earliest moments on earth survived by grasping the reality an acting about it, communicating it.
If these ‘trumpeters’ REPEAT , OVER AND OVER, that all opinions are equal in value, they B
BELIEVE THAT WE WILL ACCEPT IT.
WE CANNOT!
I posted this link to an article the other day; http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Fake-News-and-the-Internet-in-General_News-Deception_Election_Internet_Journalism_Truth-161128-340.html with this introduction:
“The new word of the year: post-truth This was the year of “fake news,” in which pure fiction masquerading as truth may have spread wide enough to influence the outcome of the election. But framing the issue solely in terms of lying actually underplays and mischaracterizes the grand deception being perpetuated inside the internet’s fun house of mirror; we must distinguish lying from deception. To lie is to deliberately say what you believe to be false with the intention of deceiving your audienc what they are selling There goal is to confuse enough so that you don’t know what is true. Almost everything that we encounter online is being presented to us by for-profit algorithms, and by us, post by post, tweet by tweet. That fact, even more than the spread of fake news, can be its own sort of shell game, one that we are pulling on ourselves.”
Years ago, Al Fraken was prescient in identifying the End of Truth; in his book “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/oct/11/highereducation.news1.
His second book “Truth,” indicated that we were coning to a post-truth era.
But Bill Maher nailed the role that th internet would play, last March in his
LIES ARE THE NEW TRUTH https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8bihhjH3nI
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You might want to read this: How to expose Fake News and still keep Alternative Media freeBy Scott Baker who says: “Combating fake news needs to be done, but how to do it without enabling propagandists and elite filtering? And how to preserve alternative media? Here is one answer.”
http://www.opednews.com/articles/How-to-expose-Fake-News-an-by-Scott-Baker-Facebook_Google_Media_Media-Attacks-161202-539.html
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School Librarians are on top of this in this blog post: Truth, truthiness, triangulation: A news literacy toolkit for a “post-truth” world. http://blogs.slj.com/neverendingsearch/2016/11/26/truth-truthiness-triangulation-and-the-librarian-way-a-news-literacy-toolkit-for-a-post-truth-world/
Of course, with budget cuts library positions are one the first to get cut .
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I was curious. I see that the post-truth spokesperson for Trump and all things hard-right conservative is “A Magna Cum Laude graduate from the University of Tennessee at Martin with a broadcast communications/political science degree. Her bio says that “Scottie Nell realized her calling for a life in political journalism at the young age of 12 with her first reporting job as a Kids to Kids Reporter for WKRN-ABC Nashville. She went on to win the top High School Broadcaster Award for the state of Tennessee and the Broadcaster of the year for her college class 3 years in a row.”
She has been rewarded for having skill in delivering messages on the ultra right-wing airwaves. I wonder what kind of education she received at the University of Tennessee at Martin. Last I heard the remarkable Diane Rehm had only a high school education. The point is that formal education is not the only thing that makes a difference in pressing for trustworthy statements about the world.
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Laura: Yes. . . . proving that there is no guarantee of getting a good education, in the sense that is implied in your note, by going through college, regardless of grades; and on the other hand, no guarantee that someone like Diane Rehm cannot become educated (in that same sense) without going to college.
I stumbled upon a point in my studies awhile back–that pretty much everyone that I found myself admiring when reading their writings had a reading of Plato’s works somewhere in their background. But I think that, especially since the world is the way it is, the more time we spend in reflecting on that world, on knowledge, and ourselves in regard to both, the better off we we are when we re-enter, so to speak, after our more formal educational experiences. Whether we continue learning is another matter altogether. College does tend to make us less dogmatic and more thoughtful and reflective–and modest where our knowing-all attitudes are concerned.
Some of course get trained but never learn much of anything in terms of what (I presume you are saying) Diane Rehm plainly is and knows. And after hearing Hughes, my guess is that her teachers at Tennessee are in a permanent state of eye-roll. If not, they should be. I would be embarrassed to claim her as my student.
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Test
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The Alt Right is getting its nihilistic message from the Russian propaganda machine with decades of experience going back to the dawn of the Soviet Union. Social media has allowed experts like Vladimir Putin (former leader of the KGB) the greatest propaganda tool ever. The world wide web has allowed Russia to originate the propaganda overtly from “white” news sources like RT News, pass along propaganda in the US to feed uncertainty with “gray” sources like Infowars, and hired an army of covert or “black” operatives in the form of hecklers, honeypots, and trolls to create an echo chamber to reinforce the propaganda.
The Russians are pushing four general themes. Their political message is designed to tarnish democratic leaders and institutions with allegations of voter fraud, election rigging, and political corruption. Financially they push fear over the national debt and are constantly attacking the soundness of institutions like the Federal Reserve. To undermine the fabric of society they purposefully aggravate racial tensions in the US. And finally propagate wide-ranging conspiracy theories promoting fear of pending worldwide calamities and questioning any expert who might try to calm those fears.
http://warontherocks.com/2016/11/trolling-for-trump-how-russia-is-trying-to-destroy-our-democracy/
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When one digs deeper, it’s easy to discover the mastermind behind the propaganda machine, Putin’s political advisor, and leader of the Eurasian fascist movement growing out of Russia, Alexander Dugin. In Russian, Dugin represent the “war party” and is seen as the driving force behind Putin’s annexation of Crimea and eastern Ukraine. He’s often described as a fascists who wishes to hasten the “end of times” with all out war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Dugin
Here is a short report that NPR did on Dugin back in July.
http://www.npr.org/2016/07/25/487380876/a-look-at-donald-trumps-ties-to-russia
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A plausible conspiracy theory, to my mind. From Lenin onwards, Russia has been the Silicon Valley of the dark arts of creepy statecraft. Meanwhile Silicon Valley proper has opened up this vast anarchic open virtual frontier with few protections against these neo-KGB schemers. We need to wake up and get smart about this war for the minds of Americans.
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A Quote from the Washington Post and link below regarding truth and science. I don’t think Trump et al can even see that a scientific study and its conclusions can be other than politically motivated. Certainly, all have political implications; but the motivation to merely understand what is and is not in a scientific way, for instance, climate change, is not even a consideration for these useful idiots.
QUOTE
“An even deeper problem than funding cuts, though, he said, involves the ‘integrity’ of scientific information. . . . ‘We saw it in the George W. Bush administration, and that was the federal government’s disregard for the integrity of science. The publicizing of demonstrably false information by several federal agencies,’ Lane said. ‘I don’t want to prejudge anybody, but there’s at least a danger that this issue of integrity of scientific knowledge and information and the importance of accuracy in reporting to the public, that may not be fully respected or understood.’”
WashingtonPost article . See https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/scientists-and-environmentalists-are-bracing-for-a-clash-with-trump/2016/12/04/0cc9476a-b8be-11e6-959c-172c82123976_story.html?utm_term=.15cd1f91e2c3
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We did it again! November is hottest on record
https://thinkprogress.org/satellites-hottest-november-on-record-93fa59887f09#.225f0labn
Last month was easily the hottest November on record globally, according to satellite data sets.In fact, satellite data, ground-based weather stations, sea-based buoys, and even weather balloons all reveal a steady long-term warming trend.Here is the latest data from the RSS satellites. (These are the satellites some climate deniers love to quote, because their data contain errors that low-ball total warming.) This chart looks at every 12-month period ending in November. It starts with December 1979 to November 1980 and ends with December 2015 to November 2016. These data show that not only is November 2016 the hottest on record, but there is an ongoing, annual trend.
These satellites have documented a steady warming of the troposphere (the lower atmosphere). It always bears repeating that the satellites indirectly measure the temperature where we don’t live (the troposphere), so the data need a whole bunch of (easily screwed up) adjustments before it is useful to anyone.If you want a direct measure of the temperature at the surface where we actually live and grow food, you need NASA’s land and ocean temperature index (LOTI) from the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS):So, no matter how we look at it, we are warming rapidly.
And carbon pollution is the primary cause. In fact, as I’ve written, the best estimate by climate scientists is that humans are responsible for all of the warming we have suffered since 1950.Despite this, the denier-led House Science Committee tweeted out an erroneous Breitbart story last week about some satellites showing cooling. The story was quickly debunked by actual scientists here and everywhere.Of course the deniers and fake news providers are, by definition, impervious to the facts. Sadly, they will soon be in charge of the whole country, led by denier-in-chief Donald Trump and his chief strategist, Steve Bannon, who used to run Breitbart.So, as Taylor Swift might put it, “Fakers going to fake, fake, fake, fake, fake, but the planet’s gonna bake, bake, bake, bake, bake….”
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With all due respect for the scientist and climate change, there ARE as reputable scientists on the other side of the conversation. And as the scientists who clamored about the next ice age were wrong in the mid-seventies, that chance does exist now, as well.
IF the evolutionists are right with age of earth etc. (Which I do not accept, but that is a different story), we only have at the most, about 150 years of gathered data, and only the last 25 years or so has there been a greater accuracy in the numbers.
Looking at the 150 years of date out of the supposed 4.5 BILLION years, there really is not much of an extrapolation that could be done.
Climate change HAS happened before (and because of that, we have oil and coal), and could be a part of a “normal” cycle.
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Rudy, why are the Polar ice caps melting? Does that happen every 100 million years?
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No one knows… That’s the problem. No one knows when and or why they developed to begin with. The predictions are based on suppositions. And I understand all of that, so I do not doubt that people take this serious. But it is based on but a fraction of the time they imagine for the age of the earth. As mentioned before, they were wrong in the seventies, using some of the same predictive models in use now. They worked on what was thought to be credible evidence, like what is happening now.
Having grown up in a country that has battled the sea for centuries, I am very much aware of what can happen. But I also know what can be done to protect countries from such dangers. Call the Dutch civil engineers… 😉
Re. New Mexico U… Iowa has a politician who presented a law, “Suck it up, Buttercup.” How do we expect people to become mature participants in society when the results of an election are creating such needs for “comfort rooms” etc.? We are seeing the end of a generation that grew up through the Great Depression (The 1930’s one). A generation that fought through WWII. A generation that was involved with the Korean Conflict, the Vietnam war. Where did it go wrong that we now have a generation which cannot deal with setbacks??
As far as the references to grade school experiences go, I know there is a different need. But college level?
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On Climate Change: This just in from the Washington Post:
“Trump said to pick Scott Pruitt to head EPA, an agency he is suing as Oklahoma attorney general.
“The nomination of Pruitt, confirmed by a transition official, signals Trump’s intention to dismantle President Obama’s chief climate change policy. Pruitt, who has written that the debate on climate change is “far from settled,” is part of a coalition of state attorneys general suing the agency over the administration’s Clean Power Plan.”
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Rudy,
The earth was cooling according to the earth’s natural cycle in the 70s like the scientists said. When the Clean Air Act of 1970 removed 90% of the climate cooling particulates from the coal burning stations, it allowed the still present climate warming carbon dioxide pollution to start driving up world temperatures in the 1980s, counter to its natural cooling trend.
Yes the earth has been much warmer in the past, like in the age of dinosaurs when our present day fossil fuels were formed and there were no ice caps on the planet. But they went extinct after an asteroid impact caused the climate to dramatically cool and allowed a new era dominated by furry mammals to evolve. If the earth dramatically warms, the reverse will happen. Mammals like us will go extinct, and us mammals will be replaced with some new type of creature better suited for warmer climates.
We are already in the throws of mass extinction right now. In the 80s, scientists warned that we were driving 50% of the world’s species into extinction. And with carbon pollution driving up the acidity of the world’s ocean to the point that sea creatures are having difficulty making shells, our extinction rate has now around 90%.
It didn’t have to be this way. The US just blew $5 trillion (and killed a million people) on the totally unnecessary Iraq War, more than the $4.5 trillion price tag to make America independent on alternative energy. The price tag for making America energy independent with fossil fuels is $14 trillion, three times as much.
Which do you think is the better choice Rudy, for America to invest $4.5 trillion in alternative energy to give our children a planet that is inhabitable? Or to invest $14 trillion to stay dependent on fossil fuels, blow another trillion or two on another counterproductive war, and leaving our children a living hell?
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Would cooling cycle not also include a warming cycle???
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Rudy, Yes there are cooling and warming cycles. To get an idea of the cooling and warming trends before we started recording daily weather data 150 years ago, scientists drilled into the antarctic’s ice sheet to collect ice core samples to depths of 14,000 feet and capturing 800,000 years of snow. The ice cores also captured the samples of the atmosphere when it snowed going back in time, showing the CO2 levels and isotopes indicating the temperature going back 800,000 years as well. It’s not as accurate as thermometer readings, but the fluctuating numbers show a distinct pattern of sudden warming, followed by 130,000 years of cooling, again going back 800,000 years. This 130,000 year pattern is due to the cycle of the wobbling earth and a few other orbital factors, which show that we should naturally be on the start of a cooling cycle (or new ice age). But we’re not, we’re headed higher because the CO2 levels are now much higher than they have ever been for the last 800,000 years, and headed higher. http://cdn.antarcticglaciers.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Vostok_420ky_4curves_insolation_to_2004.jpg
Another problem is the speed of the warming. Evolution is a slow process. Many of the earth’s plants and animals can’t evolve as fast as the climate is changing and therefore go extinct. If we continue to add more CO2 to our atmosphere, that gets absorbed by our world’s oceans making them more acidic, and drive all of the animals in the ocean that make shells, then we are going to leave our children an ocean full of jellyfish and that is about it. Do you want to leave your children an ocean only full of jellyfish Rudy?
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Rudy,
It went wrong in 1946 when the US decided to bring in 600 of Hitler’s mind control scientists into America’s industrial military complex. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnwzIr8nY4E
Many of these Nazi scientists were stationed at the US Army College of the Americas in Panama, also opened in 1946. Here they furthered Mengele’s research as they built an army of terrorists to intimidate the local population throughout South America to support puppet dictators and to make sure that the corporations always got the best deals. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUtumGk0E6Q
America saved the world from fascism in WW2, but then became history’s next fascist nightmare itself by capturing the very scientists that tricked the Germans into war and using them to fool the American people next.
You can help expose this nightmare and make America good again by supporting the School of Assassin Watch http://soaw.org/about-the-soawhinsec/what-is-the-soawhinsec They are located across the street from the “College of Assassins” which is now located in Fort Benning, Georgia and try to make Americans aware of this carefully guarded secret.
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SERIOUSLY sir… such an argument in the face of the facts that the entire AUTHENTIC GENUINE scientific community, BAR NONE, ACKNOWLEDGES the reality.
You are presenting the idea that serious consideration should be given to the “other” side. This gives air time, and repetition of a falsehood, until it takes on the aura of truth. Paul Krugman puts it better than I can
Ya know, Rudy, I thought, perhaps, I might give you the benefit of the doubt, but sir, if you are not a troll, or someone who has too much time on their hands and like to provoke arguments, then there is only one conclusion that can be drawn by what you just wrote… that you are unable to distinguish observable reality from ‘fake news’ and from this moment on, (and I am being kind) I will no longer read your commentary. THIS site is a place to examinee our world and look for solutions. YOU WASTE OUR TIME.
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