Tag Archives: education

e pluribus unum

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This post is adapted from a passage in Chapter 4 of my book A Conservative’s Manifesto.

What is the “many” in the title, the pluribus? When the phrase was first proposed for the Seal of the United States in 1776, it referred to the 13 States being joined into one nation. It has come to mean, in addition, the several peoples, religions, languages, heritages, and so on who come to the United States to join our great experiment in individual freedom and individual responsibility.

What is the one, the unum? That’s the point of this post.

We Americans take in and incorporate (note that verb) immigrants, and gladly so, for they bring fresh ideas as well as fresh approaches to old problems and a renewal of dedication to nation. However, we should not become our immigrants—they need to become Americans, or alternatively to recognize their resident alien status. Those who come to the United States do so for the opportunities here, and they’re welcome to share in these opportunities—immigrant and legal alien alike.   Immigrants come to America specifically for the economic opportunities, the political freedoms and opportunities, the sociological opportunities—in a word, for the American culture, which they know a priori to be different from their own—and which they understand to be the foundation of our American exceptionalism.

Immigrants need to adapt to, and assimilate into, our culture. Some will argue that this implies an imposition of a particular majority culture on minorities, but it is not an imposition. It is a recognition and an acceptance that to benefit from what America has to offer, to benefit from American opportunities, and to preserve these for Americans already present and for future Americans, native born and immigrant, it is necessary to preserve and to adapt to that which is America. Immigrants holding themselves apart denies to them the very reason they came—our opportunities and escape from the restraints of their old countries.

What immigrants must do is accept the current political structures, which they knew from the start, and take part in their new community. These new citizens, like the “original” citizens, must speak a common national language and share the commitment to maintaining and defending the nation. And so, having committed to the nation—to America—they will have their impact by engaging as citizens in our common discourse. However, this is not a demand for sublimation. On the contrary, once immigrants have become citizens, rather than having chosen to remain resident aliens, they can, they should, actively participate in that common discourse and make their influence concerning the nation’s goals and future through free discussion.

Parenthetically, the need to preserve these American attributes, these fundaments of American exceptionalism, emphasizes, also, the importance of providing civics courses that teach the American social contract and American citizenship in our schools, so as to reach all American citizens.

College Isn’t for Everyone, Revisited

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I touched on this a while ago. Here’s another look.

Dakota Blazier had made a big decision. Friendly and fresh-faced, from a small town north of Indianapolis, he’d made up his mind: he wasn’t going to college.

“I discovered a long time ago,” he explained, “I’m not book smart. I don’t like sitting still, and I learn better when the problem is practical.” But he didn’t feel this limited his options—to the contrary. And he was executing a plan as purposeful as that of any of his high-school peers.

The questions that keep him up at night aren’t about inequality: how rich am I, or, how rich is my neighbor? What he worries about is the kinds of opportunities open to him. Can he get an education that equips him for a job he wants? Can he find that job and build on it to make a career? His concern is economic mobility.

Indeed, there are lots of opportunities—good opportunities. Tamar Jacoby, in the WSJ article linked above, outlined three requirements for these opportunities actually to be opportunities, and paths like Blazier’s meet those requirements [emphasis added].

The first requirement of any upward path is entry ramps at the ground level. The Craft Training Center of the Coastal Bend, in Corpus Christi, Texas [for instance], teaches welding to 200 high-school students, mostly at-risk youth.

The second requirement of any good upward path is for training to lead to a job. [Anthony, 19 years old] Solis’s big break came last August, when he and 20 other Coastal Bend students auditioned for JV Industrial, which does high-risk, high-paying maintenance work in oil refineries. JV had never recruited at the Corpus Christi center, and Mr Solis was so nervous that he was almost ill on the day of the hands-on test. Still, he made the grade and headed off to Houston for more free training—with the possibility of a big job if he finished.

A third requirement of a good career path is that it must be aligned with economic needs. This is where employers like JV can make all the difference.

Indeed. RTWT, as they say.

The Obama Administration and Education

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Here’s just one example, via The Wall Street Journal. Last month,

Department of Education imposed a 21-day hold on Corinthian’s [Colleges, a for-profit college system with campuses across the USS] access to federal student aid because it “failed to address concerns about its practices, including falsifying job placement data used in marketing claims to prospective students.” The funding freeze triggered a liquidity crisis, which has culminated in Corinthian’s decision to wind down or sell its 97 US campuses.

Never mind that, among other things, DoE itself can’t figure out how to measure job placement for college graduates. The National Center for Education Statistics, an arm of the DoE, found itself tasked with generating just such a metric, but in 2011, it was forced to admit that the challenges of using institutional tracking of students, which include the reporting burden on institutions as well as the potential for inconsistent documentation and reporting, simply wasn’t feasible.

Then there’s the data the DoE demanded of Corinthian:

  • a list of all students placed by name and Social Security number
  • the students’ most recent telephone numbers and cell phone numbers
  • graduation dates and academic programs
  • job titles
  • start dates
  • employers’ names and contact information

Never mind the difficulty of collecting those data from folks who’ve already graduated and moved on with their lives. Think about the invasion of privacy this administration demanded Corinthian perpetrate on those graduated adult American citizens.

Corinthian couldn’t meet DoE’s data delivery deadline, despite having assigned an additional 100 employees the single full time task of collecting these personal data from its hundreds of thousands of students. As a result, it’s had to close its doors—that funding freeze.

This is this administration’s arrogance at its most powerful and its worst.

Do Liberals Object to Our Constitution Being Taught?

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It seems so, even if the fix to a problem might be a bit much.

The South Carolina legislature has rankled liberal groups after requiring that a pair of public schools use state funds to teach the U.S. Constitution and other founding documents….

…amount be spent “for instruction in the provisions and principles of the United States Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Federalist Papers, including the study of and devotion to American institutions and ideals.”

Of course, this has angrified the Liberals.

The National Coalition Against Censorship, ACLU of South Carolina, and other groups said in a statement earlier this week that the new bill is a “symbolic penalty….”

“It represents unwarranted political interference with academic freedom and undermines the integrity of the higher education system in South Carolina,” the groups said.

Never mind that not teaching our founding documents, the core documents of our social compact, the documents of our debate over them (aside: the Anti-Federalist Papers should have been on that list, too) doesn’t at all undermine the integrity of South Carolina’s higher education system. Not teaching these doesn’t at all politicize the classrooms.

Not a bit of it.

Religious Freedom

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Lebanon High School Principal Kevin Lowery gave a commencement address to his high school students. In the course of his speech, he spoke repeatedly of God and His role in our individual lives and in the life of our nation. Among other things, he reminded his students that our national motto is “In God We Trust,” and that it is imprinted on all of our currency. He gave a short history lesson, generally absent from the classes, that Francis Scott Key’s original version of our national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” made references to God.

Lowery also wryly noted during the May 23 commencement that even though “God is reflected in the very fabric” of the nation, it would be inappropriate to mention The Almighty at a secular ceremony.

“So while it would not be politically correct for us to have an official prayer this evening,” he said, “I would like for us to have a moment of silence in honor of tonight’s graduates. Thank you. And just in case you’re interested, during my moment of silence, I gave thanks to God for these great students, their parents, their teachers, and for this community.”

A YouTube clip of Lowry’s address is here. Among the comments on the clip, Dave Muscato, Public Relations Director for American Atheists, had this to say:

I find this extremely objectionable. I think it’s clear that Kevin Lowery violated the spirit of the First Amendment separations of religion and government. This was an underhanded and dishonorable way for him to forcibly inject his personal religious views onto his students and the others present and into his role as a government official.

That’s…unfortunate. I find Muscato’s comment extremely objectionable. I think it’s clear that David Muscato is trying to violate the spirit of the First Amendment’s free exercise of religion. This is an underhanded and dishonorable way for him to forcibly inject his personal religious views onto children and the others present and an abuse of his role as gadfly.