Author Archives: Peter Levine

tightening the “nots”

For what it’s worth, I have listed my fundamental commitments and beliefs here. I can also define my own position by saying what kind of a scholar/writer I am not:

Not a positivist, because I don’t believe that one can isolate facts from values, nor that one can live a good life without reasoning explicitly about right and wrong.

Not a technocrat, because I don’t believe that any kind of technical expertise is sufficient to address serious public problems.

Not a moral relativist, because the arguments for moral relativism are flawed, and the consequence of relativism is nihilism.

Not a post-modernist of the type influence by Foucault (who is a major influence across the cultural disciplines), because I believe that deliberate human choices and actions matter and freedom is real.

Not a social constructivist, because I believe we are responsible for understanding the way the world actually works.

Not a utopian, because I believe that any persuasive theory of justice must incorporate a realistic path to reform. An ideal of justice that lacks a praxis is meaningless, or worse.

Not a utilitarian, because I don’t believe that any social welfare function can define a good society.

Not a deontologist, because I doubt that any coherent list of principles can define a good society.

Not a pure pragmatist, because we need criteria for assessing whether a social process for defining and addressing problems is fair and good. Such criteria are extrinsic to the process itself.

Not a pluralist (in the political-science sense), because I believe there is a common good. But also not a deliberative democrat (in the Habermas version), because I believe that there are real conflicts of interest.

“the historic line of decency”

I spent part of the weekend at a conference on the political process attended by some academics and reporters plus political operatives like Donna Brazile, Doug Bailey, and Ed Rollins. After dinner in a Washington steak house, participants rose to make impromptu speeches against the harshness and narrowness of today’s political discourse. I’m afraid I found most of the speeches quite superficial and banal. While people spoke, a Republican lobbyist and former elected official made heckling remarks which indicated that she felt the room was biased against her worldview. She finally rose and said (in my paraphrase): “What if Columbia University invited David Duke instead of Ahmadinejad to speak? I think there would be a huge protest. There are some people in America who just need to shut up.”

The comment was a non sequitur; but based on her other remarks, I think she meant that Columbia University is part of a leftist establishment. The University invited the Iranian president to speak because it had some sympathy for his views. The problem with American political discourse is that such views are expressed and tolerated.

I certainly didn’t reply, but I think my considered response would go like this: Whether to invite Ahmadinejad to Columbia–and how to treat him once he arrived–were delicate questions. The University needed to consider John Stuart Mill’s argument that we are always better off with a public debate versus the claim that offering an individual a prominent speaking role at a distinguished institution grants him recognition (which someone like Ahmadinejad doesn’t deserve). The University had to consider the norms of hospitality and respect for a head of state versus the duty to speak truth to power. And it had to weigh its own principles versus the consequences of treating Ahmadinejad badly. It would, for example, be possible to denounce the president publicly (in keeping with Columbia’s principles) and thereby strengthen Ahmadinejad’s hand in Iran. In that case, principles and consequences would collide.

In any case, it’s a triple mistake to see Columbia’s actual decisions as emblematic of any leftist agenda. First, Columbia encompasses ideological diversity; it isn’t leftist. Second, the decision to invite Ahmadinejad was based on classical liberalism of the John Stuart Mill variety, not on some leftist doctrine. Third, if Columbia has a leftish bias, that puts it on the opposite side of the political spectrum from an Iranian mullah who despises homosexuality, favors theocracy, and wants to preserve traditional gender roles.

I left the conference and poked around a little on the Web, where conservatives seem to be furious at MoveOn for rhyming Petraeus with “Betray Us,” liberals are outraged that Rush Limbaugh called troops who favor a withdrawal “phony soldiers,” Columbia is denounced for inviting Ahmadinejad, Stanford is attacked for hiring Rumsfeld, the denouncers of Columbia and Stanford are denounced for selectively ignoring free speech, and everyone sees hypocrisy everywhere. The game is to associate one’s opponents with some of the worst statements made by people supposedly on their side in the debate, so that they either look bad or have to distance themselves from their allies.

I don’t think I can respond in any way that’s less banal than the after-dinner speeches on Friday; but I would say: We have serious issues before us, such as what to do in Iraq. Especially when the issues are complex and difficult and there are no good answers, it is extremely tempting to conduct the debate by proxy–attacking Limbaugh and MoveOn (and Scooter Libby) instead of proposing and defending courses of action. The rhetorical temperature inevitably rises, and people start crossing what Senator Cornyn called “historic line[s] of decency.” They attack generals, claim that soldiers aren’t soldiers, and so on. But these lines of decency are vague and disputed, so there are all kinds of opportunities to find inconsistencies in the other side’s position. How can a Senator vote to condemn MoveOn but not Limbaugh? How can a university invite Ahmadinejad but not Duke? And so on, endlessly.

I fail to see how any of this serves the republic. In fact, if I were a Democratic Member of Congress, I’d be inclined to abstain on an anti-Limbaugh resolution, saying: “Enough is enough. We could spend the rest of the session finding stupid statements to denounce on a tit-for-tat basis. There’s enough stupidity on all sides of the political debate to keep this body permanently busy with resolutions. Why don’t we actually decide what to do about Iraq?”

sclerosis

Does it ever seem to you as if the United States, having grown in relative domestic peace and stability since 1945, is now choking on itself like an old lilac bush that nobody trims? I am trying to avoid a medical cliché, but surely we are clogging our arteries, letting toxins build in our organs; softening, sagging, and losing our will.

For example, our major manufacturing industries cannot generate decent jobs, in part because they seem unable to innovate, and in part because they are carrying the expense of health insurance for their workers and retirees. For all our firms and households, the health system is amazingly expensive, yet it is riddled with inefficiency, error, and inequality. The technology is impressive; the incentives are perverse.

We choose where we live on the basis of the quality of the schools, which (in turn) is mostly a function of the affluence of the people who live around them. We thus sort ourselves by privilege and leave a substantial minority with dismal prospects.

The neighborhoods with the failing schools are often dominated by the sale of illegal drugs. Perhaps our drug policies reduce the tonnage of narcotics that we consume as a people, but at the cost of violence and rampant incarceration in the very places that begin with the fewest resources.

Our colleges and universities serve mainly to sort people by social class and to confer advantages on the already advantaged. As a side business, they run quasi-professional football and basketball teams.

Our congressional districts are “rotten boroughs,” gerrymandered to prevent competition. Our very land is planted with corn and soybeans that are turned into artificial products, all because our taxes subsidize particular crops while funding agribusinesses to lobby to preserve their advantages. Our bodies are glutted with the refined sugars that the land yields at our expense. While we chew, we sit and watch screens on which tawdry spectacles are interrupted only by incessant advertising for disposable goods that pile up in landfills. We borrow from abroad, burn mountains of carbon, send our young overseas to fight in lost causes, and toss away a trillion dollars on an optional war.

These times demand serious work from all of us, and leaders who call for us to contribute.

the drawbacks of thinking about discrete educational programs

I gave a speech this morning (early this morning) to recipients of federal grants for service-learning. People in the audience run programs that meet the criteria of the Learn & Serve America program: they provide a certain amount of community service to each child, connect the service to academic work on the same topic, etc. This is the dominant way that we think about education today: as combinations of programs that can each be defined according to general criteria. Their average impact can then be measured (holding other factors constant), and we can decide to fund, require, reward, or test only the types of programs that we think work. See the What Works Clearinghouse for the quintessence of this approach.

This was also the approach we used in writing The Civic Mission of Schools report (2003), which identified six “promising practices” for civic education: classes on American history and civics; moderated discussion of current issues; extracurricular activities; student voice (i.e., honoring students’ opinions about school policies); simulations of legislation, diplomacy, and courts; and service-learning (i.e., combinations of community service with academic study). Since 2003, the evidence of positive effects from service-learning has increased.

However, as I told this morning’s audience, there are several pitfalls to basing policy on service-learning, or any such “method,” “approach,” or “practice”:

1. Practices that are institutionalized and defined receive the most support, even if they are not the most important. In our field, two of the “promising practices” in civic education get most of the attention: social studies classes and service-learning programs. I think that’s because they have budget lines (albeit too small) and job titles. In contrast, there’s very little organized advocacy in favor of student voice in schools or extracurricular activities, because no one has a powerful self-interest in advocating for them.

2. There may be a risk that schools check off one or two of the promising practices and consider themselves to be meeting their civic missions. There is no research that allows us to say that particular combinations of practices work better than one program or another. But my gut tells me that you need a comprehensive approach. If, for example, you offer a single service-learning project but everything else about the school “teaches” the kids that they are not active and responsible citizens, it’s hard to believe the service-learning course will work. Certainly, the effects of social studies classes and service-learning programs, while statistically significant, are not very large.

3. Such practices have to be done well. We should be concerned with quantity, quality, and equality. Quantity means how many kids get the opportunity. Quality means how good it is. And equality means how evenly is it distributed. There is a tendency for service-learning to degenerate into pretty meaningless exercises and for the high-quality opportunities to reach only the students who are bound for college.

4. Service-learning and other discrete educational programs need to be connected to much broader purposes or they will become ends in themselves. Service-learning can be connected to two ambitious movements:

  • The effort to redefine adolescence as a time of positive opportunity and contribution, not as a time of risk.
  • The effort to reform society by getting young people involved in changing institutions for the better.

    • If we merely offer service-learning because research studies find that it has positive effects on test scores or behavior, it will be stripped of its essential purpose and will degenerate. This is what happened, in my opinion, to the curricular innovations of the Progressive Era.