BAD GRAMMAR, WORSE EXAMPLES

NY Times columnist Tom Friedman offers a powerful, and pointed indictment of American education.  Unfortunately, he undermines his own points.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/19/opinion/sunday/friedman-obamas-homework-assignment.html?hp&rref=opinion

Friedman cites journalist and author Amanda Ripley, 2 heart-breaking, spirit-broken classroom teachers and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to indict public education as the intellectual nullifier it has become.  He frames his discussion with a familiar question: “Are we falling behind as a country in education, not just because we fail to recruit the smartest college students to become teachers or reform-resistant teachers’ unions, but because of our culture today: too many parents and too many kids just don’t take education seriously enough and don’t want to put in the work needed today to really excel?” 

Such a run-on catalog would hardly seem to need additional culprits, but I’d like to suggest a few, among them the columnist himself.

America has been in measurable competitive decline for more than a generation now, and it is useful that Friedman and his sources offer such dramatic and appalling evidence of how and why.  But -- Friedman’s sentence is not just too long and rambling (an offense I commit far too frequently – so I’m an “expert”), it gets an F for basic grammar.  The clause “because we fail to recruit the smartest college students to become teachers or reform-resistant teachers’ unions,” cannot be allowed to stand.  

As Tom and his vigilant copy editors at the Times know, those last 3 words dangle like a parasitic fungus off the trunk of his sentence.  The all too automatic (did someone trigger the infamous Column Generator?) reference to bad unions is in no way parallel to the preceding phrase.  If it had been written “because of our failure to recruit,” the logic might not have been improved, but at least the grammar would have passed muster, especially, if the second phrase had been changed to either “because of reform-resistant,” or “the reform-resistance of” teachers’ unions.”

But Friedman didn’t write that, and his editors, if there were any, didn’t correct a fourth-graders’ error in the copy, and the rhetorical mess got published by America’s “newspaper of record.”

Thus, the Times’ writer and its editorial process actually enacted for us what’s wrong with Friedman’s climactic portion of blame: “because of our culture today: too many parents and too many kids just don’t take education seriously enough and don’t want to put in the work needed today to really excel?”

Instead of saying, students are often led to lower their own performance standards when respected writers like himself, and fabled systems like the NY Times’ copy-editing go wrong, Friedman blames America’s disastrous failure in education on “our culture” and parents and kids.  This sounds to me just like the argument that the Great Recession was caused by “the culture of Wall Street” and improvident homebuyers? 

Sure, blame “the cloud” and the victims.

But what makes “culture,” and how are its malign aspects distributed to people?  In America, culture for the past 60 years has been created, defined and spread through the mass media, especially by the great elite institutions of those media, like the NY Times and the television networks, and the people who work there.

It is those elite institutions, and their star reporters, columnists, editors and publishers who cultured moral failure through their often indiscriminate celebrations and rare critical examinations of the ascendance of, not a “culture,” but a cohort of identifiable corporate criminals. 

No one seemed to notice when these managerial superstars serially shifted money away from contracted responsibilities to pay for their workers’ pensions and medical care to exploding executive salaries and shareholder profits, or in the case of one of the great stars of 20^th Century business management, GE’s Jack Welch, when his company poisoned the Hudson River.  He and his equally culpable corporate underlings did it, but none of them went to jail, or even paid a penny of personal earnings.

More and more blatantly, over the past 40 years, America’s media, and its “top” academies of finance, business, political “science,” economics, and ethics have all actively promulgated, or silently assented to, again, not a “culture of financial impunity,” but a series of individual perpetrations of fraud and theft, obsessive self-interest, and unbridled greed by elite institutions and their highly-paid leaders, all at the expense of their customers and the American public. 

When the NY Times cheaps out on, or disempowers lowly sub-editors, and publishes avoidable illiteracy like Friedman’s, or cranky, vicious inaccuracy like Bill Keller’s recent rant against blogger Lisa Bonchek Adams, it robs and cheats its customers as blatantly as hedge fund villain John Paulsen and his Goldman Sachs collaborator Lloyd Blankfein robbed the sucker-buyers of the made-to-fail Abacus “investment opportunity.”

One more time, this has nothing to do with “culture,” and everything to do with personal failure and malfeasance.  Blaming “the culture” means blaming no one and rewarding misbehavior.

To say, subprime mortgage customers were equally to blame for taking the word of corrupted rating services and trusting the reputations of a big Wall Street money shops like Goldman Sachs is simply wrong.  And so is blaming a “culture” of parents and teachers who can’t seem to get students to do their homework. 

Yes, the home-buying schnooks should have known better the limits on their wealth and income, and yes, many parents and school systems need to do better in instilling in their children the will to work hard and learn much.  But, just as it’s tough to say, “I can’t afford this,” when you’re being told by “experts” that you can, and all the world seems to be on a go-go buying spree based on an unsustainable spike of rising house prices; it’s tough to convince your kid to do his homework, when every day, the authorities in the media industry tolerate sloppy errors or celebrate “winners” who substitute marketing for competence and bluff for preparation or knowledge.  (Democrats and Republicans may each see in the last sentence the recent President of their choice. If politicians got “Board scores,” theirs’ would be slipping even more drastically than the students rated by the testing services.)

Why would anyone who watches Fox News or MSNBC or the more august networks’ Sunday morning Washington talkfests suspect that governance (or journalism) consists not of bloviation, but hard work?  Why would anyone cognizant of Tom Friedman’s fame or salary believe they need to “dot every i and cross every t?”

It isn’t a “cultural choice” to shift budget money from teacher’s salaries or training to buy  standardized tests or common core curricula, it’s a bureaucratic method of ass-covering.  As if a rote list of lessons, and a close count of check marks on worksheets could help students learn how to think, and how to work with others, which are, after all, what schools are for.

It’s not the culture, but the political hacks who perpetrate these frauds, seeking to prove to their constituents that they are “doing the right thing,” when, in fact, they know no more about education than they do about Iraq or Afghanistan.  The unending repetition of these ignorance-based choices is clear evidence that some folks haven’t been doing their homework.

We all need to do our homework, and hold ourselves responsible to throw the political bums out and send the financial crooks to jail. Learning precisely who did wrong, how and why, are all necessary steps to making things better.  It’s not America’s culture, but us, who need to set the better example.

JOURNALISM AND INFORMATION IN CHINA AND UKRAINE

The news about the news in China is anything but good.  I first learned about it close to 2 weeks ago, when my China mentor, and the former Assistant Dean of the Journalism School at Shantou University where I taught the fall semester in 2008, sent the following news clip, a story by Teddy Ng in the authoritative Hong Kong-based newspaper, the South China Morning Post (SCMP)

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1385380/propaganda-officials-head-top-tier-chinese-journalism-schools

“The Communist Party's propaganda authority is planning to tighten its control over major journalism schools across the country and increase Marxist education at the universities,” Ng reported.

“Three people familiar with the plan said senior local propaganda officials would become heads or high-level officials of journalism programs at 10 top-tier universities, in an attempt to ensure their teaching is in line with authorities' directives.”

Leaders of the Chinese Communist Party have hardly hidden their plan, which is to spread soon from 10 elite J-schools to all places where Journalism is taught in China.

The story had actually been reported by Japan’s Kyodo News Agency almost a week earlier.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/kyodo-news-international/131222/china-tighten-control-universities-journalism-schools

Kyodo’s story cited a party source on what triggered the J-School takeover.  “President Xi Jinping senses a crisis ‘at universities and in the mass media where reformists (who support such values as democracy) have the most influence.’”

Several reports agree that officials from the party's Central Propaganda Department will, in Kyodo’s words, “take over the top posts of their journalism schools, and also beef up the media's role in serving as the ‘throat and tongue’ of the Communist Party.”

Herford, whose long career in journalism education was preceded by a distinguished record as a senior producer and bureau chief at CBS News, was properly horrified.

“I feel for our former students and those who might have been our future students,” Peter emailed.  “This latest step cements changes that have been creeping forward. They include the seven "no’s", a list of basics that are no longer to be taught in Chinese universities. These include Human Rights concepts and many of the foundations of literature and history (expunging foreign and particularly Western influences).”

According to SCPM’s Ng, the creeps have been advancing since 2001, when party hard-liners took control of journalism education at Shanghai’s Fudan University.one of the top schools in the country.  Back then, Ng reported, “Jiefang Daily quoted then Shanghai deputy party secretary Gong Xueping as saying the arrangement would ensure local propaganda authorities utilized their strength in leading and organizing the mass media.”

And sure enough, today, Ng said, “The current head of the university's journalism program is Song Chao , who is a deputy propaganda director for Shanghai.”

But today, a dozen years after the CCP put its foot down at Fudan, the party propagandists’ plan for control is widely predicted to be ineffective.

Ng quoted Li Datong, a former editor with China Youth Daily: "’The journalists will memorise some lines of Marxist thought but in the end they won't care too much about it,’"    

5 days later, Ng wrote that the CCP crackdown would extend beyond Journalism, to everything taught at China’s universities, and to what the Chinese people will see on their major broadcast networks “specific programmes for spreading socialist ideologies, as well as more public service advertisements.”

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1389382/communist-party-orders-core-socialist-values-curriculum

But will President Xi’s dictates make a difference? Ng cited another skeptic, Zhang Ming, a political science professor at Renmin University, another top university in Beijing, "’The question remains whether the public will buy it. It is impossible to carve them into the brain’."

Xi’s problem is simple: the world of information is complex, even in China, where the government and Party are just 2 of thousands of would-be sculptors, carving away at the public brain.  Cracking down on J-Schools or all schools, lobotomizing the content of mass media, is a sad old story, and a lot of the sadness and frustration is inside the government/party power structure, which still feels besieged. 

Still, like Peter, and some other former visiting teachers at Shantou, I was pretty disheartened by the news.  Until I saw the following response my wife Amy got from a Chinese friend who is both a professional translator, and a volunteer in a 20-year campaign to give all Chinese access to the significant ideas current in the world, by publishing translations on the internet.

He wrote:  The crackdown is “routine, rather than news.”  CCP policing of the media, “particularly in terms of politic issues,” he wrote, has turned “most Chinese journalists into mere zombie followers who retweet everything the Party says.

 

“Luckily,” he added, “we are not living in North Korea. The best thing that ever happened is the internet. I don't have a TV and I subscribe to no newspaper. I look out to the world through my optic fiber, in which way I can get information from both sides and make my own judgment.”

 

Which was, he said, “I am sure the CCP, no matter how hard they try to tighten their grip on journalism, has weaker influence today on intellectuals and the economically advanced areas in this country.  For journalists, it is just one more test to pass, for which they have already been inoculated during their school days.”

 

Which reminded me of my own wonderful experience at Shantou, and left me convinced he’s got it right. Even 5 years ago, the Journalism school, like every school at the University, had a Party Secretary, who was largely unseen and unheard, but could pop out at any moment with some annoying judgment or admonition.  I was warned (and had already assumed) every class had an assigned Party snitch.

 

Kyodo reported, as early as last May, “university officials in Beijing and Shanghai were saying that Chinese authorities had banned the discussion in university classes of seven subjects (Peter Herford’s “7 No’s.”)  including "freedom of the press," "citizen rights," "universal values" implying respect for human rights and democracy, and "historical mistakes of the Communist Party."

In 2008, there was no such explicit ban, and I regularly discussed journalism’s role in society using all those forbidden concepts, except the last one, on which my students had nothing to learn from me: they were already experts.  Clearly, someone ratted me out to the Dean, who counseled me to “stop talking about China and human rights, and just teach them what you know about journalism.”

I kept to my prior teaching plan, and never heard another word.

Here are 2 things my students taught me (here I paraphrase and combine sources): 

(1) “Journalism in China is a regulated profession.  To work, you must be a member of the Party and go regularly to meetings on party policy and propaganda.  This is true for us as students and will be true for us as journalists for as long as we work.”

“How do you deal with that?” I asked several students.  Their answers made for Lesson  (2)  “It’s all bullshit and everyone knows it.  You join the Party.  You go to meetings.  You nod your head, and go home or back to the office.  Then you do your best to give people real information and hope you don’t piss anybody off too much.  The whole thing is a pain, and it hurts us and the country, but you’d be surprised how much gets through.”

I was surprised at the results of a game my students and I played every week.  I would name a story that had appeared on a portion of the internet which I could see because I was a visiting professor, but which never appeared on a server they could use, and ask them to have read it by my next class.  Every time, every student passed the test.  For them, as for hundreds of millions of Chinese netizens every day, the news does get through.

Which brings me to another country where the government is trying desperately to control information and citizens alike: Ukraine.

Over the past year, the Soviet-style governance of President Viktor Yanukovych has asserted increasing direct and indirect control over the nation’s news media, and, recently, has stepped up thuggish violence against opposition reporters and demonstrators.  But all this wave of authoritarianism has produced is a backlash of  popular commitment to opposition, and widespread use of new and old communication networks.  Yanukovych, like President Xi in China, is not just failing to cut the flow of ideas, he is failing to suppress the demand for reform.

In Kyiv, the worse the government behaves, the more people know about it.  It has now been documented; the government’s own violence produces bigger crowds of demonstrators and more definitive demands for reform.  

A recent blog post in the Washington Post by Oxford University political scientist Olga Onuch passed along the results from ongoing polling of demonstrators in Kyiv.  They  suggest that a lot of journalists and activists have been mis-describing what’s going on there. 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/01/02/social-networks-and-social-media-in-ukrainian-euromaidan-protests-2/

For one thing, Onuch reported, more than 1200 interviews show, the protests are not a youth movement.  “While many reports have championed Ukrainian students and youths for being the predominant actors in the protests, the majority of the respondents (69 percent) are in fact older than 30. The average age of the Ukrainian protester in Kyiv is closer to 36, with approximately 24 percent of participants older than 55.”

What the crowds are is diverse: students, academics, workers, and retired people; Orthodox and Catholic believers and atheists.  One characteristic of the people on the streets of the Ukraine capitol that should be shockingly bad news for the government is how many of those polled are newly declared dissidents.

Onuch reported, “A surprising 38 percent of current protesters did not participate in previous protests, and 37 percent did not participate in the “Orange Revolution” [of 2004.] 

“This is, of course, not to say that students, youths and activists are not a significant group,” Onuch reported, “but they do not represent the majority of participants.”

The diverse protesters against the government have, Onuch’s poll revealed, definably diverse goals.

“The students and youth under 30 use more media savvy language of ‘EU accession,’ ‘global human rights’ and employ abstract concepts such as ‘freedom.’

But, Onuch wrote, “The 30 to 45 year-old protesters focus more on practical matters like ‘economic security,’ ‘better opportunities for their children,’  and their desire to live in a ‘normal, European democracy.’  They insist that their presence lets the regime known the ‘voters are here.’

“The protesters over 55 explain that they ‘have lived through many injustices’ and that because they are ‘retired, [they] can protest in the place of the young, who have to work and raise families.’ Thus, they see themselves as guardians of the protests, when others cannot be there.”

And while social media are important, informing people about the time and place of manifestations and framing issues, they are just part of a diverse set of communications inputs Ukrainians draw on, inputs that, as in China, are moving more and more from the policed official media to the internet. 

Asked how they follow the protest campaign, 48% of those polled said they watched on broadcast TV; but, already 41% said they have shifted their allegiance and now watched internet news channels instead.

Internet influence could be seen in the way personal contacts outweighed media contacts, including social media. Almost everyone told the pollsters they got political information from their friends, most of it from computers, tablets and mobile phones: 46% by text messages, 30% via email, versus 23% by telephone.  Asked if they responded to protest invitations posted on social media, 10.4% said yes, they had responded to an invitation on Facebook, 14% from Russian competitor VKontakte.

It is in a form of “elite communication,” that Onuch said the polls showed important influence from the social networks. “Our analysis of demands (as reflected in slogans and signage), is still very preliminary, [but] it does seem to follow certain patterns of words mentioned on Twitter, Facebook, chain e-mails and internet news sites. We have noticed a pattern whereby a sign or slogan first goes viral on Facebook, and then seems to show up more often in protester signs. While making any serious conclusions from this method is complicated, first impressions point to an “Internet-to-the-streets” directionality of claims and framing of demands.”

In China, this pattern has long been observed, although the word patterns are closer to coding than sloganeering.  Although mass media coverage of the Arab Spring was long-delayed and closely-crimped in China, it soon acquired an internet code name, “Jasmine,” which soon became a banished word from the Chinese internet.  Banished, but not forgotten.

As the world changes, communication, social and journalistic, changes with it.  Usually, it is the repressive government that can’t keep up.

Will that mean political change?  The attitude I get from people in China is typically patient and confident.  Just as most your people assume it is inevitable that the 21^st Century will be China’s (just as the 20^th was America’s), they also assume, slowly, the unstoppable spread of popular knowledge about the ideas and options available outside China will force the government in Beijing to serious reform.

Right now, most of the global evidence suggests, the coalescence of public recognition of the realities of the world into greater public participation in political and economic power is a long way off.

Great troughs of information, most of it introduced to the region by Al Jazeera (Arabic), and the implicit imperative for viewers to sort it out for themselves, are what set off the Arab Spring.  Today, a few short years later, “people power” in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria is being crushed, the old-fashioned way, under the boot heels of unpopular state force (except in Libya, where the state, as well as the people, are prey to the new-fashioned pandemonium of well-armed, poorly-disciplined independent militias.)

Long-term, I’m betting on information and the innumerable ways people devise to obtain it

The master-pessimist Herman Melville unforgettably wrote: “What like a bullet can undeceive?”

To which I reply, “What like a tyrant can unleash communication?”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE END OF E PLURIBUS UNUM?

"E Pluribus Unum." "Out of many, one,"--  "Out of many peoples, we are one America," that's the way our national motto was translated to me in grade school.  And it made perfect sense.  Out of my Russian-Polish-Jewish grandparents came I, out of Africa, slavery, and, despite at the time when I was a kid in Richmond, Virginia, enforced separation and inequality, came my back-fence contemporaries and closest friends,  Elizabeth, Benjamin, Leonard, Albert, Johnny and barely-born Richard Lambert, all of us every bit as American as my playmates Aldie Dudley, David and Billy Haslett, and Freddie Ciucci, the first three descended from Virginia's majority White, post-colonial English Protestant families, the latter an Italian-American Catholic.

We were all proud of our plural backgrounds, and all emphatically considered ourselves part of a whole -- the "one."  This is an ideology we absorbed at home and in public school.  American unity was a hallmark concept of every Memorial or Independence Day speech or celebration.  Even the down-to-the-wire segregationist Richmond Times-Dispatch counted and mourned all the casualties of the ongoing Korean War.  You'd have to read the obituaries to tell Black from White.

The lessons of the Civil Rights Revolution to come started with "separation is inherently unequal, " then progressed slowly towards benchmarks of legal, social and opportunity equality.  The first, legal equality, adjusting for the imperfections apparently ineradicable from human experience, has been achieved, and the second and third equalities seemed within reach.  Just 5 years ago, Black home ownership was rising sharply, in cities, but even more so, in America's suburbs.  Both neighborhood acceptance and African-American wealth (for most of the American us, wealth accrues primarily through home equity) were on growing fast, against weakening resistance.

Then came The Great Recession of 2008, and the thing most Americans shared most intensely was fear.  And why not, with virtually all the world's media amplifying the self-interested cant of the very criminals responsible for the economic collapse: that the whole global economy was on the brink, that the collapse of today's market-makers would mean the end of the market itself.

Even worse, the media passively accepted the even more self-interested bankers' solution to the problem created by their own dishonesty and greed: swiftly liquidating old debt by rapidly foreclosing people's hard-won properties, letting "the market" reduce the value of a property, but not the value of the unpaid mortgage on it, while continuing to pay themselves unbelievably excessive salaries and even more ridiculous bonuses, apparently immunized against performance.

There was also little media recognition, much less analysis or dissent about the fact that this whole rotten system was being kept afloat by publicly subsidized credit. 

Thus did fear roll downhill, infecting those being forced out of their homes, and those who feared foreclosure, and those whose fear was that the wipeout of their equity would impoverish their retirement years, and those whose paychecks were threatened by the reduced amount of spending frightened people could permit themselves. Still, today, after a feeble and unsteady recovery almost universally tarted up by unquestioning coverage by the news media, a majority of Americans is legitimately afraid.

With the first flush of fear came desperation and the Darwinian imperative: save what you can, yourself, your family, the people you care about.

As for the Others?  Darwinism says "Fuck 'em."

Look at the popular politics of the years since 2008, they've become all about selective otherization, finding new categories of people to cut off from public benefits, from national embrace, to tell off -- "Fuck 'em."
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The media call this "extreme partisanship," but the fact is, neither political party has escaped intellectual and moral, much less policy paralysis, most of it driven by by self-defined purists bent on punishing a growing list of other people, at the expense of any concept of national interest, much less the old idea of "E Pluribus Unum," by which all of us were invested in the lives, liberties, and pursuit of happiness of all Americans.

Because they know the policies they promote are morally wrong, the excision of various people from the national fabric is almost always posed as fiscally necessary. But every time someone says, we're cutting some government service or program because "we can't afford it," what they're really saying is "Fuck 'em."

The "fringe benefits" for which workers, public and private, often gave up direct salary payment to achieve, only became unaffordable when municipalities, states, and employers failed to underwrite them.  When they did this, these public officials and corporate bosses silently, but effectively said of their employees, "Fuck 'em."

When their dishonest profligacy was publicly revealed, they said it again, "Fuck 'em," out loud, adding equally dishonestly, "We can't afford to do better."

Of course, not all government programs are well-conceived or well-executed, but real painstaking reform on that level is not what is being proposed or debated.  Few legislators, even fewer voters know any of the crucial details.  In both the Republican-driven, "bi-partisan" concept of "the sequester," not to mention its shallowly political instrumentation by the Democratic Obama administration, the message is clear: we don't care about the details of the cuts or the people affected by them, except as we can exploit them for political advantage. "Fuck 'em."

On reducing, in a time of widespread economic pain and instability, the food stamp program that contributes to (of course, it should insure) the nutrition and health of millions of American families, as well as broadening the market for American farmers and food processors, the debate between the parties, and the 2 Houses of Congress is about "how much?"  How much should we fuck 'em?

On denying to Native Americans even the bare protections from the broadscale "sequester" budget cuts afforded to virtually all other poor or marginalized Americans, there was neither significant division nor debate.  We "can't afford" to provide native Americans livable homes, or basic health or social services, so.... "Fuck 'em."

On restoring America's infrastructure to a level competitive with the airports, rail systems, road systems with those of Western Europe, the Persian Gulf, China or Japan, a project that would create jobs, improve public services and attract more tourists -- Congress says "can't afford it," and to the people who might do those jobs, and enjoy those services, profit from those foreign visitors, "Fuck 'em."

And speaking of staying globally competitive by making our health care and education services as good as those found in rest of the world's top-tier countries, we're more worried that someone might get more medical care than he can pay for than that he or she might die, more careful about squeezing the last dollar of loan principal or interest out of a college student than caring about the value educated people add to the national treasury and culture. 

Every day or week, month after month, year after year, our so-called "political leadership," whatever else they may disagree on, say in a single voice loud and clear, to everyone who needs any kind of help or accommodation or even encouragement from our once-collective American nation: Fuck 'em.

It does have a catchy, chesty sound to it, but somehow, I like E Pluribus Unum better as a motto for our nation to live by.