Forbes in 2000?
To the Editor:
In his excellent article "The Moral Basis of a Free Society" (Nov.–Dec. 1997), Steve Forbes, in discussing abortion, writes, "In a democracy, we cannot impose; we must persuade." In writing later about drug legalization, he in effect says, though he does not use these words, "Society cannot persuade, it must impose." Which statement, I would ask, is the more appropriate part of "the moral basis of a free society"?
Milton Friedman, Senior Research Fellow Hoover Institution, Stanford, Calif.
To the Editor:
Steve Forbes is a bit muddled on one point. Progressivism is not the morally regenerating force he seems to suggest. Progressivism is the opposite of moral. It is a poison to the body politic and antithetical to the principles of republican self-government.
Progressivism seeks to relieve individuals of their traditional moral, social, and familial duties in exchange for direct, sweeping, "rational" control by scientific-bureaucratic elites. Progressive "reforms" such as the direct election of senators and the citizen initiative have not made America more moral. They have made our politics less deliberate and more passionate, and have shifted power from local communities to Washington, with its alphabet-soup of scientific bureaucracies and the attendant entrenched interests.
It is no accident that the direct election of senators, which Forbes likes, was part of the same political program as the graduated income tax, which he doesn’t. The Progressives knew what they were doing. They thought that the founders’ Constitution was fatally flawed. Among other things, they wanted federalism smashed. And to do this, they needed a graduated income tax (the 16th Amendment) to increase federal revenue, and the direct election of senators (the 17th Amendment) to expand federal power. It was the moralistic rhetoric of people such as Roosevelt that helped lull the American people into consenting to these two radical changes to their sacred constitutional text, despite George Washington’s ancient plea that we "resist with care the spirit of innovation upon its principles, however specious the pretexts."
The result is a federal government that bribes the states with their own citizens’ money, shackles them with intolerable mandates, forbids them from curbing such crimes as abortion and pornography, and now threatens to nationalize even those most domestic of concerns, health and education.
The moral regeneration of American society will require, ultimately, more significant reforms than anything Forbes currently advocates. Besides a tempering of the Supreme Court’s activism, it will also require an eventual purging from the Constitution of its Progressive taint. Ten words should do the trick: "The 16th and 17th articles of amendment are hereby repealed."
Dean Clancy, Alexandria, Va.
To the Editor:
Steve Forbes’s article was worthy of a future president. I am troubled, however, by this oxymoron: The notion of freedom to which he subscribes includes government control over abortion and doctor-assisted suicide. Should these actions not fall into the category of secured rights reserved for citizens to decide for themselves? In a limited government that protects basic freedoms, how can he justify interference in these personal freedoms? While I agree with his arguments on abortion and assisted suicide, I would never force these views on others—these are matters between individuals and their God, not their government.
Some of these matters should be limited by government to protect all of us, but the government to which his article subscribes should not interfere with personal decisions as long as they do not affect the public good. It seems to me that the "moral basis of a free society" is a government that secures the right of people to be morally responsible for their decisions.
Frank Alexander, Colorado Springs, Colo.
The Reading Wars
To the Editor:
I write to congratulate Tyce Palmaffy on his excellent coverage of the "reading wars" in his article "See Dick Flunk" (Nov.–Dec. 1997). I also wish to trace the roots of the rejection of phonics to well before Horace Mann. Its most visible origins are best seen in the influence of philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau. The rejection of phonics is intertwined with the rejection of most of the other approaches to teaching children subjects that require considerable measures of drill, repetition, and practice. The rejection of phonics went hand-in-hand with the growth of "progressive education." Horace Mann, John Dewey, A.S. Neill, and Margaret Mead didn’t attack phonics per se. Rather, they attacked the memorization of such information as multiplication tables, mathematical formulas, the alphabet, and the parts of speech, as well as the practice of handwriting.
Rousseau’s didactic novel Emile expressed his view that education is not imparting knowledge to a child but drawing out what is already in the child. Anyone familiar with a biography of Rousseau and his autobiographical Confessions can see his philosophy as a monumental effort to rationalize his own quite miserable, undisciplined, and immoral life. He described his boyhood character as indolent, irritable, and unprincipled. He stole, lied, and played dirty tricks. He was fired from all the many jobs he held except for those from which he simply walked away. Throughout his life he was in and out of difficulties as a result of his classic psychopathic personality.Rousseau’s ideal society then was one in which people like himself could easily thrive. Rousseau did pretty much as he liked whenever he felt like it. He fathered a number of illegitimate children and promptly had them put into foundling asylums, yet he wrote in Emile, "He who cannot fulfill the duties of a father has no right to become such." Rousseau saw schooling as a device to help human beings in their natural revolt against civilization.
Rousseau’s "philosophy of education" was institutionalized at England’s Summerhill School during the 1920s. Its philosophy included these statements: "The aim of education is to work joyfully and find happiness" and "Lessons are optional"—and that included the alphabet.
This progressive view of education has inflicted horrendous damage upon the literacy of America. I would add, however, that similar notions are to blame for the fact that my university students have trouble with decimals, fractions, and ratios: Educators want to rid the schools of any learning activities that are not "child-centered" and fun. The "look-say" method was first developed early in the 19th century by Thomas H. Gallaudet, the founder of the Hartford Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb, for the teaching of its inmates. Horace Mann adopted the method in Massachusetts in 1836 because it eliminated the "drudgery" and "tyranny" of the alphabetic method.
Five years later, a group of Boston schoolmasters produced an incisive, book-length critique of the "look-say" method and won a year-long battle with the State Board, allowing them to return to the alphabetical-phonetic method in the Boston schools. But the seeds of "look-say" were carefully nurtured by Mann and his followers in the teacher-training colleges. When resistance had waned and as these "traditionalist" schoolmasters retired, they were replaced by the thoroughly indoctrinated products of Mann’s teachers colleges.
James Lee, Prof. of Bus. Management emeritus, Ohio University, Athens, Ohio
To the Editor:
In "See Dick Flunk," yet another journalist shows that phonics is the best way to teach reading (surprise!), and is amazed at why there is so much resistance to it among educators.
The reason is that teachers themselves find teaching this stuff boring. They hate correcting the same old exercises and spending time on the same old drills year after year. So they project their boredom onto the kids and say that the kids hate this and don’t learn from it. Notice also that it’s just as boring to teach teachers how to teach this stuff, and so the teachers nowadays never even learn it.
The result is that they are in denial. Research tells them that kids do learn from the boring stuff, and learn better, but they refuse to believe the research, because it would mean doing something that they don’t want to do. So they invent fantasies that if they "facilitate" learning or teach things they themselves are interested in, like environmentalism or multiculturalism, the kids will learn to read and calculate by osmosis and when the bright ones perform well in spite of the roadblocks to sensible learning the teachers put up, they say, "See? We were right!"
The underlying assumption is that if the teacher is interested, the students will learn better. That is true, but the interest is misplaced. They have to be interested first and foremost in what the students need to know, and in making sure that they’re as well prepared as possible to face life as adults. Fun and excitement are fine, but secondary to this, because what a student wants and likes and what a student needs are often two very different things.
George A. Blair, Cincinnati, Ohio
To the Editor:
Tyce Palmaffy’s "See Dick Flunk" was a fabulously well-written piece. Not only educators are unaware of most of the research cited, so are the rest of us. Certainly I was unaware—-and all this time I thought the NIH was wasting money!
Gregg Shepherd, via e-mail
Battle of the Sexes
To the Editor:
I read with extreme displeasure Elizabeth Arens’s article "The Gender Refs" (Nov.–Dec. 1997). For Arens to blame Title IX and women’s sports for the cutting of men’s collegiate sports is unfair and inaccurate. It should be noted that Title IX does not require the elimination of any sports opportunities for men. There are many other options that colleges and universities can use to keep all of their men’s sports programs operating while achieving Title IX-mandated gender equity. The Women’s Sports Foundation recommends a few: Use gender equity as an opportunity to raise new funds for the entire athletic department through targeting a new demographic; reduce expenditures across the entire athletic program by requiring all sports to use a smaller piece of the financial pie; reduce costs uniformly across an entire athletic conference; or move into a lower and less expensive competitive division. Cutting opportunities for students to participate in an educational activity should be the last alternative that any athletic department considers.
Institutions choosing to compete in Division I athletics, the most competitive division in the National Collegiate Athletic Association, must be sure they can afford to field teams at this level and comply with federal law. To remain a Division I school while cutting men’s sports is a decision to value the ego and status of Division I more than the opportunity for male athletes to participate in the sports they love.
Donna Lopiano, Executive Director Women’s Sports Foundation, East Meadow, N.Y.
Elizabeth Arens responds:
My article made it very clear that Title IX as written does not require the elimination of any sports opportunities for men. The interpretation of Title IX by federal courts and the Office of Civil Rights, not the actual statute, is responsible for establishing a requirement for strict proportionality between male and female athletes as the key standard for compliance with Title IX.
This standard, while not demanding that schools eliminate male athletes, often leaves them with no choice. Collegiate athletic departments are forced by the proportionality requirement to choose between adding women’s teams and eliminating men’s teams.
Donna Lopiano suggests several alternatives that she claims would enable schools to avoid eliminating teams. She should be credited for recognizing that a problem exists, but her implication that schools have not tried these methods is itself unfair and inaccurate. They do not rush to eliminate teams, for fear of offending alumni and students, but they have done so at an alarming rate anyway. In my view, that suggests that Lopiano’s solutions have proved insufficient. For example, fundraising for women’s sports remains difficult. Since women’s teams have been established only recently, there is no base of older, wealthier alumni. It may take another 20 years for this "new demographic" to develop.
Lopiano suggests that financially strapped Division I schools drop to a lower division. But more than "ego and status" undergirds a school’s desire to remain in Division I. Division I represents the highest level of competition in collegiate sports. Moving longstanding Division I teams down a level would force them to compete against lesser teams and would limit their ability to attract top high-school athletes. This, in turn, would further undermine their fundraising efforts and cut the revenue Division I sports bring in, which enable the school to support nonrevenue sports.
Furthermore, NCAA Division II or Division III status does not shield men’s teams. The 1997 NCAA Gender Equity Study found that male athletes at Division II and Division III schools suffered nearly as many losses as athletes at Division I schools. Shedding Division I status is hardly the panacea Lopiano suggests. Restoring Title IX to its original function as an anti-discrimination statute would be a much better solution.
Already There
To the Editor:
As Mark Herring points out in his article "Virtual Veritas" (Nov.–Dec. 1997), the Internet is a potentially important archive of conservative and libertarian ideas. This potential, however, is already more of a reality than Herring suggests.
For example, there’s already a growing library of complete "e-texts" of great books on-line: classics such as The Federalist Papers, Wealth of Nations, Reflections on the Revolution in France, Democracy in America, Frederic Bastiat’s The Law, Lord Acton’s History of Freedom, and the collected works of Thomas Jefferson and John Locke; modern classics such as The Roosevelt Myth by John T. Flynn and Anthem by Ayn Rand; and current texts such as the Cato Handbook for Congress and The Heritage Foundation’s Why America Needs a Tax Cut.
Heritage’s own Town Hall Web site (www.townhall.com) and our organization’s Free-Market.Net (www.free-market.net) are two examples of Internet services that concentrate on coordinating the efforts of other individuals and organizations. The materials can be produced by anyone, and they can be found anywhere on the Internet. In fact, the decentralization of the actual data is part of what makes the World Wide Web what it is.
As of the day I write this, Free-Market.Net’s database includes 1,163 resources, all organized and annotated by hand for easy searching and browsing. These resources were seen by more than 17,000 different people in October.
In a very real sense, Web sites such as Free-Market.Net are already the Internet’s free-market archivists and librarians.
