Chopping it all down
I had a nightmarish realization last night — that American education was worse than I thought, and it was all going in the wrong direction, which will have dire consequences for the next generation. I’ve been listening to the right-wing’s plans for our schools, and they are ugly. For one thing, they hate education and want to simply shut it down; they’ve put Linda McMahon in charge of the Department of Education, which is scheduled for elimination, and she is a horrible, hateful dimwit. Science is mostly gone. They think math is what you do to fill out your tax forms. History is being put in the hands of PragerU, a fake ‘college’ run by a bigot who has no background in education or history. Museums are being policed to make sure they say nothing unpleasant about America. Their vision of good schools stops at putting Bibles and the ten commandments in every classroom.
This is how they will maintain power, by making sure every child is fitted with blinkers from birth onwards.
It made me think about how I would support good educational policy.
Math. No, math is not about filling out a form, or learning about spreadsheets. Math is the great enabler of ideas. Students should learn that math is beautiful and fun, and is also a foundation for sound reasoning and logic — I know that in my case, learning basic principles of algebra and geometry, and quantitative reasoning in the sciences, opened up my brain and led to a flowering of interest in all kinds of scientific subjects.
Every grade school curriculum should culminate in an introductory understanding of calculus. Maybe that shouldn’t be a requirement for graduation — I’m well aware that a lot of students are terrified of mathematics — but we should at least aspire to improve on that. We do have, in our better schools, the idea of college-tracks, a series of classes that students should plan on take if they want to go to university. Unfortunately, my experience in recent years has been that even if they fail algebra, students think they are prepared for science at the college level. They’re not.
History and Civics. History is not about smooth upward trajectories to the perfection that is America today. History is about stuttering forwards and backwards through errors and tragedies to overcome terrible human failures. One of my high school history classes started with how the “founding fathers” done fucked up, compromising on basic human rights to get a short term victory, that led to the catastrophe of the Civil War. More of that please. Maybe one of the lessons of history is the ability to look back and see where we went wrong, so that maybe we realize that even “Great Men” are fallible and biased.
You won’t get that with the PragerU approach to history — they even whitewashed Christopher Columbus, one of the greatest monsters of our history.
Literature. Do right-wingers even read? I don’t think so.
I think our education has been hobbled by the Western Canon, which contains what modern minds would consider real klunkers. I know, they’re well-regarded for reasons, and if we studied them harder, maybe students would warm to them, but we have limited time and we need to get them enthused about learning. For instance, Darwin’s Origin is a gorgeous piece of Victorian literature…but I wouldn’t inflict it on students. Contemporary literature removes that roadblock of historical conventions, and is going to be more engaging on subjects of modern interest. There are few 19th century texts that have anything relevant to say about the current gay or black experience.
Turn the teachers loose to discuss books they are passionate about. If a teacher has a passion for Silas Marner, go for it. The key, though, is engagement, and there are ways to do that that don’t involved dogma.
Language. This would enrage the MAGAts, but we should be teaching Spanish from kindergarten on. I had grade school Spanish myself, and it didn’t take — we memorized a few rote phrases, but learned nothing about the structure of the language, how to assemble a sentence, how to engage in a conversation beyond learning how to ask where the library is. We learned the parts of speech in our English class, but nothing of the kind in Spanish. The goal should be that every kid be able to have a simple conversation on the playground in Spanish by the time they get to middle school.
We should be beyond our self-centered focus on just one language, English. We live in a hemisphere where most people speak Spanish (OK, also Portuguese), and where growing communities in the US are Hispanic, we should be obligated to be at least bilingual. I think I was short-changed by a system that treated an entire language spoken by our neighbors as negligible.
Science. I’m going to go against my own background on this one, but a little less focus on science in grade school is OK. I generally feel like I have to start at the beginning for my college biology classes, because their understanding is mostly superficial; what they did learn seems to have leaked in through their eyes and ears and then dribbled out their noses. That sounds harsh on the students, but what I do see that is encouraging is that they come in eager and ready to learn.
This is partly my bias, because the science classes I took in high school were mostly boring, empty noise that didn’t teach anything particularly fundamental. The one exception was my high school chemistry class, where the teacher ignored the expected curriculum and taught remedial math: estimation, quantitative measurement, logarithms, all that juicy stuff which actually proved useful throughout my career. Thanks, Mr Thompson!
The right-wing perspective on education is all about compelling kids to memorize a set of facts, a simplistic pattern, that doesn’t involve thinking at all. If we let them get away with it, we’re crippling the next generation. Don’t let them.
A week or so ago, I was at the local coffeeshop and overheard a conversation. A very earnest, serious conservative was talking to a young woman about parents’ rights — how the law must not interfere with parents’ ability to instruct their children about religion and politics, that parents have a right and a duty to pass on their values to their children, and it shouldn’t matter how weird and wrong they might be.
It was infuriating to listen to, but I didn’t speak up, I didn’t bother the pair, I just got more and more aggravated to the point where I just left the coffee shop rather than make a scene. All that was running through my head was a simple question:
What about the children’s rights?
Shouldn’t every child have the right to good information, a good educational framework, an opportunity to learn about other perspectives? Every thing I see about conservative education is a denial of ideas outside a narrow ideological focus, leading to a situation now where un-American ideas (where the conservative starts with a very limited version of what is American) are on the verge of being criminalized. And one of the ways they accomplish that is by treating children as property who can be rightfully indoctrinated with whatever stupidity their parents hold sacred.
It is probably not all that bad.
By the US constitution, public education is controlled by the states.
The funding from the Department of Education is only 8% of public K-12 budgets. Sure the states will miss it but it isn’t the end of the world.
And…If the Federal government abolishes the Department of Education and diverts that 8% to the billionaires, which is who will get it, then they have no leverage towards the states education.
The Red states will do a poor job of educating, which they would do anyway. They usually anchor the bottom of whatever statistics you look at.
The Blue states can just ignore the Federal government and put the effort into educating their children.
At this point, we aren’t looking for positive news.
We are trying to salvage what we can as the GOP tries to destroy the USA.
What the GOP is planning and doing is destroying the US Federal government.
CDC dead. NIH dead NSF dead, EPA dead, Department of Education dead. Medicaid dead Social Security dead Food Stamps dead Department of Energy dead and so on.
After the US central government is dead, what do they have left to offer the 50 states.
Nothing. Except US military troops and National Guard troops wandering around doing nothing.
What do they have for leverage? Threats to randomly shoot whoever is in front of them and that is about it.
Which means the 50 states are on the way to becoming the 50 de facto countries.
It’s already happening. The west coast states have set up their own CDC equivalent. etc.
This is “soft secession” and it is where we are going.
The Blue states aren’t completely stupid or helpless.
They’ve been in “Soft Secession” since Trump was inaugurated.
The Blue states have most of the population and 70% of the GDP. California alone is the fourth largest economy in the world.
All governments including dictatorships depend to some extent on the consent of the governed. Ask the USSR, Syria’s Assad, or the Shah of Iran how that works.
FWIW, the Red states have been in “Soft Secession” since they lost the War for Slavery in 1865.
The Blue states can do a lot by simply stalling, beating around the bush, and ignoring the Federal government.
I wouldn’t mind it if the universities started offering classes in how to ignore and evade the dysfunctional Federal government.
They could start by not allowing military recruiters access to high schools, which is the current practice.
A lot of conservative thought around children and education lacks even the most basic understanding of how children learn. For example, my parents were conservative and my dad taught me chess. He stopped playing it with me when I was in third grade because I began to win fairly often. They bought me a book on it that was a little too advanced and assumed I’d just get really good at chess. But I couldn’t even play it anymore because my dad felt like losing the chess game to me was too much like losing control.
They seemed a little confused when I lost interest in chess. They lacked even the most basic understanding and empathy for my situation. If they’d had any it might have allowed them to see the why I lost interst in a two player game I couldn’t play due to no one to play it with.
I see variations of this all the time when I look at conservative ideas around kids or education.
About science, IMO the abysmal level of science education is what gets the US to the place where “trisodium phosphate in Home Depot means it’s toxic”, “there are only two genders because it’s fifth grade biology”, and also “evolution is just a theory”.
Rote memory of scientific facts is not ideal (which I have first hand experience in China) but at least people accept evolutionary theory better and laugh at someone when they says “sodium chloride is toxic because it is a chemical”.
Learning a second language should be encouraged, but it would be more enlightening for children if they learned a non-European language. Teaching the local indigenous language would be good alternative to Spanish; the contrast in ideas would be much sharper than English/Spanish. Another language gives you another way to understand the world, but the difference in worldview between English and Spanish is small compared to that between a European language and a non-European one. Plus there’s that teaching indigenous languages would help repair the Spanish and Anglo attempts to eradicate indigenous culture.
Dude, math beyond the “ancient Greek” level – exponents and logarithms, differential and integral calculus, transforms, like Fourier and Laplace transforms were like a mind expanding drug for me.
No, I dont use these in my day to day life but that’s not the point. It’s no exaggeration to say just understanding stuff changes your perception of the world.
You’re right that at least calculus should be regarded as basic. It’s very simple. The slope of the curve; the area under the curve. At least conceptually that should be taught in high school.
Who said, “Don’t teach what to think; teach how to think”? Was that Sagan?
Anyway, yes. I was fortunate my education involved no explicit indoctrination, just learning and thinking and questioning. I would wish that for every child.
Hard agree. When I was a kid all the high school sitcoms, comedies, and so forth made me terrified of algebra. My mom had to take extra effort to convince me it wasn’t some monster outside my abilities.
Grade school is the time of life when children’s interest in science is at its peak.
Agreed. Calculus is much easier than the algebra through which one must get in order to arrive at it, though that algebra is an absolute necessity in order that calculus be done successfully and/or well. A secondary option for a higher-level terminal high-school mathematics course for which I often find myself advocating is linear algebra, but again, you need basic algebra first for that.
We had to read Frühlings Erwachen in school, and I’d say it is one of those works.
@mathman85
I might also add probability and statistics. Kids get some of it in 1-8, but a case can be made for it being both practical and easy to make engaging, because of how often students might see it outside the classroom.
(And for languages, I might offer American Sign Language. Part of taking a language should be about thinking about how language works, because even a fellow Indo-European language like Spanish does things in a different way than English. Thanks to a quirk of history, ASL derives from French Sign Language, in addition to the differences in grammar that come from using sign instead of sound as your basic unit of language. I’d be fine with it being a state or district level choice, even if they had to pick one: for instance, having Hawaii use Hawaiian as the standard second language for a cultural connection to the past, even if currently it is an endangered language.)
I saw a Tumblr post about math that had a teacher talking to a football player, and comparing high school math to the athletic training and conditioning an athlete goes through. Some of that is just to build up general physical fitness and athleticism: a football player will never need to lift static weights during a game, but muscle strength can help them play football.
I definitely agree on the language part. Learning a new language fundamentally teaches you a new way of thinking, even if you never get fluent with it. I’m Canadian, I was exposed to French all through school and through life because everything on store shelves has to be labelled in both languages, but I also took German in high school because it sounded interesting. And to this day I say that I learned more about the English language in my German class than I ever really did in my English class, which makes sense as English is basically a Danish/French hybrid. (Learning the German genitive case was how I realized why English uses apostrophe-s for possessives. It’s one of those little historical artifacts, just like there are a number of German words that pluralize just by changing the vowel sound, something which in English is only done by a few words like man->men.)
As was also in one of the other comments, fundamentally we should be more interested in teaching people how to think than what to think. Which, of course, is exactly what a lot of conservatives are trying to destroy: the idea that children might grow up to believe different things than their parents is anathema to them, and the idea that your average ‘peasant’ should need to think at all means a loss of societal control.
I, fortunately, had mostly good teachers. (Mostly. My main fifth grade teacher was… a nice enough guy, and wanted his students to enjoy learning, but he really had absolutely no idea what to do with myself and the other couple of students in the class who could probably have tested out of half the year. This was the guy who gave me a ‘B’ on an epic poem because he just couldn’t believe I had written it without outside help. But he was just useless rather than actively horrible.)
Granted, the fact that my mother was a kindergarten teacher and her father-in-law was a high school teacher and later principal meant that I had a bit of a leg up on education and my family actively encouraged exploration. It wasn’t really until I got to University that I realized how lucky I had it with that.
Geographically, you’re closer to millions who have French as their first language (between a fifth and a quarter of the Canadian population). But it’s likely less useful in the US than Spanish (or even other languages).
During WW2 the healthiest recruits came from states like Washington, Idaho, Oregon, and California. This was due to better nutrition and a more active lifestyle. The least healthy recruits came from states like Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, et al. (no surprise). One in nine recruit candidates failed their physicals in 1941 due to nutrition-related health problems.
Perhaps it’ll be education levels that will be the great leveler in the event of another major war. But, it’s a lot easier to fill recruits’ bellies with nourishing food than it is to fill their heads with the knowledge needed to build and operate complex weapons systems. That takes a solid math and science foundation that can only be achieved over time in school.
Which countries churn out the most engineers? India and China at about 1,000,000 each year. The USA only produces about 250,000. The USA doesn’t even break into the top 10 countries with the most scientists per capita in the world.
Mankind is a warlike species. You may not like it, but there it is. A war between the USA and China is a very real possibility. China wants us out of the Westpac. We have no intention of leaving. Having an educated populace isn’t just a nice-to-have thing. It’s essential to our national survival. I wish the anti-science, Christian nationalists could understand that. Knowing the 10 Commandments isn’t going to cut it when the missiles start flying.
The magat admin’s war on education is just one of the MANY wars they are in; using taxpayer money to screw taxpayers.
A big clue to why this war is important to them is they want to destroy Thomas Jefferson’s ‘a well-informed electorate is a prerequisite to democracy.’
Putting that drooling imbecile Linda McMahon in charge of the Department of Education makes it easier to destroy and is a huge step toward the ‘dumbing down’ of the populace.
How far down the Death Spiral are we now?
@Becca Stareyes
I’m not opposed to probability or statistics—I’ve taught introductory stats dozens of times since I finished my Ph.D.—but (a) the theory of statistics is deeply calculus-based, and (b) I’m a pure mathematician, so anything too applied is automatically given side-eye by me.
But with McMahon in charge, schools could have excellent professional wrestling programs complete with advanced classes in KeyFabe…oh wait, you already mentioned Bibles. Did they say which Bible? There are several different ones, and some cults believe theirs is the only right one. That could become an area of serious disagreement among the Christ-like warriors of the Christian right. I’m pretty sure Catholics don’t use the KJV or its successors.
PZ wrote: Shouldn’t every child have the right to good information?
I reply: Obviously, not! Read http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/robert-reich/115076/the-mad-kings-television
Robert Reich explains that the magat-in-chief sent troops to destroy portland because he just watched a years-old video of the violent protests of George Floyd’s murder on FUX news and was so brain-dead ht thought it was current!
It’s mostly MAGAt central around here, but the husband of one of my mom’s former colleagues (an engineer) once commented on the math skills of the type of people coming in that he wouldn’t want to be driving over any bridge that they designed.
I wish I’d been able to take a foreign language in grade school. I was eager to get to 3rd grade because that’s when we got to learn cursive, and I knew that was the closest I’d get to taking a foreign language until I got to junior high. (Took 6 years of Spanish in junior high and high school, several semesters in college, and keep it up by reading books in Spanish. I get the opportunity to speak it every once in a while because I am 1 of 2 people at the animal shelter fluent enough to carry on a conversation.)
@18 robro wrote: Did they say which Bible?
I reply: It just doesn’t matter. All the versions of the bible are obscene, murderous, self-contradictory works of FICTION (except for a few documented historical events which may be true)
Shermanj @ #21 wrote: “I reply: It just doesn’t matter.”
I reply: I couldn’t agree with you more, but unfortunately for some Christians it matters very much. In fact there are some that are willing to kill or be killed for a particular version of the Bibles.
I think it’s important to teach children that they are being introduced to subjects, that just as when they first started reading they leaned mostly single syllable words and only moved on to polysyllabic words once they had mastered single syllable words, what they learn at each stage in school are the basics to any subject, there is so much more to all of them.
In reply to @22 robro, I say, Thanks for accurate amplification on the point.
I think, as already eloquently stated by others above, foreign language learning is so effective and helpful, that learning at least one foreign tongue should be obligatory in higher education. That said, motivation could be boosted by letting children chose which one they want to take up from a choice of languages, e. g. Spanish and French.
I have been very lucky, as in Germany, there was at Gymnasium-level at first English for everyone, second we had to chose between Latin and French, later you could add Latin voluntarily on top. At bigger Gymnasiums there were even additional languages to chose from. And a third language is way easier to learn than the second. Life gets so much richer, meeting other people in foreign countries becomes more fun, you can enjoy original version books and films with all of the jokes and innuendo, empathy and thinking skills get boosted, win, win, win.
“One of my high school history classes started with how the “founding fathers” done fucked up, compromising on basic human rights to get a short term victory, that led to the catastrophe of the Civil War.”
Dang, I’m kind of awed by that statement. I never had anything close to that, and I think I’m from a younger generation than you, which makes it more unusual to hear. Maybe you had better teachers than I did, or me growing up in Pennsyltucky had something to do with it.
It is getting worse.
“Christian activist David Barton will advise Texas State Board of Education during social studies overhaul”
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/09/24/texas-sboe-social-studies-standards-david-barton/
A fool never learns from his mistakes. A smart man learns from his mistakes. A wise man learns from the mistakes of others. That is why wise men study history.”
I think a lot of early science education could be morphed into teaching critical thinking. Its not nearly as important that you remember the difference between ionic and covalent bonds, as it is that you learn how to test an idea for truth – which you can demonstrate using chemistry, biology, physics, or what have you.
Symbolic logic; that was my version of ‘getting’ it.
Crank the handle, see the answer the inputs give you, know you are correct.
Should be part of late secondary education, but it is not.
(So nice!)
John @29: One of the most important lessons to learn is ‘know you could be wrong’. I’m sure you’ll have a clever response.
Wrong about what, Rob?
i am certainly not always right. one time, i thought i was wrong, but it turned out i was really right.
ba dump bump
Robbo, heh. Oldie but a goodie, that one.
—
In case I was unclear: I may be wrong about many things.
However, a valid argument is basically a tautology.
A tautology is always T. Never F. Never U.
Analytic truths vs synthetic truths, that is the distinction that determines whether I may be wrong.
Additionally, I very much doubt I am wrong about my own recollections, but.
For example, I distinctly remember the day when I first got spectacles for my myopia, and my exaltation as suddenly I perceived the trees on the street as 3-D and it fascinated me for a period.
If anything, the recollection is an etiolated version of the perception at the time.
(Same with the logic thingy)
Contemporary literature is hobbled by copyright. Any class that requires that all the students read books that are still under copyright, or worse, copyrighted and out of print, is inevitably going to be expensive. I heartily endorse infringing copies of ebooks, but I understand that if a teacher recommends that, then ICE is going to bust down their door in the middle of the night.
inb4 “Follow the rule of law or GTFO, ICE.”: copyright infringement is in their jurisdiction. As it turns out, the rule of law is not the rule of good laws.
Two good points, beholder.
On the first, a clever teacher can turn the blind eye and stay ‘clean’.
On the second, not just that.
Selective/discretionary enforcement (turning the blind eye included ;) of law is as bad, if not worse.
(Then there are the upper trophic levels, such as the courts)
Now looks bleak.
@1 raven
It is that bad. Wealthy communities will be better off, but they are a privileged few, and it doesn’t break down nicely along your outmoded red-state-blue-state dichotomy.
Not the bottom of education. We’ve been over this in the other thread, the one consistently at dead last is a blue state.
Wouldn’t that be nice? Unfortunately, a blue state without much money and in close proximity to Texas (guess who) is going to face financial and practical incentives to use Texas’s public school materials, or whatever table scraps the Feds will toss to them.
Since we’re dealing with possibilities here, it’s probably safe to say that the bottom 99% are being abused more than ever these days, and current signs say they are less likely to vote against their own interests compared to the past few decades. What if the Democratic party promised great things to both the wealthy and the poor, but favoured the 99% and left the wealthiest 1% largely cheated after attaining power in 2028?
The Republicans are twisting the election process more than at any other time in history, to try and corrupt as many Democratic votes out as possible. But if the Republicans still fail to reach 40% of the votes in the House and the Senate, and lose the White House, wouldn’t a Democratic president be able to reverse much of Project 2025? Wouldn’t they be able to put more money towards the 99% of the voters, towards replacing the axed programs, and claw back much of the massive wealth dump from the 1%? I can only see things being worse for the Republican voters over the next few election cycles instead of better, and Trump is unlikely to place the popularity of his party on election day over his continued pocket stuffing grifts. And even if Trump falls to a McCoronary or dementia (or worse) before 2028, I don’t see the MAGAts in charge as wanting to reverse course either.
@34 beholder wrote: I heartily endorse infringing copies of ebooks,
I reply:
First: My organization as also a publisher of books and multimedia works, in both physical and e-book form, has registered our copyrighted works with the Library of Congress. Those that steal them are criminals.
Second: Having been a textbook manager for a bookstore decades ago, even then, most textbook publishers were abusing students by horribly over-pricing books.
Third: AMAZ0N, G00GLE and others, for decades, have been criminally stealing and digitizing copyright books, depriving authors of a decent living. How much do you think Y0UTUBE pays for all the stolen videos they make available?
Fourth: Therefore, I ask you; if you worked hard to produce something and people came and stole it all from you so you couldn’t make a living, WOULD YOU BE O.K. WITH THAT?
HidariMak, if President A enacts Order X, President B can issue Order ¬X thusrevoking it.
(And we all know how Trump uses them as his primary tool, and how comparatively sparsely he does the legislative thingy)
“Fourth: Therefore, I ask you; if you worked hard to produce something and people came and stole it all from you so you couldn’t make a living, WOULD YOU BE O.K. WITH THAT?”
By the same token as I’m fine with public libraries. Do they steal it all?
@38 HidariMak commented about the bottom 99% are being abused more than ever these days
I reply: John Morales (on another article: the-president-is-insane) commented 5 October 2025 at 4:31 pm Rather interesting article in Vox: https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/462226/end-times-crisis-history-lessons-cliodynamics-collase-society
“The “wealth pump”
The wealth pump consists of various means by which the fruits of economic growth are, instead of being shared equitably, siphoned upward the social ladder.
@41 John Morales asked: By the same token as I’m fine with public libraries. Do they steal it all?
I reply: Public libraries buy and pay for their materials (at least here in the u.s.) and they lend them out for single use to educate people. They even abide by strict rules when they lend e-books.
I have no problem with that. We’ve even donated some of our works to libraries.
@39 shermanj
Making copies is not stealing. The false equivalence of the two is publishing industry propaganda.
@44 beholder wrote: Making copies is not stealing
I reply: That is a FALSE statement. When they make copies, that is stealing just as much as those that make and sell knock-offs of brand name handbags, etc. are stealing. Such theft deprives those that work to create or produce something of the income they need to survive and thrive so they can create new products.
Again, if somebody stole all of what you produced is that not criminal?
So not at all, then?
You decided to try and turn a profit on what can generously be called a risky venture. You aren’t owed damages for losing at a casino, the same logic applies to selling licenses of uncertain value to individual copies of a work.
I figure that, in principle and at least for primary and secondary education, textbooks could be purchased by the school and lent to each class; the amortisation would be best served if the books did not need frequent replacement. Each student would functionally be ‘borrowing’ it from the school pool (‘library’).
Problem is turnover, but really, how often is a new edition necessary at that levell?
It’s all introductory stuff, and simplified stuff at that.
Someone’s logic is shaped like a pretzel. We never (as @46 beholder wrote) ecided to try and turn a profit on what can generously be called a risky venture
I have no idea what you are alluding. You do not know us or our organizations. We have always asked a reasonable price for everything we created/produced. When we have run a licensed business, we did always abide by the laws and have been responsible and ethical in all our work and never engaged in risky ventures.
@47 John Morales discussed textbooks.
I reply: Some schools do provide the books and include the price in the tuition. The school would by sufficient copies for the students to borrow.
You are right about turnover. When in that business, I did see a few professors that would change a few words, call it a new edition, and require students to buy only that new edition to prevent the sale and use of used books thus unethically increasing their income from book sales.
Children’s rights? They have a right to be born. The rest is debatable.
@48 shermanj
Is that the royal “we”?
Here once again is the tension between doing the right thing and doing the lawful thing. You may be following the law, but I claim copyright is not an ethical system. Especially not if your terms are “All Rights Reserved”. Fundamentally, copyright is Congress passing a law restricting of the speech of others, and in the U.S. such an institution should have been abolished by the first amendment.
@51 beholder asked: Is that the royal “we”?
I reply: As I said ‘You do not know us or our organizations’. There are many people affiliated with our organizations.
Hey, beholder, thanks for the pretzels.
@51 beholder wrote about the tension between doing the right thing and doing the lawful thing.
I reply: Aren’t you able to understand what ‘the right thing is’? As I wrote: When we have run a licensed business, we did always abide by the laws and have been responsible and ethical in all our work and never engaged in risky ventures.
Also, copyright has been recognized as legitimate for Centuries
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright
The history of copyright starts with early privileges and monopolies granted to printers of books. The British Statute of Anne 1710 full title “An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned”,
Also, pondering what John Morales wrote: your idea of ‘Some schools do provide the books and include the price in the tuition.’ is not a bad idea. I would like to see electronic editions of all textbooks where the author could provide them to schools for a reasonable price. (authors and professors do need to put food on the table, after all)
Last comment for now: Getting back to PZ’s original article, YES, the future looks bleak.
As for language, I would start the elementary students with any language but simply start with vocabulary. What is the Spanish word for “egg”? How do you count to ten in German? That sort of thing. But when the kids hit 8th grade, I would hit them with Latin. I learned more about the English language in Latin class than I did in English class. Besides, in teaching Latin, there are invariably touch points with history. “Omnia Gaulia in tres partes…” who wrote that? Julius Caesar. Why did he write that? Oh, he was a Roman soldier? Yes, and a Caesar. There are touch points in government and talking about the Roman Senate. Didn’t you know we stole the idea for a Senate from the Romans? Why? There are touch points for art, history, politics, language, philosophy, etc. Not to mention critical thinking. Why didn’t Rome last? What was the cause of the fall of Rome?
“Blue state soft secession” describes the non-violent effort by liberal-leaning states to resist federal policies they disagree with through strategic non-cooperation and leveraging their economic power.
If we’re trying to uphold the US Constitution on US soil, that’s almost the exact opposite of “secession.” We should call it something else.
…I claim copyright is not an ethical system. Especially not if your terms are “All Rights Reserved”. Fundamentally, copyright is Congress passing a law restricting of the speech of others…
That’s absolute bullshit. How have copyright restrictions, in themselves, restricted anyone’s freedom of speech?
I realise that making a scene is exhausting and inconvenient. But if we stop doing that, if we stop being vocal about what’s right, we don’t help the future at all.
Three notes on copyright:
It’s an explicit constitutional power of Congress (Article I, section 8, 8th clause). Don’t confuse “free speech” with “right of author to the exclusive right to his or her writings”… when that “exclusive right” is not to the words themselves but the economics (and indirect economic, like the right to make derivative works).
Beholder’s argument is a long-discredited argument over “what are the characteristics of property?” His argument focuses on rivalrousness, especially as to e-books, from making “copies” — by making a copy, you haven’t destroyed what you made the copy from or taken it away from its owner, therefore making copies doesn’t impair a property right, therefore the words that make up a copy are not themselves property. The problem here is that the author’s right isn’t in the copy, but in the right to make copies — and by making a copy, the copier has taken that right from the author for the resulting copy.
Rivalrousness is an aspect of property that can be used to identify property, but in the “sufficient but not necessary” sense (if it’s rivalrous, it’s a form of property; if it’s not rivalrous, it may or may not be a form of property). Not all property is rivalrous — consider “bank accounts”…
Don’t confuse the author’s rights with the publisher’s rights. It’s not the authors’ fault that publishers of textbooks are abusive with their pricing and availability. Dealing with that is actually a separate issue from copyright, although sloppiness in discussions too often conflates them. The same, of course, goes for the commercial recorded music industry, for the film industry…
@ 50 garydargan
Lol. “Right to be born”. No. Absolutely not a thing.
People aren’t brought by the stork. Whether a human wishes to give birth is entirely up to the human.
@61 Jaws
Right, and amendments passed afterward supersede those powers, when one is in conflict with the other. It is plain that this “exclusive Right to their respective Writings” necessarily restricts the speech of others — speech can be written down, after all.
I was not explicitly making an argument about property, but you’re right that I don’t consider speech to be private property, nor “Intellectual Property” to be a coherent concept. Such notions muddle the mechanisms of copyright, patents, and trade secrets, which I believe ultimately serves as a thin justification for entrenching and further expanding corporate supremacy over the shared cultural heritage of the public domain.
Some copyright licenses explicitly grant the privilege to make copies to whoever accepts the terms of the license. That right was not taken from the copyright holder — making a copy is not a zero sum game.
Author’s rights? Your appeal to the needs of an author supposedly served by copyright is undermined by one simple fact: copyright only grants privileges to the copyright holder, who is not necessarily the author of the work, and often is not. U.S. copyright law allows copyright holders to freely rewrite the works they hold the rights to and pass it off as the author’s words, even restricting access to the original. I have said elsewhere that copyright a publisher’s game, not for the benefit of the little guy.
You have to admit, though, that allowing anyone to make copies really brings prices down, often close to the price of the raw materials. Getting rid of copyright deals with that rather elegantly.
@28. devnll
Quoted for truthand seconded by me. Although both Critical thinking and science shoudl be taught and promoted so much more than itseesm they are.
Teach logic as well as maths..
@56. shermanj :“Last comment for now: Getting back to PZ’s original article, YES, the future looks bleak.”
Understatement! Truth and inso many very worrying ways.
@50. garydargan : “Children’s rights? They have a right to be born. The rest is debatable.”
What the.. ? That sounds very anti-abortion-y and no, I don’t think they do. They have the same human rights as we all do once they have been born but up until they are alive out of their mothers bodies – no. No, they don’t.
@50 garydargan
Children already have been born̈, otherwise they wouldn’t be children.
As for abortion, that god of yours aborts more pregnancies than doctors do. Take up any rights violations with your invisible friend first.
I would like to make a change to copyright law specifying that anyone who pays the copyright holder (ideally the author, but that gets more complicated with multi-creator works like films) the amount per copy that the copyright holder is asking for is able to make as many copies as they want. Thus, no publisher, streaming service, or textbook exploiter, is able to limit access to a creative work to ‘their own store’. (Also, copyright holder applies the same fee to everyone.)
This is wrong.
If the children are born in the USA, they have almost as many rights as an adult. Food, shelter, education, safety etc..
Even my cat has rights.
She has the right to food, water, two litter boxes, to go in and out at will, and to sleep on the couch all day.
Shrug. Then again, we treat our pets better than the fundie xians treat their kids.
If copying was really equivalent to stealing, then what is the thing that I used to have before someone made a copy of some of my work that I would not have afterwards?
I’m tired of repeating refutations of “copyright bad because I don’t wanna pay” arguments. It’s almost as bad as repeating refutations of creationists; I’ve been stuck doing both for decades, so I have some basis for comparison.
J’ai pensé quelque chose comme ça. Ou ici.
When your voices aren’t heard, it doesn’t matter what language you speak. In the US, your words are merely noisy exhales.
@51. the disingenuous Trump voting via spoiler & Putin shill Stein beholder : “Here once again is the tension between doing the right thing and doing the lawful thing.”
Given what you did last year in working to put Trump in power you are have zero credibility and no ethical right to talk about “doing the right thing” whatsoever.
Oh and how about you stop dodging and avoiding and actually honestly answer the question : who was the better more ethical and competent and rational choice for POTUS last year esp in light of all we have seen out of the TWO actualoptions people truly had either Trump or Kamala?
Note : there were NO other viable real options as everyone with a basic understanding of US politics knows & pretending otherwise is simply lying & denying reality.
PS. Silentbo : ^ this applies for you too.
As for copyright, I do think fair use provisions ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use ) should be used and expanded as long as the correct author is attributed and it is for non-profit use.
Authors and other creators should be recognised and rewarded for their work – but also they shouldn’t limit the public interest and access to knowledge and so there is a balance that needs to be found between those things.
Shorter – copyright should be used and NOT abused. People shouldn’t be able to use to it, frex jack up the price of textbooks making them inaccessible to those on lower incomes* or otherwise game it to unfairly deny & harm others and society in general.
Creators should get credit and reasonable payment for their work without unduly disadvantaging anyone and copyright should stop at the creator i.e. not be transmissible or inheritable.
Our badly flawed adversarial legal system in general should be reformed with a bar on private lawyers whose services got to the highest bidder so it isn’t a case of people purchasing the law and verdicts via the most expensive and most lawyers. Also all court cases and pieces of legislation should have to face an ethical review by ethicists who have the power to alter or revoke them so we have an ethical rather than legal system – or rather an actually just ethical legal system – but that’s a whole other topic. In cases on copyright it would come down to : Is copyright being used ethically as intended to give creators their fair credit and due or is it being exploited for undeserved profit and unfairly hurting others?
FWIW On languages, Primary & High schools in South Australia, at least some of them, are now teaching the revived Kaurna language of our local Indigenous Peoples
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaurna_language ) which I think is excellent.
Back when I was in high school (mid 1980’s) there were options of doing at least a couple of languages – Indonesian, Italian and French. I did three years of French in high school but have sadly forgotten most of it – except that the French call their swimming pools “Piss-ins!” (Okay, I do recall a tad more than just that.. ) I think even back then there was the option for learning the central Australian Indigenous Pitjantjatjara language too if memory serves? This in a very monolingual environment and nation.
As a kid I used to spend my free time – lunchtimes, recesses etc.. in the library reading and learnt most of what I know that way. At home, I also used to read books and National Geographic magazines and encyclopedias notably World books ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Book_Encyclopedia ) & Childcraft (?) ones including Science years & Year books. When I was younger and earlier on as a boy I used to love reading the old very English Ladybird books for kids especially those on history and nature but many others as well and loved that.
( https://esperantowebdesign.com/ladybirdpictures/737_Leaders.html ) Lots of fond memories!
.* As mentioned by #49. shermanj.
@ ^ More old classic Ladybird book covers for the sheer nostalgia value of it :
https://esperantowebdesign.com/ladybirdpictures/561_Adventures_from_history.html
I’ve read and even still got quite a few of those..
@60. drdrdrdrdralhazeneuler :
Quoted for Truth.
@15. John Watts :
Emphasis added. Absolutely right – well almost, because I’ve no idea what you mean by “Westpac” there! Here in Oz Westpac is a bank FWIW but presume that’s not what you refer to there!
@44. bad faith Trump enabler troll : “Making copies is not stealing. The false equivalence of the two is publishing industry propaganda.”
Really? Just try making copies of classified top secret documents then! (As long as you aren’t the man you politically aided – Trump – that is..) Of c, context is a thing here but still. Making copies of things you’re NOT meant to copy can indeed be considered a very serious crime depending on the material copied.
@ StevoR
Hopelessly off topic and sheer curiosity – did you ever have How and Why books?
There were How and Why books on everything – the planets, astronomy, dinosaurs, spaceflight, robotics, computers. The most awesome science books for primary school kids, I couldn’t get enough.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_and_Why_Wonder_Books
@57.geoffbadenoch : “..when the kids hit 8th grade, I would hit them with Latin. I learned more about the English language in Latin class than I did in English class. Besides, in teaching Latin, there are invariably touch points with history…
Plus Science especially botany with the latin linnean names for flora and fauna! Agreed and definitely useful in many ways – not least understanding some Monty Python sketches..
Greek could also be handy here for similar reasons. Not sure whether ancient or modern – not something I know enough about -but handy for astronomy and the Bayer (Greek letter) star (& sometimes other eg Omega Centauri) designations.
@ Silentbob – 8 October 2025 at 7:28 am : saw them at schools sometimes but not really. Didn’t have them at home or atleats not that I recall. There were a few series of books and there used to be a program of some sort when I was very young where the school (?) would do a yearly selection of some educational kids books where we’d get to pick one or two from a long booklet of possible choices to get although I forget what that was called and most of the details. If it helps Children of the Ark by Robert Gray (Scholastic Book Services,1975) was one of those I got that way and one of the older personally chosen books I still have. *
.* This one – although tha tspecific one featured is defintiely NOT my copy just the same book & cover :
https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/356949660815
@37. the Trump helping troll : “Not the bottom of education. We’ve been over this in the other thread, the one consistently at dead last is a blue state.”
False.
See :
https://academicful.com/states-worst-education/
Looks like those are mostly if not all red states to me..
Plus see : https://people.howstuffworks.com/least-educated-states.htm
Note fromits wikipage : “West Virginia is regarded as a heavily Republican, “deep red” state at the federal level.[9][170] Since 2000, West Virginians have supported the Republican candidate in every presidential election, nearly always by increasing margins.”
Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Virginia#Government_and_politics
Among the questions you won’t answer I’d like to know why the troll here is so keen to attack and diss blue states and thereby support red ones given the record and the respective blue bvs red education polcies generally..
@77 StevoR
Oh, I see, you’ll throw New Mexico under the bus, then. Was +15 and +10 for Obama, +8 for Hillary Clinton, +10 for Biden, and +6 for Harris, complete control by Democrats at the state level and all Democrats as U.S. senators and representatives enough to qualify for “blue state” status? But just like that, the moment it complicates your narrative, you’ll deny those metrics and call them a red state.
Faithless. Sad!
beholder, you do a lot of narrative claims, but you never adduce any basis.
Here: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/profiles/stateprofile?sfj=NP&chort=1&sub=MAT&sj=&st=MN&year=2024R3
It’s so very easy to check your claims!
(BTW, nice to know you don’t consider Puerto Rico, the true outlier)
Anyway, of the bottom 10, how many are blue? Heh.
(Yes, universal claims bug me too, but still)
It is noted yet again that the disingenuous troll beholder & Silenbo are still to answer the actual question I’ve asked them in #71 and before here :
Out of the TWO & only 2 actual options people had to choose from last election – either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris – which was the better choice in terms of being more rational, compassionate and mentally competent to become POTUS?
Amazing that they seem so determined to squirm away from answering such a basic either / or single name question honestly although it is clear in at least one of the cases why they refuse to face reality and answer.
@78. the Trump supporting (de facto at very least) anti-Democratic troll here :
No. I never actually mentioned New Mexico. New Mexico is, notably, NOT the “.. the one (state – ed) consistently at dead last (in education – ed)” as the Trump-enabling Troll claimed in their disinfo posted at #37.
As I mentioned with cited linked supporting evidence in my #77 that dead last on education state is deeply Red West Virginia.
Let’s look at the top or rather bottom ten US States listed in those sources in #77 using the wikimap of political colour here :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_states_and_blue_states
Worst first five listed on Academicful Worst Education States list cited #77 above
West Virginia – Red (Repug.)
Mississippi – Red (Repug)
Louisiana – Red (Repug)
Arkansas – Red (Repug)
Alabama -Red (Repug)
Worst five -all red & Repug / Trump cult.
Next five :
Oklahoma – Red (Repug)
Nevada – Red or if we’re to be VERY generous purple, Voted for Trump last year like our troll de facto did.
Kentucky – Red (Repug)
New Mexico – Blue (Democratic) & finally
Texas – Red (Repug)
So that’s ten states with nine or eight of them being Red States, one being either red or purple (Nevada) and just a single literally exceptional Blue state in the Worst Education States list.
What does that tell us? It tells us that #1 raven is correct and that the Trump assisting troll beholder is being extremely suspiciously selective and cherry-picking when they “throw New Mexico under the bus” and focus on the ONLY Blue state listed amongst those ten worst states for education.
Now why would a supposed self-proclaimed in word if very much NOT in deed “progressive” left-winger go out of their way to attack Blue left leaning states and defend Red right-leaning ones I wonder? Seems awfully fishy to me when they keep generally making a point of attacking anything Democratic all the time here.
That’s yet another question that I’m guessing we won’t get an honest answer from our Trump supporting – in reality – troll here.
What a non-surprise my guess about our dishonest troll here has yet again been proven correct.