The Eleventh Day

A tentative agreement between the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) and the Chicago Teachers’ Union (CTU) has been reached. Well, almost. Now the teachers are refusing to return to work until the mayor agrees to pay them for their time off to picket. Amazing! During this whole charade, why has no one mentioned the one most important purpose of a school system: teaching children? CPS and CTU are complicit in their abysmal failure to achieve this basic purpose yet no one is addressing the issue. You have CPS and CTU arguing over how much more of the taxpayers' money will be wasted. CPS has offered the teachers a 16% salary increase over the next five years. The mayor has proudly announced that most teachers will be making $100k or more at the end of the five year period. Would your boss reward you with any amount of pay increase if you failed to achieve a measly 25% success rate at work? Look at the statistics. In language arts, mathematics, and science, approximately 75% of CPS students are below standard. And only 25.9% of eighth-grade students are passing Algebra I. What I don't understand is how only about 25% of students are passing in three major measured areas, while 75% of students graduate. Wait, I do understand and so do you. Once graduated they are no longer the system's responsibility. Push them out the door unqualified to perform in the workplace or succeed in higher education.

No one is asking the taxpayers' if that is acceptable and if they are willing to pay even more to reward failure. Seems to me that there are some important groups under- or un-represented in the whole process: the students and the taxpayers. Who is listening to them? And do they even care to be heard? Talk about millions, even billions, of dollars spent on education goes right over the taxpayers' heads. Break it out into dollars spent per taxpayer, and a few might demand to be heard, to demand excellence. Afterall, it's "for the kids."

Morality

From a rather young age, I have been concerned off and on with how moral values are decided. Who determines what is right and wrong, good and bad? And how are gradations determined between apparent opposites or even among each opposite? Complicating the understanding is how the execution of rights, wrongs, goods, and bads are accepted, rewarded, and punished differs among individuals, groups, and cultures.

The recent death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, a Muslim cleric and leader of the so-called terrorist group ISIS, reminds me that I have yet to resolve my concerns regarding morality. The ISIS goal, by any means necessary including beheading, is to establish world domination and rule informed by Sharia law. We, at least in the United States, consider that goal, in and of itself and particularly the means of attaining it, as bad, even evil as measured against our values. Consequently, killing al-Baghdadi, is considered by most non-radical Muslims a good thing. Worse, by most values, he took the lives of three of his children with him.

Where did the concept of good, bad, etc. come from anyway. Nietzsche sort of (hard for me to understand him) blames religion. For this to be the case, religion had to come before values; not a logical cause and effect. God or gods, it seems, came about as a means to justify the existence and enforcement of the first and probably few values. As the values piled up, many weaker ones (logically) were adopted and codified demanding more complex religions, rules, and laws. Back at the beginning, Ugh has a son, Ugh-Ugh, who is killed by Awg-Awg, a neighbor boy, probably Ugh's nephew, of about Ugh-Ugh's age who lusts after Ugh-Ugh's spear. Ugh feels pain, not physical pain, yet serious emotional pain. He calls a family meeting where Awg-Awg sits with a smug look and Ugh-Ugh's spear. You can imagine what happens next. Hence two particular values, that of human life and that of retribution, are encoded in the earliest sapiens' genome and brains. (See Braintrust. What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality, by Patricia S. Churchland.) How we got from here to paying taxes being arguably good and not paying taxes being arguably bad is a long and convoluted story.

Back to al-Baghdadi. What exactly makes his and ISIS' exercise of their religious values wrong? Actually from an evolutionary perspective, nothing. I believe that those committed to ISIS are following the only path they can. "My genome and brain made me do it." What made ISIS wrong was that they, in effect, declared and executed a violent war against all peoples that did not believe or at least profess to believe in the same values that they did. That is in direct opposition to the most Americans' values, so their leader had to be killed.

So where am I going with this? Is science the answer to the morality question? A reasonable counter-argument to evolution being the source of morality is from Christain talk show host, author, and speaker Greg Kouki: "Evolution may be an explanation for the existence of conduct we choose to call moral, but it gives no explanation why I should obey any moral rules in the future. If one countered that we have a moral obligation to evolve, then the game would be up, because if we have moral obligations prior to evolution, then evolution itself can't be their source." In my example above, Ugh and the other members of the family recognized that what Awg-Awg did was wrong BEFORE it was imprinted in their genomes and brains, therefore, evolution cannot be the source of morality. This is the "oughtness" argument. Hmmmm. Maybe a Deist can move beyond this muddle.

What We Did Not Fight For

I am now 77 years of age. We of my age group, give or take a few years, fought our war some 45-55 years ago. We fought our war in Vietnam (North and South), Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia. They called it the "Vietnam War" but it was much more than that. We didn't talk much about our war until recently when "Thank you for your service" became popular. Even now we don't speak of it much. When our war became unpopular, many American citizens saw us as more enemy and aggressor than they did the real enemies and aggressors. Many of our at-home enemies are still with us and we remain sensitive to the enmity they displayed. But we did fight and although we weren't and aren't yet sure why we fought, for the most part we did so with dedication and bravery. Dedication to our comrades and our units and yes, even to the country we felt forsook us. And we fought bravely, some innately so, some for medals, some for parents, relatives and friends back home, and all for our buddies who we could never let down. When we talk among ourselves we speak mostly of what we did not fight for. In the following excerpt, read "United States" instead of "Britain" and see how closely it fits.

"They did not fight for a Britain which would be dishonestly railroaded into Europe against the people’s will; they did not fight for a Britain where successive governments, by their weakness and folly, would encourage crime and violence on an unprecedented scale; they did not fight for a Britain where thugs and psychopaths could murder and maim and torture and never have a finger laid on them for it; they did not fight for a Britain whose leaders would be too cowardly to declare war on terrorism; they did not fight for a Britain whose Parliament would, time and again, betray its trust by legislating against the wishes of the country; they did not fight for a Britain where children could be snatched from their homes and parents by night on nothing more than the good old Inquisition principle of secret information; they did not fight for a Britain whose Churches and schools would be undermined by fashionable reformers; they did not fight for a Britain where free choice could be anathematised as “discriminisation”; they did not fight for a Britain where to hold by truths and values which have been thought good and worthy for a thousand years would be to run the risk of being called “fascist” –that, really, is the greatest and most pitiful irony of all. No, it is not what they fought for –but being realists they accept what they cannot alter, and reserve their protests for the noise pollution of modern music in their pubs."

Quartered Safe Out Here: A Harrowing Tale of World War II by George MacDonald Fraser copyright 2007, Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

Left vs. Left

In Chicago an interesting dynamic is occurring as I write. The ultra left city administration is in a contract dispute with the radical left teachers' union. Strangely, we have a situation where the administration is unable to pay its current obligations and the union is unable to teach the children. Both are failing miserably, yet both proclaim the moral high ground. Regardless of the outcome, the teachers will at least receive an unearned pay increase and the city will incur additional unpaid debt. The union will likely get a promise of additional support staff and reduction in class sizes. I'm not at all sure what the housing demand is about but it surely will be expensive and it does seem that the union is brokering to get deeper into the city's business. If the city and federal and state agencies can't afford to provide cheaper housing to new teachers, the poor, and homeless now, how would they ever expect it to happen just because it's promised in writing? Whatever. Both will claim that a fair and balanced agreement was met. The losers have been and will continue to be the tax payers and the students. What does the future hold? The Chicago student population continues to decrease at what should be an alarming rate and upper middle and upper income home owners (property tax payers) are leaving just as fast. The city will go deeper into debt and a greater numbers of students will graduate high school neither prepared to succeed in college nor survive in a competitive economy.

So, what's the difference what the city promises? If it can't pay for the current education system, it doesn't matter if it contracts for more obligations it won't fulfill. Give the union what it wants. Promise it all, then ignore it.