About the Civil War …

I’m copying and pasting this from Quora:

 

If the Confederate States of America had won their independence, do you think they would have survived into the 20th Century?

Scott Johnson

Answered Oct 23 · Upvoted by Jack Strahan, former Satellite Telecom Network Design at The United States of America (1989-2006)

The Confederacy as we know it didn’t even survive the Civil War. Several counties and areas controlled by deserters and Unionists in Southern states voted to rejoin the Union and break off from the Confederacy at least a year or more before 1865 because the Confederate government was both incompetent and corrupt. West Virginia actually did. As David Williams notes in his excellent work, Bitterly Divided, “Most southerners eventually came to feel they would be better off with the war over and the Union restored. To many, the Confederacy was the real enemy. It conscripted their men, impressed their supplies, and starved them out. It made war on those who dared withhold their support and made life miserable for the rest.” Williams quotes a South Carolina farmer who had had his livestock “impressed” – taken without compensation for the “war effort” – as saying “The sooner this damned Government fell to pieces the better it would be for us.”

The Confederacy and the South are not the same. Most Southerners had opposed secession. The so called secessionist conventions were held because secessionists knew simply having public votes would result in the defeat of the secessionist movement. While less than a third of Southerners owned slaves, the conventions were dominated by slave-holding planters, just like the Confederate Congress.

The Confederacy could never have survived anyway because it couldn’t even feed itself, let alone prosper. Even before the War, the South had had to import most of its food from the Northern states because its incredibly greedy planters only planted cash crops – tobacco and cotton. During the war, despite pleas from many quarters to the planters to plant corn or beans, they continued to plant cash crops. There was too much money to be made and they controlled they legislature. Speculation added to the misery. Salt went from 50 cents a sack before the War to $80. That’s 16,000% inflation. No society on earth can endure that.

Anti-Confederate Virginians in Montgomery and Floyd Counties formed the State of Southwest Virginia and elected a governor and a “brigadier general of deserters.” Colonies of anti-Confederates in Marion County Mississippi and Washington Parish Louisiana did the same. Irwin County Georgia voted to call for the Confederacy to surrender. Hart and Lumpkin County residents asked the Governor to arrange a “speedy peace.”

Jefferson Davis himself admitted that two-thirds of Confederate soldiers had deserted by the fall of 1864. The soldiers had little real choice. Because of the greed of the planters, their families back home were starving. That they could get shot for desertion if they were caught meant little if their wives and children were dead or dying. And they mostly weren’t caught. There were simply too many. Lee sent out a 50 man detachment to round deserters up and every one of them deserted themselves.

In Richmond and other cities starving women broke into stores and government commissaries and took whatever food or dry goods they could. At least one commissary officer, aware of their plight, simply opened his doors and let them take what they wanted. It was the only decent thing to do, but most others never did it.

Also, unlike in the North, Secessionists often simply murdered their neighbors if they were pro-Union. The largest lynching in U.S. history took place in Gainesville Texas where secessionists rounded up over forty men and simply hanged them without trial or evidence. In Arkansas three people were hanged for having read an anti slavery book. A Methodist minister was held in jail for a year for doing the same thing. An Episcopal minister in Texas who had been born in the South was hanged simply because his sect, Northern Episcopalians, was anti-slavery, though he himself had never advocated abolition. As the Soviet Union and other totalitarian regimes eventually found, that’s not a recipe for national longevity. The irony was not lost on most Southerners. This was no way to win freedom.

Long before the War started, Southern tradesmen knew slavery impoverished them. They weren’t idiots. You can’t compete with free labor. That’s also why so many actually fought for the Union and not the Confederacy. They wanted the Confederacy to lose. Williams estimates a quarter of Union troops were made up of Southerners.

Confederate enlisted men also knew it was “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight,” as they called it. They were fighting, they said, “for the rich man’s negro,” for the planters’ right to keep slaves, not for themselves. Planters with more than 20 slaves were exempt from the draft. Few if any volunteered.

The Confederacy, like Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany, lied and murdered its way into existence. All three were based in racism. The problem with racism isn’t simply that it’s “wrong.” The problem is it makes you stupid. The Confederacy didn’t murder 6 million Jews but it did try to keep enslaved 3 million people in the name of “freedom” and it savaged and impoverished its own citizens. Not a winning strategy in any century.

Sources:

Williams, David. 2008. Bitterly Divided: The South’s Inner Civil War. New Press, New York.

Pickering, David and Falls, Judith. 2000. Brush Men and Vigilantes: Civil War Dissent in Texas. Texas A&M University Press, College Station.

Marten, James. 1990. Texas Divided: Loyalty and Dissent in the Lone Star State 1856-1874. University Press of Kentucky, Lexington.

How do Putin’s Russia and Trump’s USA Compare?

A screenwriter whom I knew back in junior high school here in DC, and who, like me, was an anti-war activist back during Vietnam, and with whom I sometimes agree and sometimes disagree, wrote:

Retweeted Doug Henwood (@DougHenwood):

Anyone left of center who took the Russia paranoia seriously, look where it’s taking us. This is extremely bad news. https://t.co/64ZUUe4p9K

I replied as follows (edited by me for clarity and accuracy):

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I cannot find any actual facts in that tweet. (And yes, I followed the link)

On the other hand, here are a few things that I think are objectively true, and a few that are my own opinion:*

the Russian government is… (1) oligarchical,

(2) a kleptocracy on every level,

(3) steals from its own people and rapes its environment for the benefit of a small group of billionaires,

(4) murders, muzzles, or imprisons people who dissent,

(5) supports friendly dictators abroad,

(6) builds and sells military weapons all over the world, and

(7) meddles in the internal affairs of foreign countries.

By contrast, the American government has recently been adjudged by experts (not me) as

(1) an oligarchy that systematically works for the benefit of a small wealthy class of businessmen to thwart the wishes of the majority,

(2) assassinates lots of people (mostly overseas; the murders of black men by police seems to be a local, not an explicitly national, policy),

(3) while the billionaires have been quite successful in breaking labor unions in the US and reducing wages for working people, we have had over time all sorts of vigorous [and sometimes somewhat successful] movements [which are now under hard attack from the current party in power] to preserve the rights of workers, consumers, and the environment,

(4) the US does in fact allow critics [for example, I’ve been to any number of anti-government demonstrations over the past 50 years and have only been arrested a couple of times for it, never beaten up by police; however, there have been plenty of times when the power of the State lined up firmly on the side of corporations to help break labor unions],

(5) supports friendly dictators abroad [of course proclaiming them to be lovers of freedom,

(6) builds and sells more weapons than anybody, and

(7) meddles in foreign elections and so forth [I recently saw a very long list of countries where the US had interfered with internal affairs or overthrew the government since WW1].

There are a couple of differences, though:

In many countries, you can’t get ANYTHING done at any level of government (from the head of state down to dog-catcher) without bribing somebody. That is not (yet) true in the US. However, it looks to me like Trump and his family are working hard to bring the US up to the level where our corruption is even higher than in Russia, China, India, the Philippines, or Nigeria. And 45 has certainly called for beating up protesters like myself, and praised corrupt, murderous foreign dictators like Putin and Duterte. However, there is still a lot more freedom of the press and assembly here than in the four countries I named!

Vive la resistance!

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* which statements are fact, which are opinion? I type – you decide.

It’s not so much that we have bad teachers (even tho they do exist): It’s an incoherent educational system that is at fault

Very interesting article in Atlantic by E.D. Hirsch on the problems facing American education. Among other things, he finds (as I do) that Value-Added Measurements are utterly unreliable and, indeed, preposterous. But most of all, he finds that the American educational system is extremely poorly run because its principal ideas lack any coherence at all.

Here are a couple of paragraphs:

The “quality” of a teacher doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Within the average American primary school, it is all but impossible for a superb teacher to be as effective as a merely average teacher is in the content-cumulative Japanese elementary school. For one thing, the American teacher has to deal with big discrepancies in student academic preparation while the Japanese teacher does not. In a system with a specific and coherent curriculum, the work of each teacher builds on the work of teachers who came before. The three Cs—cooperation, coherence, and cumulativeness—yield a bigger boost than the most brilliant efforts of teachers working individually against the odds within a system that lacks those qualities. A more coherent system makes teachers better individually and hugely better collectively.

American teachers (along with their students) are, in short, the tragic victims of inadequate theories. They are being blamed for the intellectual inadequacies behind the system in which they find themselves. The real problem is not teacher quality but idea quality. The difficulty lies not with the inherent abilities of teachers but with the theories that have watered down their training and created an intellectually chaotic school environment. The complaint that teachers do not know their subject matter would change almost overnight with a more specific curriculum with less evasion about what the subject matter of that curriculum ought to be. Then teachers could prepare themselves more effectively, and teacher training could ensure that teacher candidates have mastered the content they will be responsible for teaching.”

…

 

What if Finnish Teachers Taught in the USA?

You have all heard that FInland does the best job in the world at getting high scores on tests like PISA without burdening their students or their teachers with extreme workloads. Finland does not have long hours of homework for elementary kids, and they don’t require the daily filing of rigidly formatted, complex lesson plans for teachers. Finnish teachers are selected from the very best of their university classes, and have enormous amount of control over what they do, which they plan with their peers.

So what if some of these Finnish teachers came and worked here in the US?

Now we know, thanks to an article in The Atlantic.

A couple of quotes, from three such teachers. One said,

“If you asked me now, my answer would be that most likely I would not continue in this career.”

Another:

While teaching in Finnish schools, she had plenty of leeway to plan with colleagues, select curricular materials for the principal to consider purchasing, and influence decisions about schedules and responsibilities.

Today, with 16 years of teaching in U.S. public schools under her belt, this ESL teacher feels that she lacks a career in teaching. She described it as a rote job where she follows a curriculum she didn’t develop herself, keeps a principal-dictated schedule, and sits in meetings where details aren’t debated.

And another:

“I teach six classes a day with a one 45-[minute] ‘planning’ period,” she said. “My classes are at three different proficiency levels, and I have four minutes between classes to prepare for the next class. At the same time, I am expected to stand in the hallways to monitor students as [they] transfer from class to class, and to check my email for last-minute updates and changes because of ongoing testing or other events.”

All of those tasks, and several others, wear her down: “I feel rushed, nothing gets done properly; there is very little joy, and no time for reflection or creative thinking (in order to create meaningful activities for students).”

Muja concluded her response with a quote from one of Pasi Sahlberg’s articles for The Washington Post, “What if Finland’s great teachers taught in U.S. schools?”

Sahlberg, an education scholar and the author of Finnish Lessons 2.0, answers the theoretical question in his article’s title, writing in part: “I argue that if there were any gains in student achievement they would be marginal. Why? Education policies in Indiana and many other states in the United States create a context for teaching that limits (Finnish) teachers to use their skills, wisdom and shared knowledge for the good of their students’ learning.”

Education in India and China

Perhaps you recall the alarming ads from a few years ago about the millions of Chinese and Indian students who weren getting better educations from their system’s schools and wildly out-performing American students. The threat, of course, is that these Asians were about to eat the collective lunches of American students, and that we evil, lazy, stupid, unionized American teachers were to blame.

Lloyd Lofthouse has a column about how lousy the Chinese and Indian school systems are, in fact. I recommend reading it, but, unfortunately, he didn’t cite any of his sources, so I decided to dig around a bit to try to verify his figures.

So far, so good, and let me share a few things I discovered:

Take a glance at this table that I copied and pasted from a survey of Indian education by some group called CLSA. Notice that by  the high school level (grades 9-12), only thirty-two percent of the children in India are still in school. 

That means that 68% of the children in India have dropped out of school by the time they reach high school.

Wow.

And according to Hindu Business Online, not probably a hotbed of wild-eyed Marxists, the typical Indian child only spends about 5.1 years in school. Five years!

And while it is true that China has done an amazing job of opening up opportunities for its youth and reducing the illiteracy rates from about 80% to about 5% (mostly the aged), and while it is true that many Chinese students study very hard and do very well on tests, this should be taken with some grains of salt. According to James Fallows in the Atlantic,

“it is certainly arguable the Chinese educational system and culture leads the world in training students how to take tests. But it is not clear whether this type of training prepares students for much else other than taking tests. Certainly I have seen much evidence for this proposition in the Chinese graduate students that I have worked with. My favorite examples were the Chinese students with perfect TOEFL scores who could neither read nor write English in any meaningful way.”

[TOEFL used to mean Test of English as a Foreign Language]

I have not yet been able to nail down figures for what percentage of Chinese students actually make it to middle school or to high school or to college. But from what I see so far, you can rest assured that these numbers are much, much less than 100%!!

Apparently it doesn’t matter to that nearly every other nation has close to 100% union membership among its teachers, notably Finland — another nation whose students appear to be eating our lunch, too, according to the same international tests. It also doesn’t matter that in the USA, states where teacher union membership is high tend to have higher test scores than states where union membership is low.

How the US press continues to parrot the ‘party line’ that American students suck, despite the facts

This excellent post on how perhaps US schools aren’t so bad after all comes from The Daily Howler by Bob Somerby. He does a great service by putting together the points I was trying to make when I showed graphs and figures from the TIMMS report showing how well the US did. His summary is much better put-together than mine. Good job, Bob!

FOOLED ABOUT SCHOOLS: Fools for Finland!

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 21, 2012Part 5—Good news outscored by script: How well did American students do on last year’s international tests?That can’t be easily answered. In reading, American students scored very near the top of the world. Among the large nations which took part, only Russia outscored the U.S.

In reading, American students outscored the vast bulk of the world! Unless you read major American papers, where this success was largely obscured.

In math, American students did somewhat less well—and without any question, a fairly small group of Asian nations tend to outscore the world by significant margins in math. That said, here’s a surprise:

In fourth-grade and eighth-grade math, American scores were “not measurably different” from the scores of students in Finland.

We mention Finland for an obvious reason. In the past decade, this small, middle-class, unicultural nation has been all the rage in America’s low-scoring press corps. Its strong performance on international tests has been a constant source of commentary from journalists who don’t have the slightest idea what they’re talking about.

That’s why you might think it would count as news when the U.S. came close to matching Finland on last year’s international tests. Indeed, Finland was walloped by some U.S. states—states which took part in last year’s testing as independent “education systems.”

Continue reading …

Why does no-one mention Finland?

Here is a table that gives the latest PISA results in science, reading, and math.

The NYT highlighted Shanghai, Macao, and Hong Kong, individual cities within China. A number of people have pointed out that Shanghai, in particular, probably attracts some of the brightest students within China.  I don’t think there is any way that American students would tolerate the extremely long hours and hard work that Chinese students put in.

Notice that I highlighted Finland.  Finland used to score at extremely low levels on international tests like this, but has risen dramatically in the past few decades. But NOT by using any of the methods currently popular among the US Educational Deform movement. Instead, they do just about the opposite. See my previous blogs on that.