The Divine Conspiracy Blog

Sol Stern on education thinker E. D. Hirsch, Jr.

Hirsch was at the pinnacle of the academic world, in his mid-fifties, when he was struck by an insight into how reading is taught that, he says, “changed my life.” He was “feeling guilty” about the department’s inadequate freshman writing course, he recalls. Though UVA’s admissions standards were as competitive as the Ivies’, the reading and writing skills of many incoming students were poor, sure to handicap them in their future academic work. In trying to figure out how to close this “literacy gap,” Hirsch conducted an experiment on reading comprehension, using two groups of college students. Members of the first group possessed broad background knowledge in subjects like history, geography, civics, the arts, and basic science; members of the second, often from disadvantaged homes, lacked such knowledge. The knowledgeable students, it turned out, could far more easily comprehend and analyze difficult college-level texts (both fiction and nonfiction) than their poorly informed brethren could. Hirsch had discovered “a way to measure the variations in reading skill attributable to variations in the relevant background knowledge of audiences.”

This finding, first published in a psychology journal, was consistent with Hirsch’s past scholarship, in which he had argued that the author takes for granted that his readers have crucial background knowledge. Hirsch was also convinced that the problem of inadequate background knowledge began in the early grades. Elementary school teachers thus had to be more explicit about imparting such knowledge to students — indeed, this was even more important than teaching the “skills” of reading and writing, Hirsch believed. Hirsch’s insight contravened the conventional wisdom in the nation’s education schools: that teaching facts was unimportant, and that students instead should learn “how to” skills.

More here.

Troy Senik, author of the forthcoming book California at the Crossroads, currently has an article on California in the fall issue of National Affairs.

The most egregiously coddled of the state’s favored constituencies are California’s public labor unions. This is partly the result of their bloated ranks: The percentage of unionized public employees in California is 20% higher than the national average. Even more important, though, is the unions’ outsized influence. Awarded collective bargaining rights with nearly every sector of government during the 1960s and ’70s, the unions subsequently exploded into a political force to be reckoned with and a primary cause of California’s fiscal hemophilia.

The latest issue of City Journal also has an article on California.

A great Dennis Miller column from yesterday.

Obama’s play is to downsize as far as American chest-thumping goes. I happen to believe we have oodles to be proud of, he feels the nation would be better off as the lion that squeaked. But if in lieu of engaging our actual enemies, he believes he’d rather pick a fight with a straw man, he has definitely misidentified the Obi-Wan Kenobi of Fox News, Roger Ailes.

You see, a straw man is a straw man because he usually has no spine. Ailes has a spine made of a substance that they use to cut titanium. Ailes makes Rahm Emanuel look like an Amish Lamaze instructor and if they’re gonna lock antlers with Ailes, they’d best wear a cup.

Religion News Stories has an article on the controversy surrounding Jon McNaughton’s “One Nation Under God” painting.

McNaughton, who lives in Spanish Fork, Utah and is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, says he designed the painting to reflect his conservative views and his concern for the future of the nation if it departs from the Constitution.

“I think it’s been good for me to articulate what I believe,” said McNaughton, “I’ve done a lot of landscape paintings. Another landscape painting isn’t going to change anything.”

To be sure, others are noticing McNaughton’s work, particularly on the Internet, where “One Nation Under God” has reignited the fierce debate over religion’s role in the nation’s history. While many applaud the painting, some see it as historical revisionism at its worst. McNaughton paints famous figures whose religious views were ambiguous, such as Ben Franklin, assuming pious poses towards Jesus.

You can see the painting here.

Slate has a not so kind review of Liquid Memory: Why Wine Matters.

Liquid Memory presents itself as a call to arms; it exhorts wine lovers to rise up against “all those critics and arbiters who purport to speak with authority and are taking most of the fun and almost all the culture out of wine these days.” The book, declares Nossiter, is “an invitation to discover your freedom to taste.” He contends that consumers are being denied this freedom by figures such as [Robert] Parker who have shrouded wine in an arcane language designed to “exclude, bully, and belittle” people and by global economic forces that have placed wine on “the pedestal of high luxury, stripped of any relation to pleasure and discovery” and turned it into a “remarkably brazen expression of psycho-mercantile intimidation bordering on theft.”

The problem with Nossiter’s professed populism is that he doesn’t mean a word of it; it is just a pose. He denounces contemporary wine jargon as elitist—even smells a conspiracy behind it—yet how does he talk about wine? Mostly through historical, cinematographic, and literary allusions, a descriptive style that is vastly more inaccessible than all this chatter about cherries and berries. Of Burgundies, Nossiter writes that they are “closer to the experience of poetry, particularly as practiced by the ancient Greeks and, say, the classical Chinese or, not coincidentally, by the modernist poets since the turn of the twentieth century who’ve sought inspiration in the staccato lyricism of the Greeks and in the mellifluous indecipherability of the Chinese.” Now, there’s a tasting note for the Everyman! Likewise, it is a bit hard to square his indignation over wine’s luxury status with the fact that the three winemakers who garner most of the attention in the book—Roumier, Roulot, and Dominique Lafon—turn out some of the rarest and priciest wines on the planet.

Over 500 pages of academic papers available starting here.

You can download the book I Trust When Dark My Road: A Lutheran View of Depression here.

Newsweek on Mary Gordon’s new book, Reading Jesus: A Writer’s Encounter with the Gospels.

Gordon’s publisher, Random House, calls Reading Jesus a religion book, and it is: a series of meditations on the Gospels by an American Catholic who is progressive and intellectual. But really, it’s a book about writing. What Gordon loves about the Gospels is not the pat lessons of Sunday school. She loves what a writer loves: paradoxes and inconsistencies, moments of high drama and plot twists. She especially loves the character of Jesus: ascetic, radical, perfectionist—the childish, arrogant, demanding boy. (The magical healer curses a fig tree to death because he’s hungry and it has no fruit.) The story of the prodigal son is a parable about the bounty of God’s love. But it’s also a story that has the message of much great fiction: life is not fair.

You can also read an excerpt from the book here.

The government ends funding for abstinence-only sex education.

Buoyed by $1.9 billion in government funding since 1997 ($1.5 billion of that federal money), abstinence-only education grew from a niche market to a booming industry, with hundreds of curriculums for teachers to choose from. But if the 2000s were abstinence’s boom years, the next decade may well be its bust. With Obama’s budget for 2010 dropping all abstinence-until-marriage funds from the federal budget, past grantees are left uncertain. Congress could restore funding; the Senate Finance Committee voted to do so, 12–11, last month. But the measure must still pass the full Congress, where chances are slim. So abstinence-only groups are left hoping private donors will step forward to at least partially fill the gap. “The open question is whether these organizations will continue to thrive when federal funding is no longer available,” says Alesha Doan, author of The Politics of Virginity: Abstinence in Sex Education (Greenwood Publishing Group, 2008).

John Nolte on Pissing on Jesus.

“Larry David would never do this to Muslims. He doesn’t have the guts.”

That’s missing the point.

Hypocrisy or a fear of how some wacko extremist might react has nothing to do with this. Hollywood constantly singles out Christians for cruel ridicule and the worst kind of stereotyping for one simple reason…

They hate us.

They hate our guts.

There’s nothing more complicated to this question than that.

I promise you that if every Muslim on the planet was as gentle as a kitten, it would still be Christians singled out by the entertainment industry at every opportunity.

Read the rest here.