Betsy DeVos Is Not a Dope (With Betsy DeVos Reader)

From the grizzly bear jokes of her confirmation hearing, to late night television lampoons, to satire from the Onion and Borowitz, DeVos has become an easy mark. Everyone's in on the joke. Do the budget numbers not add up? It's that  wacky Betsy DeVos having trouble with math.

I've said this before-- it's a huge mistake to think Betsy DeVos is a dope. She is something else ay more dangerous. I've been reading her word and a ton of words about her for a year (and you can, too-- I've included an exhaustive reading list at the end of this piece), and while any game of armchair psycho-analysis has to come with huge caveats (like "I could be completely full of bovine fecal matter"), DeVos seems very much of a type that I've known my whole life, and it makes her both familiar and scary.

Betsy and I are of the same era, just eight months age difference between us, graduating high school in 1975. Our cohort includes Scott Adams, Brad Bird, Laura Branigan, Berke Breathed, LeVar Burton, Steve Buscemi, Dan Castellaneta, Andrew Dice Clay, Katie Couric, Bill Cowher, Daniel Day- Lewis, Michael Clarke Duncan, Bill Engvall, Stephen Fry, Nick Hornby, Jon Lovitz, Kelly McGillis, Donny Osmond, Kevin Pollack, Ray Romano, Michael W. Smith, Eddie Van Halen, Sid Vicious, Vanna White, Hans Zimmer, and, yes, Osama bin Laden. We are theoretically Baby Boomers, but we are the tail end of the generation. The US pulled out of Vietnam just in time to let us ignore the draft. And our older brethren, the Woodstock and protest march crowd looked a little silly to us; many of us suspected that they were kind of full of shit. Ideals were nice and all, but they seemed to have passed us a world that had scrambled old rules while not giving us much guidance. We were the guys having discussions in our college dorm rooms about whether or not it was okay to hold a door for a woman, and if it were okay for a woman to yell at us if we did. We were more cynical than idealistic; consequently, I have always known people my own age who wanted to rewind right past all of that to a God-sanctioned rule-bounded age of moral certainty. It felt as if we were living in age of painted cardboard, and so some of us longed for an age of steely solid certainty. I knew young women  who were probably young Betsy's, like the student who, offered a gifted class course of study of comparative religion, replied, "Why would we study those other religions? They're all wrong."

We are all sixty-or-so now, which means we are well-settled into our missions in life. It's easy to forget this about the well-preserved Betsy (we are, most of us, well preserved-- we're practical that way), but this is not a woman who's looking for a direction in her life, but a woman ready to take her life's work to its next level, maybe even its culmination.

She's not a politician, and she never has been. Politicians above all else respect and support the whole political game, the structures and traditions of what P. J. O'Rourke calls "unearned power." Politicians may scrap and fight over the chess board, but they honor an unspoken agreement to never flip over the table.

But DeVos is not a politician. She  (like many of her Trumpian fellow travelers) doesn't value the board and the table-- in fact, she believes they are actually part of the problem. Tell her that her actions threaten to tear apart the foundation of traditional order and she will simply smile that self-satisfied supremely smug smile and say, "Good."

Mind you, she is not a chaos muppet like her President. rump is prime boomer, like Bush II and Clinton secure in the boomer notion that if I want to do it, and I'm a righteous person, then whatever I want to do must be okay. Only with Trump, narcissism replaces "righteous person" with "only real person that exists." In many ways, Trump is the boomer id on very bad drugs. But that's an essay for another day.

And that's not the Class of '75. We have goals and we remain suspicious of our older brethren's unmoored moral compass. So DeVos is not a chaos muppet. She is Ernie, not Bert. She answers to a higher power, and she works in pursuit of a more important moral order.

An evangelical friend explained to me once that society started to go (literally) to hell when the church lost control of the major institutions. If we are going to fix our society, the church has to take those institutions back, and schools would be a great place to start. Talk to a lot of religious right and you were hear echoes of an idea that there was a Better Time in the past when Jesus's people ran the schools and the government and health care and plenty else. (Do not try to pin them down about when that time was, or try to argue that history shows no such place-- the books and the history and the so-called learning have all been infiltrated by the Godless hedonists who have written the church out of its rightful place in American history.)

DeVos has (just keep inserting disclaimers about my suppositions and best armchair interpretations) a clear idea of how the world is supposed to work, and what has gone wrong.

Here's how the world is supposed to work.

God has created means for sorting out people in a way that reflects His justice. People who make good health choices end up healthy. People who make proper relationship choices end up with families that please Him. People who choose well in life and honor Him will be rewarded with wealth and prosperity. People who end up holding the shitty end of the stick are only getting the just punishment they deserve, and if it stings, that because the pain is supposed to spur them to better life choices.

Here is how the world got screwed up.

Opportunistic Godless humanists sold the lie that our government was not supposed to be Christian, but some sort of Godless humanist state. Then, they bought votes by giving money to the poor and the sick and the rest of the Lower Classes. This act is a violation of God's law, a heretical attempt to thwart God's law with human action. Imagine that you were trying to discipline your child for some sort of serious misbehavior, and just as you had grounded that child for a month and encouraged them to think about what they've done, someone else busted in and gave your child a pony. That's what social programs look like to these folks.

So many modern institutions have been overrun by this Godless approach. God gives the rich and powerful dominion over parts of his world, and These People get in the way. Corporate leaders should be free to use their superior judgment to run their companies without interference from unions (a group of lower class laborers who don't know their place) or government regulations (produced by selfish money-grubbing people who relish the power they don't deserve to have). Capitalism is God's way of sorting out the Good from the Poor (that famous invisible hand is His). Communism is "godless" precisely because it interferes with God's will.

And God is not racist. Is it really racist to note that white folks have always stood at the forefront of a better society, of a world that more effectively brings kingdom gains? It's not that they don't believe in equality-- they do. But "equality" means that everyone has the opportunity to rise (or sink) to their appropriate level. Black and brown people can rise to higher levels-- they just have to prove they deserve it. And if that's harder for Their Kind-- well, that's not our fault is it. Society is suffering from attempts to give minorities unearned elevations (as exemplified by having the White House captured by a man who had no right to be there at all). DeVos has been consistently unable to imagine when the government should step in to protect the rights of minorities; she cannot shake the idea that such protection is a violation, that people who have lived good and righteous lives and made good choices should have nothing to fear.

So what is to be done?

God must be put back in charge, through the work of his most trusted servants. Unions should be crushed. Government powers should be made subordinate to the powers exercised by righteous servants of God. The church must take back the schools, which means that the public schools must be cut down, killed off. Like black and brown and poor folks, public schools should have the chance to rise if they do things the Right Way. But in the meantime, government must stop taking money away from the deserving people who earned it just to throw it away on Those People. Instead, if we could just harness the power of public tax dollars and direct them to private, Christian schools.

That's why Choice is paramount. Every parents should be free to choose a school that best fits their child, that puts their child in a place they belong, that is appropriate to their station. Future laborers should learn how to best serve their future employers, who should have a large say in how the schools can best serve their corporate needs. Some schools can best serve Those People by providing them with the discipline and control that they need in order to best serve society.

People should get what they deserve. No less, and no more.

And government should stay out of it-- if you answer to God, you don't need to answer to anyone else.

This is the secret of DeVos's apparent ignorance-- she doesn't know things because she doesn't need to know them. She already knows How the World Works, and after sixty years, she is well-practiced in blocking out the voices of a secular world that is lost, Godless, just plain wrong. DeVos was born into wealth and married into more wealth, and while some of us may look at that and see enormous luck, to DeVos it must seem obvious that she and her family are favored by, chosen by God. Every ornate chandelier and giant yacht is just further proof that they are on the right track, that they are good with God, that they are right. Just as DeVos could not think of any lesson that could be learned from the application of her education policies in Michigan, she is unlikely to think of areas where her understanding is poor and she needs the help of human experts. Experts in the things of this world who are not of the church are no experts at all. God gave her family that money to spend with the understanding that they-- and not some government functionary-- know best how to spend it. (And, incidentally, where others may see failure and chaos in Michigan and Detroit, DeVos sees water finally finding its own level, human capital being sorted into its appropriate bins).

Again, DeVos is not a politician. She is an advocate and a warrior. She has no interest in political give and take, in some sort of compromise that serves all stakeholders, because from her view, some stakeholders don't deserve to be stakeholders and as for US politics-- well, when it can be harnessed as a tool, that's fine, but you don't make deals with the devil. She famously admitted that they were buying influence and she's okay with that, because you can't corrupt a corrupt system, and you don't have to explain yourself to your Lessers-- particularly when they are allied with Satan.

As for managing her bad PR...

Betsy DeVos is not a dope. If you are on her side, tight with God and Jesus, then you already know that, and you know just what she is. If you aren't, then she doesn't really see any reason to explain herself to you. She doesn't need to have a conversation about you to achieve mutual understanding. She has spent a lifetime acquiring the power and position to win this battle for God and the Right and she doesn't need to understand the forces that she plans to trample with brute force (and really-- trying to understand Those People is just opening yourself up to the voice of Satan, and that's always a bad ides-- you know they're wrong and what else do you need to know).

I'll say again-- this is by no means all Christians or even all conservative Christians. I know people who believe much of this and yet can still have plenty of normal conversations with other, non-Christian humans. But of course none of them are incredibly wealthy and powerful, and there's nothing quite like wealth and power to insulate you from any need to interact with people Not Like You.

DeVos does not want to watch the world burn just for giggles. But there is much that she would like to tear down so that God's kingdom, white and happy and orderly, with everyone and everything in their proper places, can be raised up instead. She's almost sixty years old; nobody is going to talk her out of it.

Final disclaimer. I could be completely full of it. But here's a collection of some of the best writing about DeVos. Bookmark it; come back and work your way through it. And understand that Betsy DeVos is not a harmless incompetent ditz.


Religion Dispatches: Dutch Treat: Betsy DeVos and the Cjristian Schools Movement

Advancing God's Kingdom: Calvanism, Calvin Colege, and Betsy DeVos

Alternet: The DeVos Family: Meet the Super-Wealthy Right-Wingers Working with the Religious Right To Kill Public Education

New Yorker: Betsy DeVos and the Plan To Break Pubic Schools

Hidden Roots: Betsy DeVos's Educational Policies

Edushyster in DeVosland

Slate: How Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos Could Gut Public Education

Alternet: Betsy DeVos's Vision Goes Way Beyond Prinvatizing Education

Jacobin: Education, Privatization, Charters, Public Schools and Betsy DeVos

Progressive: The Long Game of Betsy DeVos

Politico: How Betsy and Dick DeVos Used God and Amway to Take Over Michigan Politics

Washington Post: Betsy DeVos Ties To Reformed Christian Community\

Mother Jones: Betsy DeVos Wants To Use America's Schools To Build God's Kingdom

New York Times: Betsy DeVos and God's Plans for School

Religion News: Faith Facts about Betsy DeVos

Rewire: DeVos Family Promoting Christian Orthodoxy

Betsy DeVos: Religion and Free Market View of Schools

Religion and Profit in the War on Education

Huffington Post: Betsy DeVos and Potters House Christian School

Watching the Gatekeepers

This time it was Steven Singer, who published a blog post taking a characteristically fiery stance against privatization of schools. Steven was tossed into Facebook jail for, maybe, a week. Why is not exactly clear. Sure, he took a stance against privatizing education in the House of Zuckerberg (which currently employs Campbell Brown to help them sort this stuff out). But it's not like it's the first time he's taken such a stance (hell, it hasn't been that long since he depicted Trump as a pile of poop). And it's not like he's the only person to do so-- so why now, and why this post?

Singer's plight brought up the story about the Network for Public Education's attempt to place an advertisement buy on Facebook to counter "School Choice Week." NPE was apparently permanently barred from such activity. Why, exactly? Nobody really knows.

And these things happen. You may recall a while back that many bloggers posted various quotes and summaries of PARCC test questions. I could link you to my own post, except that blogger, my blogging platform, took it down. Ditto for most of the other posts on the subject. Blogger is owned and operated by Google. Why, exactly? Copyright infringement, except that many of us described the questions in only the broadest terms.

If you frequent Alternet, you've been greeted by a panel that points out that Google's new attempt to clean up their algorithmic news act seems to have aimed the big broom primarily at progressive sites-- like Alternet, which has seen a precipitous drop in traffic.

Meanwhile, the Atlantic points out that Facebook and Google fail us in times of trouble-- supposedly because most of the critical decisions are made by algorithms and not human beings, with the caveat that algorithms are the product of human beings and literally codify whatever biases those human beings bring to the software-writing table. And if you want to have some extra credit fun, just Google "Is Facebook too big..." and watch the articles pile up from over a decade's worth of concern.

There are several lessons to be learned here, but probably the most important one is that social media are not values-free wide-open unbiased platforms. They are not a public utility. They are private businesses unlike any we have ever seen, and as such make decisions based on business concerns. It would be a mistake to assume that they will always be there, always willing to push our own particular viewpoint. That also means that advocates of a cause should think really really hard about demanding that so-and-so be banned from the platform, because once we accept and promote the idea that these platforms be available only to people with acceptable points of view, we run the risk of someday being found unacceptable. So it works kind of like, you know, freedom of speech-- everybody gets it, or nobody gets it.

The other important lesson is have a Plan B, and be well networked. When word spread through the community that Singer's piece had been squelched, umpty gazzilion people posted it in his stead. If he were a solo artist, laboring in unheralded obscurity, his piece would simply have vanished. So it's important that we have each others' backs.

And pay attention. Always pay attention. The gatekeepers of social media may appear to be benign and without prejudice, but that's just an illusion favored by today's business model. Best we all keep an eye out to see what tomorrow's business model brings.

ICYMI: Applefest Edition (10/8)

The first weekend in October is Applefest-- the major festival in my town (we take a day off from school for it). But I still have some reading for you.


Teaching: If You Aren't Dead Yet, You Aren't Doing It Well Enough

If you don't read anything else this week, read this piece from Othamr's Trombone about teaching as an act of self-sacrifice and martyrdom

Education Reform Is a Right Wing Movement

Jersey Jazzman remind us where the ed reform movement's roots really lie

Recommended Reading

A good collection of books about writing, teaching, and teaching writing.

Betsy DeVos's Vision

Jennifer Berkshire at Alternet with a widely reprinted that looks at the DeVosian long game-- what is she really up to?

Dutch Treat: Betsy DeVos and the Christian Schools Movement

Another good look at what really drives DeVos.

Fordham Institute: Teachers, Don't Get Sick

John Thompson's response to the Fordham sick days study

For Profit Schools Get State Dollars for Dropouts Who Rarely Drop In

Pro Publica has been doing some bang-up work on charter schools. Here's a at the practice taking money for ghost students.

Arts Integration Is a Sucker's Game

Jay Greene is a reformster who will sometimes call his colleagues out. Here he takes aim on STEAM

Jeanne Allen: Reactionary Right Wing

Allen and her Center for Education Reform work tirelessly to support charter schools. But now she's butt-hurt that a new documentary portrays her as a tireless supporter of charter schools.

Why Privatization Is a Disaster for any Democratic Society

Salon looks at privatization in education and other areas

Looking Behind the Curtain of School Choice Again

In Chicago, one more look at how choice really works (and how you can tell it's a sham)

Revolting Tech

It has been a typical couple of days with tech.

I spent a bunch of time on the phone with various offices of a major telecommunications company (rhymes with "Shmerizon") in an effort to upgrade our wireless plan, but this, it turns out, requires an actual phone call which in turn involves being passed around to various departments, each one of which requires a new explanation of what you're trying to do and why. This is all because we were using a Shmerizon feature that allowed us get just one bill for all of our services, but because our wireless is sharing a bill with "another company", there were extra steps. So apparently this large corporation is really several corporations, or one corporation whose internal communication is so bad that it might as well be several separate companies.

Which seems not uncommon, as meanwhile I am trying to settle issues with my tablet from Shmicroshmoft which has strange glitches that keep it from working well with other Shmicroshmoft products, for some reason that nobody knows. This particular issue I solve on my own, pretty much by randomly switching some settings and stumbling across something that neither the message boards.

Both of these take a while because on my home computer, I must deal with a browser that balloons up to huge KB use until it has to be restarted, which is also slow because the Shmerizon DSL into my home is a terribly noisy line that repeated attempts by the  company to fix have, in five years, been unsuccessful. It is especially bad when it rains, to the point that you can't have a conversation on the land line. There are no other reliable internet providers locally,

That's actually why we need the improved wireless plan-- for when we anchor our household wi-fi on the phones. This trick does not work at school, where signal is bad that the phone is basically unusable (and has to be either plugged in or turned off to avoid draining all power). I can take care of some prep work at school, provided I have what I need unblocked. And because our school has gone Google, the sites and services that are Google uncompatable are a no-go at school, too.

Many of these issues are exacerbated by the age of my equipment, but I can't afford to upgrade every six months to keep everything high grade and current. My home desktop is practically a dinosaur at five years old, which may be one more reason I need to reboot the modem almost daily to keep the connection working.

And I am not a Luddite or a digital dope. But this kind of constant maintenance and nursing and workarounds is part of my daily tech routine.

So tell me again how ed tech is going to revolutionize schools.

Bowling: Critics and Choice

I've followed Nate Bowling for a while. I admire his willingness to stay true to principles and avoid simply throwing his lot in with one faction or another.

On his website, the Washington state educator neatly sums up one of the central challenges of the current ed reform landscape:

Teachers of color face a dilemma: we know--more than anyone, the urgent need for change--we get that the status-quo screws our kids. But at the same time we also see a reform movement that "has all the answers" and doesn't want or value our experience and insights from working with marginalized communities.

Bowling is a founding member of Teachers United (recipient of many Gates $$), flies the #educolor flag (a mark of one of the most valuable networks of educators of color, including many strong public ed advocates), and won the Milken Educator Award (from the foundation set up by former junk bond king, convicted felon, and current reformster Michael Milken ). Yes, he's in a video accepting a big check from Milken while Sen. Patty Murray looks on proudly (well, as evangelist D. L. Moody supposedly said upon being challenged about accepting the "devil's money" from a reprobate, "The devil's had it long enough. It's time to give it to God.") And while he may talk about charters, he has turned down lots of charter job offers to stay teaching in a public school.

He's talked to Bill Gates, and he and I once had a bloggy back-and-forth (here's the end, with all the links).

Last week he posted Stop Berating Black and Brown Parents Over Charters (and Give Your Twitter Fingers a Rest)  and while it feels a little like a sub-tweet aimed at particular individuals, it has what I consider some useful advice that we haven't visited in a while.

Bowling starts with this point:

If there's one lesson that I have learned over the last few years, it’s that you're never going to convince a black or brown mother to change her mind about where to send her child by demonizing her choices, calling her a “neo-liberal,” or labeling her a “tool of privatizers.” 

 My first impulse is to say that folks in the pro-public school camp don't say things like that, but then I think about and, well, yes, some do. But some of us have developed a more complicated stance. Both Mark "Jersey Jazzman" Weber and I have said on numerous occasions that we can imagine charters as valuable additions to education-- but not the way folks are trying to do them currently.

And there is a tension that Bowling nails exactly. I think charters are a huge policy problem, and the current rules under which they operate are somewhere between hugely misguided and underhandedly destructive. I will gladly stand in front of legislators all day and argue that at a minimum, the rules governing charters must be radically changed. At the same time, I wouldn't stand in front of a parent for even sixty seconds and tell them that they must send their child to public school in order to support the "good guys." Parents know their kids and the situation on the ground, and so there is a real tension about what we should collectively pursue as matters of policy and what parents should pursue as matters of care for their children.

Charter-choice advocates are, of course, well aware of this tension and they are very careful to frame the issue so that we are only talking about parents and not about policy. Let's talk about letting parents have a choice, they say, and let's not talk about a charter system that stacks the deck heavily against parents and the community in favor of the operators. Current charter-choice advocates are too often in the role of spokespeople for the 1920s meat packing industry. "Let's not talk about all that ugly stuff in Upton Sinclair's novel, about the rotten meat and the inhumane conditions and the unsafe products. Let's just focus on making sure that the customers get to go to the supermarket and choose."

This is one reason Betsy DeVos keeps her focus on parent choice, to the point of arguing that the institutions of education don't even exist-- because as long as she  makes the issue parental choice, she can ignore all the systemic issues of bad standards and screwed up testing and systemic inequity and all the rest.

But Bowling is absolutely correct that we do not resolve this tension by demonizing black and brown parents. And he provides a list of suggestions that we might want to consider instead.

You must address their motivations and concerns. 

Why are folks choosing charters? Yes, in some cases they are choosing charters because the charters are using marketing to push attractive lies-- but that doesn't change the question we should be asking, which is why, exactly, are those lies effective. And can we take a look at the log in our own eye and address that as well. If we want to make public education more effective, we have to move past "Wow, No Excuses schools are pretty racist" to "So why do some parents fine them less racist than the local public school?"

Work to improve the experience of students of color in traditional public schools.

Bowling correctly observes that a good way to combat charters is to make public schools too attractive to leave.

In some respects, this is easier said than done. Choices are being made-- financial choices, curriculum and standards choices-- at high levels that tie our public school hands and force us to serve less-than-stellar educational material to our students.

But let's face it-- it doesn't cost a penny to put a less racist staff in place. Nor is it costly to do the self-examination and self-policing needed to create a more nurturing environment for students of color.

You can be right on the issue and still be wrong.

Here’s the deal, friends. You’re right about neo-liberalism and the decaying of public goods, but ain’t nobody trying to hear that from you when it comes to their child’s well-being. We all know there are awful schools and school systems out there in desperate need of transformation.

Bowling is talking again about the tension between larger policy issues, the business of operating and improving the institution of public education, and the needs of parents to make sure their child is getting the best shake possible. Yes, it's true that, as currently structured, when a child leaves a public school for a charter school, she makes things worse for the students who are left behind-- but would we really counsel someone to stay in a burning building because there are other people trapped in their, too.

Obviously the macro-issues and the personal issues are linked, but it's a mistake to believe that only the macro issues matter. Charter and choice folks create plenty of opposition for themselves by the way they conduct their business; public school supporters should not make that same mistake.We cannot denigrate parents for making the best choice they think they see; we must go after the system and the charters who make bad choices look good.

Kurtz and the Angry Saviors

In the past, this was the time of year in which I taught Heart of Darkness. As my teaching year has been shortened by testing and other demands on time, I've cut bits and pieces of my curriculum, so Kurtz and Marlowe are gone.

It's a work that sticks with me. It's a problematic work, a work that calls out racism even as it is itself terribly racist. But it also opens up larger questions, like the question of how evil gets into the world. Conrad only half answers that question, by suggesting that darkness and evil are part of the world's primordial soup, always barely held back by a thin veneer of civilization.

But Conrad never really offers a solution to one of the great mysteries at the work's core-- how did Kurtz, who entered Africa as an "emisarry of light," a gifted man of possibility, intent on uplift-- how did that man become the dark, twisted, murderous soul that Marlowe encounters? How is it that Kurtz comes to rage against the people he came to save? Conrad has Marlowe muse that somehow the darkness spoke to Kurtz, entered him through some weak spot, all of which has a nice metaphysical ring to it, but doesn't really explain anything. William Golding would later try to add to Conrad's work with his Lord of the Flies (and makes sure we get the reference by having Ralph weep for the "darkness of men's hearts" at the end), but I have a theory of my own.

There is something that happens when a person sets out to "save" other people, especially when the savior believes that he is inherently superior, that the folks who need saving are defective, broken, less than. Because they are broken in his eyes, he doesn't try to know them, to understand them, to so much as listen to them-- even though he approaches them with nothing but love and good intentions.

Imagine that a group of monkeys discover a lake filled with fish. "Brothers and sisters," they declare, "These poor fish know nothing about climbing trees, know nothing about fetching and eating bananas, know nothing about the joy of picking bugs out of each others' fur. We must go to them. We must help them. We must show them a better way to live."

Bet it's been at least a week since you've seen this cartoon

There are giraffes in the same area that mock this idea. "The fish are our inferiors, and they must always remain our inferiors, and we should take steps to make sure that none of them ever rise above their station." But the monkeys disagree. "We can give them the chance to rise just as far as we monkeys," they say.Because monkeys assume that since climbing trees is what they do, it must be what everyone who matters does. Only by climbing trees can one succeed in life,

So the monkeys raise up a group of missionaries to travel to the lake, to save the fish.

Some begin the careful and heartfelt work of taking the fish out of the lake and trying to teach them to climb trees. Some get the clever idea of growing trees in the lake itself.

Over time, very few fish learn to climb trees. But other things happen.

One is that some monkeys offer to "help." "Brothers and sisters," they say. "Your work would probably be easier if the lake were not quite so wet. To help with your important and uplifting work, we will gladly undertake the removal of water from the lake." And those monkeys, spouting endless pieties, go on to make a ton of money selling lake water. But they are not the worst.

The monkey missionaries, utterly convinced of their own superiority and righteousness, become increasingly frustrated. Because almost none of the fish learn to climb.

Says one group of monkeys, "Well, they're lazy. They just don't have the grit and ambition to climb trees. They need stronger discipline, tighter structure. It's the only way their kind will ever get ahead."

Inevitably, a day comes when some fish dare to speak up, perhaps even criticize the tree climbing policy, and the monkeys who had previously been so vocal about helping and uplifting fish get hurt-- and angry. "How dare they. Where's their gratitude? Where are the thanks for the benefits we've allowed them to have?" It does not occur to the monkeys that, implicit in their complaint, is the notion that they assume the fish are less than, that the fish deserve no voice in their own lives. That they are in fact just as species-ist as the gorillas.

And the monkeys get angrier and angrier. "These fish aren't just lazy. They are deliberately resisting us, deliberately refusing to climb the trees as we have so lovingly explained they ought to. We've told them and told them and showed them and given them all the help in the world and the GOD DAMN MOTHER-EFFING FISH STAY IN THE DAMNED LAKE ALL DAY!!" And then the monkeys pick the fish up and fling them at the trees, hollering all the time.

This metaphor is flawed in that we are all the same human species, doing this to each other. Golding's expansion of Conrad's point omits the racial factors of Heart of Darkness-- the boys are all from the same culture and class. But Goldings is right-- the source of this evil is in us.

I see this dynamic in many places. Not just in the colonialism of No Excuse charter schools, but in every classroom where a teacher thinks, "Lazy little bastards-- I hope they all fail." Or in the ed reformers who angrily dismiss teachers who won't see how much better the reformsters can make things.

It's the repeated arc of every situation where folks decide they are going to "fix" other folks as a big-hearted generous favor, but they never take the time to actually listen to the people they want to "fix." Of course we are not as different as monkeys and fish, but if we are going to attempt this manner of missionary work, we might as well be. There is no anger like the anger of a thwarted self-proclaimed savior.

[PS. Only now have I discovered that Fishtree is actually a company that is flogging a computer platform for personalized education. So I guess what the monkeys really need is a computer, and then the fish will finally catch on.]

The Maltese Badges

From Malta Today:

Malta is the first country to launch a blockchain initiative which will see it issue notarised blockchain certificates to complement paper certificates for professional and informal education, the government announced today.

Because you had no idea where Malta is, did you.

Malta is teaming up with Learning Machine, a group we've heard about before. Learning Machine has some big ideas about turning out educated people like you manufacture toasters, or "decoupling" education from any sort of institution, and of creating a whole new credentialling system. That blockchain concept they talk about is the same idea behind bitcoins, the digitized currency that was going to totally do away with money.

Here are some of the things that Natalie Smolenski, "Cultural Anthropologist & Dedicated Account Manager at Learning Machine," had to say to explain the high concept here.

Because skills are only meaningful in social context, any given classification of skill is a provisional judgment of pragmatic value within an economy in which such values can be productively leveraged and exchanged. Moreover, because the kind of skill that credentials record is at root a unit of value that has been conferred to a particular individual or entity by another, it can be recorded in any ledger that records transactions of values.

Your value as a meat widget will be determined by how valuable someone else says your skill set is.

Not only will the shift toward a standardized, competency-based credentialing system allow us to address the social question of what constitutes skill with some consistency and reliability, but it will also decouple credentials from any particular institutional arrangement, in particular the over-reliance on university degrees as arbiters of skill.

In this brave new world, we will standardize everything, including what a particular skill is or means, and we'll never need schools again. You just log on, watch some video, take a test. Boom-- badge!

Everyone will have standardized credentials that follow them around digitally, and employers and managers will never actually have to deal with other humans face to face again. We'll just be able to open a file, look at your list of badges, and no exactly what work you are capable of. Human resource departments will be able to shop for the exact employees they want like a meat widget amazon.com, because of course every skill set in human experience can be reduced to a set of simple standardized badges.

It's a scheme that is so insanely at odds with how human beings actually function that you may find it hard to believe that it's popular among a certain class of people (exactly the kind of big, important people who would never agree that their own special skill sets can be reduced to some competency-based standardized badges). Here's one company's version of it called the ledger. Lumina is working on it (in fact, one of the big practical problems of blockchain CBE is going to be a VHS vs. Betamax problem of which company will dominate the field, because this only really works if everyone is in the same system). This is out there, and while I would like to believe that it will collapse under the weight of its own foolish disregard for how human beings live, learn and work, it is exactly the sort of thing that the Captains of Industry would love to forcibly impose on the plebes.

And now they have an entire nation as a proof of concept test. True, a small nation, but still-- a nation has ceded their education system to this corporate scheme. The European Union is watching how Malta manages to place education credentials in the blockchain, for full access and portability. The Netherlands and Estonia are exploring this stuff.  Certificates are expected to be issued by the end of the year.

“Blockchain gives us the opportunity to ensure that every Maltese citizen take ownership of their educational credentials,”said the education ministry, which highlights another aspect of this version of CBE-- idoesn't just privatize education, but it gets government completely out of the education work altogether. Congratulations, citizen-- your education is now your problem, and yours alone.

Three Maltese colleges – the Malta College for Art, Science and Technology (MCAST), the Institute for Tourism Studies (ITS) and the National Commission for Further and Higher Education (NCFHE) –wil be granting certificates based on the new CBE system. I hope everyone at those institutions is polishing their resume, because they will soon be unnecessary.

Of course, this could fail spectacularly and Learning Machine will slink away in ruined disgrace and oh, who am I kidding-- there is too much money to be made here in this wholesale depersonalization of education. Whatever happens, they will spin this as a win. Pay attention-- this is not the end of this.