I am prefacing my review of Steve Klees book "Conscience of a Progressive" with this long blog about my recollections of the course I took from him in 2004.
I retired as a computer consultant in 1997 with the publication of my fourth book, The Oracle e-business Suite. Times were fat. My stock market and real estate investments were doing well, and my wife Mary Ann’s business was prospering. Moreover, the handwriting was on the wall for white guys. I had left IBM years earlier because all the promotions were going to other than white men. Mary Ann being a minority, I had closely followed the advantages that women and minority businesses enjoyed in doing business with the government. I watched as Indian owned businesses got government contracts, and shamelessly hired foreigners with H1B visas in preference to guys like me. They obviously wanted me to go the way of the dodo. Since I was in a position to do so, I obliged.
I had always had an interest in education, sitting on the boards of the primary and secondary Episcopal day schools my children attended. From 1998 to 2002 I worked as a substitute teacher for Catholic, private and public schools, and in 2002-3 as a classroom teacher for Field School in Washington DC. I didn't fit the mold of a teacher, was and I was not convinced they were doing it right.
Governments have a lot of screwy social policies. The University of Maryland gave free tuition to students over 60. I have no earthly notion what social good it provided, but as it was becoming clear that I was a bone in the throat of the Field School and they would love to be rid of me, I applied for a doctorate program at the University of Maryland College of Education.
Four decades of business experience had done me some good. My GRE scores were 150 points higher than my SATs had been. Inasmuch as Colleges of Education are renowned for getting the least qualified students, they just about had to take me, although they must've wondered what on earth I wanted from them.
Recognizing my unusual status, my advisor steered me to some interesting courses in my first semester, spring of 2004. William Galston, whose book Liberal Pluralism I had just happened to recently read and review, taught a course on the Politics and Policy of Educational Reform. He is the epitome of a liberal scholar. His course was a delight.
George McReady taught Quantitative Research Methods, an introduction to statistics. I’m a math guy. I loved the course. Laura Perna taught Quantitative Applications in Education, another stat course but in the education faculty. She, as a crusading feminist, ensured that I could never do anything right.
Lastly Steve Klees taught Alternative Educational Systems. He is an intelligent and mild-mannered guy, enamored of leftist activists from every quarter. I had encountered the type in high school, later manning Fair Play for Cuba tables at Berkeley in 1959 and promoting Russian language and culture at Reed 1960-62. They were shouting against the Vietnam war again in Berkeley 1964-66. They embraced the Soixante Huitards as they trashed the Champs Elysées in the early ‘70s – shards of which I happened to see as I visited from Germany. They embraced Salvador Allende in Chile, the Tupamero guerrilas in Uruguay, Montoneros in Argentina, Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua and so on.
I had seen a lot in my travels, living in Vietnam and visiting Cambodia during the war, visiting Franco’s Spain in the ‘70s and Argentina under the generals in the ‘80s. Things were very quiet when men with guns stood on the street corners. I had talked to former Sandinista and Contra fighters while doing Habitat for Humanity work in Nicaragua. And, of course, the Che T-shirts were ubiquitous on every campus in America.
I won’t say they are always wrong, but where such radicals will crop up and what they will say is fairly predictable. There is a leftist mentality which always finds somebody to blame for the world’s imperfections and always has a solution which they are willing, even eager, to implement just out of the goodness of their hearts, for the benefit of all mankind. For your benefit I have uploaded a class roster and some class readings here, to give you a taste of what was going on twenty years ago in academia.
Klees loved to talk about the Zapatists and in particular Subcomandante Marcos and the marvelous transformation taking place among the indigenous peoples in Chiapas, Mexico. You haven’t heard about it? Like every socialist dream, it has faded. I’m sure there are good excuses, but I haven’t time to find them. I am sure he felt a bit smug presenting us the above link in its original language. Being equally able to read it, I pass judgment on the smugness.
Another of his pets was the Landless Rural Workers Movement in Brazil, the MST – Movemiento sem Terros. I saw one of their camps that summer of 2004 on my way to the Kayapo Indians. It was incredibly depressing. My sympathetic but unhelpful take is “These poor people. They can’t do a damned thing useful.” It is not that they are oppressed so much as that they have nothing going for them. You have to feel for them, but also recognize that there is little that can be done. It has been 20 years, and nothing has been done, despite the second coming of Lula.
Though it was after the course, I got some brownie points by sharing my photos and experiences with him upon my return.
Klees treated me fairly and gave me an A in the course. My fellow students were not as generous. They hated me and resented my observations about the blacks burning down their own neighborhoods in the Watts section of Los Angeles where I carried a gun in the 1965 riots. They did not want to hear my account of spoiled kids trashing the Champs Elysées in Paris in the 1970s. They did not want the stories I had heard from the former Sandinistas and the Contras in Nicaragua. Basically, nobody wants facts that get in the way of dogma, and my life's experience was too full of facts.
That’s the background. Look forward to the review.
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Meanwhile, the common folk push back. I mentioned yesterday that the Poles are not paying Pfizer for vaccines they rejected on the grounds they are dangerous. Today’s news is that the WHO has struck out trying to take dictatorial control over handling epidemics in Slovakia and Estonia. Discussions of the same are going on in many other countries. Wish them luck.
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I stopped reading Fred Reed when he stopped writing for Unz. He’s a prickly guy. Never answered my emails, among other things. However, he sees things clearly when it comes to education. Probably the reason he was cancelled. Here is a piece I copied twenty years ago about the schools. Yep. Same sentiment you will read again shortly. Here’s a recent Fred piece. He hasn’t mellowed.
That’s the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the strong man is being called downstairs to clean a mess of smelt for dinner. Men still have a role in family life! Cleaning stinky fish guts. Until later.
Why were you carrying a gun in the Watts riots?