Education and Liberty

I find myself constantly amazed at the lack of ethics and logic, even just plain common sense, regarding our treatment of children in society. The startling lack of judgment on the part of the Lower Merion School District (The latest headlines read:

A suburban school district secretly captured at least 56,000 webcam photographs and screen shots from laptops issued to high school students, its lawyer acknowledged Monday. Full Article)

and the recent tasering of a ten year old boy in Martinsville, Indiana (Full Article) are all symptoms of the same problem: I will call it “Zero-Tolerance Thinking”

By “Zero-Tolerence Thinking” I mean the tendency of adults, members of large powerful institutions such as schools and police forces, to think of people, all people, in terms of groups. We all do some version of this. It acts as an economization of time and effort in using our judgment. And it can be a useful social tool: labels allow for us to categorize our social experience, and more quickly make decision. It becomes Zero-Tolerence Thinking when, instead of sound judgment, those in a position of power and force use it to exact punishment. It becomes dangerous when instead of seeing a ten-year old boy, throwing a tantrum, police officers see a violent offender whom they must violently subdue.

How about you? How often do you do this? How often do you choose put a situation into easily definable terms, instead of thinking critically about all that parts? As teachers, co-workers, friends, have you done this (albeit on a smaller scale)?

My larger question is about the outcome when we do this to children. When we see them as a group, instead of as individuals, how does that change their understanding of self? Zero-Tolerence policies at schools create situations in which the individual child is subsumed under the rule of gross group punishment. The implicit moral is “Do not think about your actions, your desires, the particulars of your situation. They do not count, will not be taken into account when considering the consequences. Follow the rules. All of them.” Who does this policy serve? Is there anyone who feels good about it? The administrators, who usually recognize the injustice? The parents who see their child in pain? The student, who is emotionally destroyed?

The most eloquent description I have found was unsurprisingly (or surprisingly, if you aren’t as familiar with her body of work) written by Maria Montessori :

The fact that the rights of the child have been forgotten and ignored, that the child has been mistreated, even destroyed, and that moreover hsi worth, power and nature have been misunderstood, should all give humanity serious food for thought.

Maria Montessori, 1938

Very serious food for thought. And a serious call to action.

P.S. I recently came across this fantastic account of a small town lawyer and his fight to make a school board use common sense. Enjoy!

Zero-Tolerance For Zero-Common-Sense

If you practice law in a small town–and especially if you practice criminal law in a small town–chances are pretty good you’ll eventually experience the joy & thrill of appearing before some school administrators at an expulsion hearing.

And you may be thinking to yourself, that doesn’t sound too bad. What harm could come from developing a niche practice in a small town, a practice in which you might be able to help confused students (and their parents) find their way back into school to pursue their future academic and extracurricular promise?

Well, Dear Reader, the problem is YOU WILL LOSE YOUR MIND.

Welcome to the Land of Zero-Tolerance, a place much like Alice’s Wonderland, where your client gets a mad tea party instead of a hearing with due process, conducted by a school administrator who could be easily confused with the Queen of Hearts. It doesn’t take long to find out that a “policy of zero-tolerance” can be the modern-equivalent of “Off with their heads!”

Now, some solace can be found in understanding this frustration is not new. One of my favorite sages, Mark Twain, once quipped:

“In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made School Boards.”

So, you can’t say you weren’t warned. But that doesn’t mean it hurts any less when you bang your head against the schoolhouse wall.

I once represented a young man, who had never been in any real trouble at school, for an expulsion under a zero-tolerance statute for the offense of “possessing a firearm facsimile.” His transgression? He had made the mistake of asking to see the object another student had brought to class. It turned out it was laser-pointer in the shape of a gun. A very small gun. Like a tiny toy gun. Which he could hold in the palm of his hand and then close his fist around without anybody else knowing what it was. Which is why he stupidly asked to see it in the first place because he didn’t know what the other kid had in his hand.

The school principal said he was compelled to expel my client for a year under the law and it didn’t matter what my client’s intent was. I appealed to the school board and pointed out that the language of the statute clearly required that the “weapon facsimile” be capable of being confused with a real gun. The school board was unimpressed with my logic. After all, as one school board member commented, it could have been just like one of those tiny guns that James Bond uses.

OK, then.

Luckily, a district court magistrate–employing a shocking amount of common sense–didn’t buy the James Bond approach and overturned my client’s silly expulsion. The school board, wounded by this judicial rejection of their power, appealed.

The appellate gurus can probably predict what happened next. I made arrangements to have the little gun-shaped laser-pointer brought to the oral arguments, where I showed the Court of Appeals just how small it was and how it could be held inside a fist without any sign it was there. And the Court of Appeals judges shook their heads in approval and asked really good questions that showed just how absurd they thought the school board’s decision was.

And then they issued an opinion upholding the expulsion–because it was the school board’s decision to make–not some pushy, common-sense wielding judge.

And, not for the first time, I went insane.

So imagine the state of my mental health when coming across this item in the New York Times:

“Finding character witnesses when you are 6 years old is not easy. But there was Zachary Christie last week at a school disciplinary committee hearing with his karate instructor and his mother’s fiancé by his side to vouch for him.

Zachary’s offense? Taking a camping utensil that can serve as a knife, fork and spoon to school. He was so excited about recently joining the Cub Scouts that he wanted to use it at lunch. School officials concluded that he had violated their zero-tolerance policy on weapons, and Zachary was suspended and now faces 45 days in the district’s reform school.”

Please be sure to click on the link to the NY Times story to view the picture of this scary transgressor Zachary. Nefarious, ain’t he?

The NY Times correctly reports that zero-tolerance policies concerning weapons started with the tragedy at Columbine High School, here in Colorado. But the reference to Virginia Tech and the claim that the “growing debate” over whether these policies have gone too far being a recent development are not accurate. The shooting at Columbine was over ten years ago, and most of these laws were passed soon after in the typical knee-jerk fashion so loved by state legislators. The shooting at Virginia Tech is only one such awful and sickening demonstration of the ineffectiveness and futility of these laws.

But zero-tolerance policies are very effective at one thing: demonstrating the definition of “absurd.” Thus, I could barely wait for the answer when the NY Times posed the question “on the minds of residents” where Zachary lives: “Why do school officials not have more discretion in such cases?”

The mind-bending, psychosis-inducing answer? School board officials don’t have more discretion because, essentially, they’re too stupid. (Score one for Mr. Twain, thankyouverymuch.)

It appears “some school administrators argue that it is difficult to distinguish innocent pranks and mistakes from more serious threats, and that the policies must be strict to protect students.” Protect the students from whom? From other students? Or from imbecile school administrators too dumb to distinguish a prank from a serious threat?

And the answer is??? Of course! It’s from imbecile school administrators:

Charles P. Ewing, a professor of law and psychology at the University at Buffalo Law School who has written about school safety issues, said he favored a strict zero-tolerance approach.

“There are still serious threats every day in schools,” Dr. Ewing said, adding that giving school officials discretion holds the potential for discrimination and requires the kind of threat assessments that only law enforcement is equipped to make.

There you have it. Zero-tolerance laws are designed to protect students from school officials who possess zero-common-sense and are unable to make unbiased decisions that an average cop, who presumably has less education, makes on a daily basis.

So, while school officials might be in charge of educating our children and inculcating values like fairness, equality, and respect for authority in this nation’s future generations, we can’t trust them to tell the difference between a Cub Scout utensil exuberantly and proudly displayed by a six-year-old and a deadly weapon intended to be used to hurt somebody.

No wonder some school officials have tried to ban Mark Twain.”

This article on Mises.org (HT: Blake Stephenson) gives an example of how the negative feedback loops inherent in large, centrally directed bureaucracies stifle the use of judgment, local knowledge and initiative.

The article illustrates why the modern state should not be in charge of public education. But I think it also suggests that there are problems that exist in all collective human endeavors that educators, social scientist and entrepreneurs need to try to overcome.

Why can’t we all “learn” from history? Why don’t organizations learn?

Experience teaches. While individuals can clearly be very resilient to recognizing the lessons of their experience, when the consequences of their actions fall squarely on them, it is difficult for them to be completely immune to the implications reality has for their thinking and behavior. Even when we are resistant to such lessons, we are bothered by conscience and failure. Reality provides a kind of ‘control’ for our errors. Yet peoples, governments and organizations seem to be remarkably oblivious to lessons which can be drawn from their past. They repeatedly take the same actions that are detrimental to their purposes. They fail to draw conclusions about the consequences of their collective behaviors and they are slow, if not entirely resistant, to making use of innovations suggested by the experience of their members.

One of the reasons for this is that there is a fundamental epistemological difference between the natural and social sciences. Strictly speaking, experiments cannot be made in the social arena because social structures and relationships are far too complex to isolate one-to-one causal connections between actions and results. In the social realm, every moment is always different from the one before it. History never repeats itself.

For these reasons, irreducible judgment and understanding (verstehen) are essential. We can learn by reading history, however. We can practice exercising our judgment about social dynamics by comparing the considered judgments other individuals have made about particular historical situations in the past. This is practice in developing and considering likely stories about social cause and effect. We can also learn from economics, which tries to uncover the abstract and timeless principles of human actions.

The difference between the learning that occurs in individuals about the immediate effects of their actions and the “learning” of group is that the composite results of the actions of individuals is not immediate and cannot be directly observed. There are unintended and unobserved results of our behaviors that are beyond our conscious recognition and control. Social science studies the results of human action but not of human design. According to Frederick Hayek the “economic problem”–which is to say the fundamental social problem–is the need for agents’ actions to be coordinated to make use of the knowledge (and learning) available to all of those agents separately. In order to make use of dispersed knowledge, we need experimentation, judgment and risk-taking on the part of diverse individuals and some form of feedback that translates individual learning into a form that will tend guide the actions of others.

In the nexus of voluntary exchange (the “market”), the price system and the institutions of private property help to coordinate the knowledge and decisions of all the agents involved. In The Use of Knowledge in Society, The Creative Powers of a Free Civilization and Competition as a Discovery Procedure, Hayek describes how certain institutions tend to make use of fortuitous discoveries and local knowledge for the mutual benefit of agents in that nexus of exchange.

Strictly speaking, groups of individuals do not learn; concomitantly, institutions cannot learn. But social structures can be so constituted that they allow individuals to make use of the knowledge and learning of the other individuals in that group.

Figuring out how to order all of our collective affairs in such a way that optimizes the use of the knowledge of the members of a group who do not possess that knowledge themselves is an exciting task for those who care about learning and progress.

St. Johns College President Christopher Nelson recently gave an address about the value of a liberal arts education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

If you have ever asked me why I went to St. Johns, what I think is so great about the liberal arts, or why I think that education is the only way to create real change, here is your answer:

Our nation’s foundation rests upon the principle of the intellectual freedom of each of its citizens; its political, economic, moral and spiritual freedoms are all derived from this intellectual freedom, and its political, economic, moral and spiritual strength depends upon it. We are a nation built upon a respect for the individual and a trust that our citizens are capable of self-government.

For the sake of our country, we therefore need our citizens to have an education in our democratic traditions and foundations, as well as in the arts needed to question and examine those very foundations so that we may keep them vibrant and alive for us against attack or atrophy. There is a real tension between these two goods. The traditions, customs and laws of the nation are at times at odds with the very things that encourage the autonomy of the individual citizen who might question them. This tension is healthy in a free republic.

A college education that will strengthen this tension will serve this nation well because it will help us educate independent and self-sufficient citizens who will be fit for the freedom they enjoy in our country. Providing the access and opportunity to as many as possible to undertake such an education will serve that public interest.

If we prize the individual in our society and value the ways an individual may become self-sufficient, we also ought to support the many and various means our colleges employ to help their students become independent and strong. In the end, the independence of our citizenry will strengthen our nation. Education in the arts of freedom and self-sufficiency make the promise of America possible[...]

We are sometimes asked whether we aren’t elitist. One former dean’s answer to that was, “We are small, but we are about as exclusive as a pick-up baseball game. If you have a glove, want to play and make an effort, you belong.” It’s a particularly good image because it suggests something that is very all-American. We are a model of an American institution in at least two respects:

? First, democratic participation is our primary mode in the classroom. Our students are responsible for participating in their classes, all of them in the same way. They must all read the books, and then they must learn to listen to the authors, listen to their classmates’ contributions, and listen to themselves speaking. They have equal responsibilities, equal rights and equal opportunities to learn according to their abilities, their desire and their preparedness for class.

? Second, all of our students read, and read critically, the principal documents that define our American democracy: the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, the great speeches of Washington and Lincoln, and certain key Supreme Court decisions.

Read the full speech here.

{I love my college.}

rAmmoRRison Flickr Photostream

“We are probably only at the threshold of an age in which the technological possibilities of mind control are likely to grow rapidly and what may appear at first as innocuous or beneficial powers over the personality of the individual will be at the disposal of government. The greatest threats to human freedom probably still lie in the future.”

Friedrich A. Hayek

As much as I love technology I also see the terrible potential for misuse.

Yesterday’s story from the University of Chicago (Hayek’s former employer) is just one example:

“A student at the University of Chicago says an innocent status update on Facebook led to an investigation by university police.

Joseph Dozier, a third-year political-science and classics student, posted a comment on his Facebook page on December 6 saying “Dreamt that I assassinated John Mearsheimer for a secret Israeli organization—there was a hidden closet with Nazi paraphanelia [sic]. Haha! ” Mr. Mearsheimer, who has been one of Mr. Dozier’s instructors, is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago…”

“Mr. Dozier says a police officer called to question him about the post the next day and said he would need to remove the post or it would be reported to Mr. Mearsheimer. The student contacted the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a nonprofit group that focuses on free-speech issues, which told the news media about the case on Wednesday and has posted documents online, including a screenshot of Mr. Dozier’s status update and a rough transcript of the officer’s call based on Mr. Dozier’s notes about the case.” <more>

It is a scary huxley-orwellian future if we cannot cultivate a society that values liberty over safety. (HT: Ben Franklin)

If you would like to read more on whether technology will foster or suppress a free society I highly recommend looking to the Mont Pelerin Society 2008 Hayek Essay Contest:

In The Constitution of Liberty Hayek says that “we are probably only at the threshold of an age in which the technological possibilities of mind control are likely to grow rapidly and what may appear at first as innocuous or beneficial powers over the personality of the individual will be at the disposal of government. The greatest threats to human freedom probably still lie in the future.”

Has Hayek’s gloomy warning been borne out by events, or has technology become more a force for liberating people from government?

You can find copies of the winning essays here.

© Papazi Mouris, Flickr “greekadman”Creative Commons License

“Ideal conversation must be an exchange of thought, and not,
as many of those who worry most about their shortcomings believe,
an eloquent exhibition of wit or oratory”

~Emily Post, American Etiquette Pioneer

A new study in the journal Psychological Science concluded that happy people talk more, and have more substantive conversations. While this study solely reveals the correlation between happiness and conversation, not a causal link, I find it interesting that it is not mere conversation that the happy have, but substantive conversation.

If education is didactic and does not foster behaviors that allow for the clear and purposeful exchange of ones own ideas than there is no opportunity for the students to practice what the happiest people do: have meaningful fulfilling conversations!

See the links below for more information on the study:

Happy People Talk More, and With More Substance

Can You Talk Your Way to Happy?

Substantive talks better than small talks for happier life