Hermeneutic Heretic

The Girl Wars : Terrible Mother on Offsprung.com
It seems like half the interactions between women can be classified as Girl Wars. Do we ever get out of this? And why the hell are girls so vicious to each other? When did they start this? Just a few years ago, Thing One was small and sweet and kind, a little kid who cried when I accidentally squashed a ladybug. I can’t imagine her hurting someone on purpose, or someone wanting to hurt her.

First and foremost, this is, hands down the best-written blog on the web (and I know these things, having, as I do, exquisite taste for language and narrative structure). This single post can be used as a pretext for asking a whole lot of interesting (to me with my exquisite tastes) questions.

Let’s start with the really puzzling question of literary quality. There are an enormous number of talented writers on the web (Offsprung features quite a few of them). Why does Terrible Mother stand head and shoulders above so many of them? I’d be the first to admit the subjectivity of narrative aesthetic experience but there are some writers whose quality cannot be disputed regardless of enjoyment. TM is one of them. I (and many good critics) can generally recognize them but if we were to apply an arsenal of recognized techniques of literary analysis would the ‘good ones’ be enmeshed in the web or slip through the cracks (to mix me a metaphor or two)? I suspect conceptual and formal blending has something to do with it. Just the right amount of description to trigger the right images, set up and confound expectations, follow through with the emotions. In other words, the really powerful writer, reconfigures the constraints on conceptual integration that usually apply in our world of speech and thought and substitutes those applying in a world over which she has full control. Given that blending is not a discrete serial algorithmic process but rather a massively parallel fuzzy process, in which underspecification of reference is as important as the profiling and backgrounding of conceptual elements, it is unlikely that the identification of quality can be completely universal or subject to traditional ‘academic’ analysis. No wonder, then, that so much literary criticism (all of it, in fact) is mostly poetry about poetry. And, on reflection, despite the formalists, structuralists’ and others’ efforts to the contrary, may be a good thing.
Now for something completely different: Feminism and social psychology. First, both ‘boys’ and ‘girls’ can be cruel in the folk theoretical framings currently being negotiated in the Anglo culture. Some have expressed a surprise at Private Lyndie English and others have seen it as a confirmation of the untenability of the ‘women as the gentler sex’ hypothesis. Quite obviously, human beings, when put in certain configurations will display the kind of ‘banal evil’ that when given an institutional backing can devolve into repression or genocide (Arendt, Baumann). It’s been more than thirty years since the Stanford prison experiment and Milgram’s work and over half a century since Asch’s work on conformity. Jane Elliott replays many of these in her Class Divided and Blue Eyed work. (It is interesting on its own that these seminal results have not made more of an impact in education and social science.) All of these experiments play themselves out daily in ‘boy groups’ and ‘girl groups’ in the ‘innocent’ guise of BFFs and ‘frenemies’.

Now for the advice to educators and parents (just as an interested observer rather than an active participant). The one concern expressed in public debates and private moments of anguish by parents is whether their child will be bullied in school. But in fact, the question they should be really asking, will their child be a bully? This is in some respects much more likely. Not because their child is bad (it is likely that only a comparatively few children are truly evil) but because of the capacity of enforced group identities to produce ‘banal evil’. But it is also interesting how little effect the efforts of educators seem to have. ‘How do you think that feels’ is as useful in engendering desired behavior as ‘have you taken out the trash?’. They should really look at some of the answers Milgram and Zimbardo offer. Some people seem to have an intrinsic ability to overcome the pressures put upon them by the authority of the individual or the group but most need help. In the groups of tweenagers, this is difficult because the sources of authority and prestige are so fluid. Adults play a certain role but the peer group is beginning to assert itself more and more. Furthermore, it is difficult to identify how a single individual will be influenced by their context. So an individual parent is pretty much stuck.
Social psychology can explain and predict group behavior pretty well but is much less successful at the individual. Psychoanalysis does not as good but decent job of the individual at the start and the end of the process of group interaction but is useless at navigating throughout simply because it cannot account for all the variable the group configuration will present. Bottom line, parenting is difficult for all and agonizing for the secular humanist parents. But in the hands of a gifted writer like Terrible Mother, it makes a hell of good read.

I got an A in Phallus 101 - Los Angeles Times
The problem that the Young America’s Foundation list, first issued in 1995, highlights isn’t simply the hollowing-out of the traditional humanities and social sciences disciplines at colleges and their replacement by crude indoctrination sessions in whatever is ideologically fashionable — although that’s a serious issue. At Occidental, for instance, it seems nearly impossible to study any field, save for the hard sciences, that doesn’t include “race, class and gender” among its topics. Even the Shakespeare course at Occidental this semester focuses on “cultural anxieties over authority, race, colonialism and religion” during the age of the Bard.

The bigger problem is that too much of American higher education has lost any notion of what its students ought to know about the ideas and people and movements that created the civilization in which they live: Who Plato was or what happened at Appomattox.

Instead of the carefully crafted core programs that once guided students through the basics of literature, philosophy, history and the social sciences, most colleges now offer smorgasbords of unrelated classes for their students to sample in order to fulfill requirements. And the professors stock the smorgasbords with whatever the theorists they idolize tells them is the new new thing.

Why not take a course in “The Phallus”?

You can get the same credit for it as for a course in Greek tragedy.

This is as much about education as about the very definition of knowledge and social cohesion. It underscores one of the issues that progressive educators often neglect, viz the images of education, the schooling process, and educatedness, prevalent in a given culture. The assumption that the result of education is knowledge (and skill and attitude and acceptable behavior and all that) is missing one important element. What education provides is above all primary socialization. That, however, is thought to be rather limited in scope because it refers to only basic communities. However, students need to be ‘primarily’ socialized into a number of groupings (secondary socialization would just be primary socialization into a non-immediate group - the process is similar). It could be described as learning to acquire ways of signaling membership. And one of the ways of signaling membership in a group/category of college graduates is knowing a little about Shakespeare. By little, I mean enough to have a mundane conversation. This may seem like a trivial matter but this signaling is absolutely crucial in the academic world (and at its intersection with the real world). The problem is that we need to affirm credibility of our sources of information. We basically have no way of verifying more than a tiny fraction of information that we need to base many decisions on. These signals our pretty much our only way of doing that (along with social connectivity). These new college courses (while often based on solid scholarship - no more woollyheaded than most tripe spouted about Shakespeare) neglect this aspect of education and run into trouble. The requirements for this social acceptability are fairly modest, though, as the highlighted section about shows. The author’s own knowledge of Plate would probably be shown woefully inadequate by any closer examination but a few mentions of the Republic of the cave in a conversation will establish her credentials as an educated person and therefore her credibility in certain kinds of social exchanges. (That is not to say that the same processes don’t operate within these ‘new’ kinds of courses, only they socialize their graduates into smaller more ‘exclusive’ groups.) The convener of Phalus 101 need not worry, though. Should the subject prove viable it will become part of the academic establishment. Many worthy disciplines (probably most) from mathematics to psychology have at some point or other been subjected to similar abuse and many are still fighting to gain acceptance.

The other questions, namely, what about the more general cognitive and affective outcomes of education. I suspect that they will be on average the same no matter what subject matter is the focus. The only thing that curricula and materials have any lasting effect on is encyclopedic (factual) knowledge. So if we start telling students that Pluto is not a planet and the capital of Kazakhstan is Astana, that’s what most of them will know (percentages of retention depending on how salient the need for the piece of information is and social and psychologically relevant it is). However, if we start telling them that drugs are bad, they will know that that’s what they were told but may or may not believe it or may or may not act on their knowledge and/or belief. Equally many students will remember that Plato had something to say about a cave with shadows in it but in relatively few will it lead to an ability to integrate it into their view of the world beyond the most trite late night musings. So, in short, despite being in favor of a lot of radical curriculum reform, I tend not to get too excited about these things any more.

Limp language leaves kids with an awesome paucity of speech
[Teenagers on which the author eavesdrops] They’ve got one all-purpose word — “awesome” — to cover everything from mild approval to exhilaration. When they’re indignant or angry, they have to fall back on clichés — including a few tired four-letter words.
…
Today, teens aren’t the only ones who have lost the ability to speak and write with vigor and eloquence. Folks of all ages are reading less — especially the classics, whose authors wielded our language most powerfully. As a result, our ability to express ourselves is diminishing, because we can’t draw on their example for inspiration.
…
“Today, our common cultural reference points come from the visual culture: Britney Spears, Jennifer Lopez,” [Diane] Ravitch [who just compiled a collection of important English texts] told me last week. … Our schools could help remedy the problem, but often don’t, she says. That’s because “‘relevance” is now the watchword in education.

In textbooks, teens tend to find countless stories about young people much like themselves, according to Ravitch.
…
Norman Fruman, an emeritus English professor at the University of Minnesota, agrees. “Good literature deals with ideas, as well as emotions and the psychology of human behavior,” he says. “It records our greatest tragedies and our highest aspirations.”

Aside from being more or less predictable nonsense this article and views reported in it raise several reasonably interesting questions.

On language (and its variability): Language here is presented as reflecting complexity of thought and emotion. However, the language discussed is written or formal spoken language and contrasted with informal spoken language. This is a very typical feature of mavenry (I use the term language maven from Pinker’s Language Instinct) and it shows that these people really know very little about language if a bit more (though not a lot) about grammar. However, there are some underlying issues here that should be discussed, however. Is there such a thing as complexity of language? It is already accepted by linguists that individual languages all have the same level of grammatical complexity This is an issue that may need revisiting as the lines between grammar and vocabulary blur, but it is clear that all languages (from creoles up) can roughly express what is expressed in all other languages (connotations and misaligned categories being the most difficult to make into an equivalent). But what about the ’systems’ contained in individuals’ brains? There is certainly a great deal of variation in how well individuals deal with the subtlety of linguistic expression. What is the nature of this difference? None knows or is even, as far as I know, researching this. Let’s accept for now that there is such a thing as a lower complexity language speaker (I suspect that there will be - and it will have something to do with ability to do certain kinds of conceptual blends). What would happen (the author of this screed implies) if all the individuals in a group had this hypothetical lower complexity (such as a pigin)? Would the language of the entire group deteriorate and cease to be a language? Most possibly but this would have to be a result of an evolutionary biological process rather than poor educational standards. Not knowing what Shakespeare said does not mean not being able to express oneself. Of course, the new language will have different means of expression and variability that may be erased in one place will appear elsewhere. This is amply demonstrated in the relatively well-understood process of creolization. Of course, there is also the issue of language decay and language death but those are always associate with a decrease of prestige of a language as a whole and a reduction of the number of native speakers (leading to reverse creolization - e.g. decrease in number of categories, etc.). English or no other language with a million or more of native speakers is in any immediate danger. Unless we mean English as spoken in 2007. That of course is in imminent danger and there is a good chance that English as spoken in 2207 will be significantly different to the degree that mutual intelligibility will be impaired or a refragmentation will occur (of course, like with Latin, academic English may prove to have remarkable staying power and its prevalence may still be in its ascendancy).
On historical perspectives and anachronism: Part of this problem is the tendency of all historians to ignore the level of magnification they are dealing with when making these comparisons. The author contrasts giants from the history of verbal expression with randomly (and anecdotally) chosen subjects speaking in an informal context. Had she done such random eavesdropping two hundred years ago should would have heard exactly the same issues (I’m sure that there are a number of texts out there bemoaning the decreasing standards of education and expression). Conversely, if she looked today’s world of English expression from far enough she would see about the same (if not greater) proportion of luminaries read by about the same number (proportionately) of people. This goes for almost all ‘it used to be better’ rants.

On modality of perception and social cognition: The author makes another assumption that might bear investigating. Namely, that there is a fundamental difference in the modes in which we perceive language (and that written is the superior one). Of necessity, there are important differences in how we process written and spoken word cognitively at the moment of perception. However, are there also enough differences in the cumulative learning of language and improving the ability of self-expression? Homeric and Vedic poetry would beg to differ (the ahistoricism again). Reading in general is a relatively new thing and silent reading by the population at large is barely a century old. So we can hardly expect the educational system to have much to do with the complexity of language otherwise there would never have been any. Furthermore, the supposedly ‘visual’ symbols of culture such as Britney Spears come with a significant linguistic baggage much of which is written (just look at fan sites and fan fiction).

Then, there is the fact that reading and language are not merely matters of encoding and decoding emotions or information. They have a significant social component to them so we can hardly expect a group of socializing teens to be articulate beyond the standards of their community. Simply because it would be disruptive to that community.

On literature: Connected to that is the assumption that there is only one thing called literature and that there is a standard for good literature, particularly for the purposes of public edification. For some reason, the author chose to forget that Shakespeare wrote plays and those were put on in extremely visual ways including lewdness frowned upon by the makers of American Pie. I already pointed out that much of the great classics were not in fact written or transmitted in written form (or not in the form we know them today - e.g. serializations of Dostoyevsky or Dickens). So having problematized the notion of literature, we need to cast our net a little wider. And what do we find: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Gilmore Girls, Sopranos, Veronica Mars, West Wing or even Friends or My Name is Earl. All of these are exhibit the highest levels of narrative and linguistic sophistication that easily measure up to the best in Shakespeare (we must not forget that while good, Shakespeare’s reputation as the greatest is mostly due to nationalistic propaganda of the 1700s). And if somebody thinks they don’t deal “with ideas, as well as emotions and the psychology of human behavior” or don’t record “our greatest tragedies and our highest aspirations” they just plain don’t know what they are talking about.

On cognition again; and literacy: However, there is a potentially valid point hidden in here. While it is impossible that humans would lose the complexity of language as we know it. It is not inconceivable that they would give up writing and reading, particularly, as technologies such as speech recognition and AI develop beyond what presently seems possible. It is impossible to live without some system of graphical representation of language but the complex and powerful alphabetic systems may fall into disuse if certain conditions are fulfilled (I vaguely recall a sci-fi story that suggested it). I am not suggesting that it is likely or that it would happen due to a poor educational system but it may certainly happen over many generations. One possible way I can imagine is if technological solutions designed to deal with illiteracy or ‘analphabetacy’ in most of the world today became so successful and the developing world became socially prestigious enough to make this ‘getting information without reading’ a popular thing. There undoubted advantages the written text has over spoken text as a transmissive device but I can envision these to ignored once the key need for textual representation has been met by other means.

On learning, the effects of education (and a bit of cognition again): It is interesting to see the assumption that the effects of education are so straightforwardly causal. When the author claims that less reading of classics results in that “our ability to express ourselves is diminishing, because we can’t draw on their example for inspiration.” She assumes that language is learned purely by mimesis (or some other principle such as Chomsky’s LAD). This brings us back to the question of how different individuals process text. Some may benefit from extensive reading to increase their own expressivity and others won’t. What principle is involved here is anybody’s guess but it most certainly doesn’t bode well for the assumption that schools “could help remedy the problem” (assuming, of course, that there is a problem). And furthermore, that the cumulative effect of thus helpful schools would be the changing of levels of expressivity in the population at large. As it stands, we don’t have anything exceeding a folk theory about how this would happen. (We do have a lot of data suggesting that it almost never does, though.)

On relevance and motivation in education: Finally, not to simply disagree, Diane Ravitch makes a point which is very important for contemporary debates about education. It has been a trend for some time (or at least an aspiration that goes back to Comenius and further) to try to make learning materials “relevant” to the students to engage them in and motivate them for better learning. The problem with this is twofold. First, it assumes that cumulative effect of and within education I mentioned above. More importantly, though, it rests on our confidence that curriculum developers and textbook authors can determine what is relevant to students and preserve that relevance. Instrumental relevance, in particular, is of little use. Two diggers of holes or two trains going in opposite directions make the solution of mathematical equations no more appealing and probably not much easier. They are certainly of no relevance to most learners. It is also not certain that instrumental relevance will lead to the kind of motivation that enhances learning (even if we knew what learning really was and how to tell if it is enhanced). We know a little more about motivation that improves results of test taking (much easier to measure and much less necessary to motivate for). So Ravitch is broadly right to imply that the attempts to make everything be exactly the same to what the students already know, it is more likely to impoverish rather than enrich their learning (although, I suspect that the overall effect is less pronounced than she seems to assume). She also relies on the probably incorrect assumption, as we established earlier, that all students use these texts in the same way. But she is right to raise the question of relevance as a basically blind alley in the pursuit of motivation.
The problem with motivation is that we know that it is probably the most reliable predictor of success in learning (baring mental disabilities and differences in learning styles, and lots of other things). However, we have know idea how to produce it (certainly not uniformly across populations) and we don’t even know what kind of motivation works when. Ultimately, all we can say with any confidence about motivation in learning is the tautology that the kind of motivation that produces successful learning is the motivation that has produced successful learning. (It’s usually even hard to describe the complex interplay of different kinds of motivations and dismotivations.) We don’t have much in the way of predictive tools to look at somebody who appears motivated and say how well they will learn but we can usually say that someone who was a successful learner was motivated in one way or another.

End. (Who would have thought that such innocuous article can encapsulate all that there is about language, cognition and education.)

November 17, 2006, Hour Two: The Family that Couldn’t Sleep / The Artist and the Mathematician
Starting in the 1930s, Nicolas Bourbaki published dozens of papers, becoming a famous mathematician. There was just one problem: he didn’t exist. Join Ira in this hour on Science Friday for a conversation with Amir Aczel about the genius mathematician who never existed.

The really interesting thing about this Science Friday podcast is not the subject matter itself (although it’s no boring either) but a little throwaway line by Aczel when he says that the reason French mathematics of the 1920s and 30s wasn’t very good (meaning there weren’t many world-class mathematicians) was the fact that the main introductory textbook was boring and hard to read. There is also a comment on p. 14 of the book: “in addition to the fact that the teaching at these small schools in wartime France was not good, the textbooks were inadequate.” - thanks to Amazon.

This brings up the image of a number of stories of confused students who then decide not to (or do not decide to) pursue mathematics further. This is a very typical image employed in much of educational policy to justify particular action in service of global change. But there really is no good reason to claim that this is an apt image to apply (although it may be the most natural one - or the one most readily integrated with the mental spaces). First, for it to be useful, the opposite would also have to be true - i.e. that engaging and easy-to-understand texts would leave to more mathematicians. This clearly isn’t the case - because there are many who use the opposite scenario. Students who study easy math are never challenged enough to become good. (A friend of mine who is a mathematician in the US in a department full of non-Americans blames many of the failures of US domestic mathematics on the ‘permissive’ nature of the American approach to education.)

The problem for policy is that plausible stories can be told with either of these rich-image scenarios. But neither of them has a great explanatory let alone predictive value. I suspect that a good anthropology of education might provide a good explanation and the complexity of the situation will preclude any effective predictive explanation. But anthropology and ethnography have in general proved to be very difficult to translate into policy.

Malaysian National News Agency :: BERNAMA
PEKAN, Nov 4 Bernama — Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak has called for the countrys memory-based education system to be replaced with one that promotes mind development so that the students become more creative and critical.

The Deputy Prime Minister said the education system was currently directed towards memorisation which became the basis in assessing the students performance especially during examinations.

This little new story goes to the heart of the whole problem of education. Is it about knowledge of facts or skills? Well, in fact it is about neither of these things. The primary purpose of education is socialization. This is often concealed because only a small proportion of it is ‘primary socialization’ in the sense of socializing into one’s immediate ethnic group. Education provides multiple socializations: into all the various groups of specialists, into a group of people in education with a view of a membership in a group of people who have received an education. In fact, it is possible for somebody with only a minimal grasp of fact or limited skill to be socialized into a particular group if they can engage productively with that groups code (or discursive practices). Very often the prerequisite for that is a certain amount of knowledge and skill but the performances that membership in a group calls for are mostly symbolic. It reminds of ‘Trading Places’ by David Lodge in which an professor of English has never read Oliver Twist.

So what is the implication for the educational system? Its stated and apparent purposes seem to be fairly divergent but that is a necessity. What would the curriculum look like in a system that was explicitly focused on socialization? Interestingly enough, some of the recent debate on faith schools in the UK has had that focus but even there with a few exceptions (teaching of evolution, religious education) the examples were extracurricular (dress, environment, background of teachers, etc.).

Therefore, we are forced into an instrumental view of education which is where ultimately the skill argument seems to win over. This is because the argument for memorization ends up being mostly reminiscent of the argument for socialization. However, the problem is that skill-based (competency-based) curricula often do not deliver the desired results, i.e they do not ‘produce’ people who appear to have been well-educated in the sense of not being able to engage with particular discursive communities. Bringing back memorization then seems to be the solution favored as a countermeasure. But since memorization is then treated instrumentally rather than as a means of secondary socialization(s), it is also doomed to failure, particularly since the skill-based approach has changed the frames of expectation.

I would therefore predict great conceptual as well as practical problems for Malaysia (and any other country) as it tries this particular reform. Is there a solution? Not really! Perhaps a hint of one might be: use the skills-based approach when viewing education instrumentally and the memory-based approach when thinking of it socially. And make sure that both perspectives are present in equal measure in the underpinnings of the system of schooling.

From the Wikipedia entry: Accepted is a 2006 comedy motion picture about a group of high school seniors who, after being rejected from all colleges to which they had applied, create their own college.
…
At one point Bartleby [the main character] wants to end the charade before it begins, but is overcome with pity after realizing that everyone in the college is in the exact same position he is in having been rejected from every other college. Thus begins the first year of classes, founded on the revolutionary notion of students choosing what they want to learn and teaching the very same courses.
…
Bartleby successfully argues his way to a one-year temporary accreditation. The students return to the new college and begin a full year of ad-hoc classes and partying.

It is amazing to see so many “progressive” educational ideas in what is a fairly plodding genre film. I say plodding because the educational theorizing is carried on the back of a fairly formulaic narrative framework of teenage comedy (with not much of the inventiveness of American Pie). That is not to say that it is not an enjoyable film - it’s 36% rating on RottenTomatoes probably underating it - IMDB is much closer with 6.2. What makes it particularly interesting is this strange blend of Dewey and Montessori applied to higher education. The idea of students learning what they want when they are ready for it being straight out of Montessori (which, of course, is never applied beyond primary school). The school as a laboratory preparing students for real life by engaging with practice would be Dewey. (Rousseau would probably find justification for some of its cooky ideas in Emile in it, too.)

Where it is educationally fairly radical is the point where students truly choose classes they want: doing nothing, mixing drinks, staring at girls, but also doing art. This is where many reform projects typically fall apart when taken mainstream. Students are encouraged to choose but only certain choices are accepted which takes away the motivating element of freedom. But the reform usually relies just on such motivation to work and without it, fails. In other words, if we give students a choice, we must be prepared to live with the choice they make (I have made this mistake many times in adult education). Where the film is inaccurate is the assumption that all of these free motivating choices (which it makes its best not to judge) also result in happy liberal middle-class learning (also the main characters are reliable middleclass, and their approach to their charges is in part missionary). This relies on a typical enlightenment idea of ennobling knowledge. Here the film is prohibited by the narrative structure to discuss the idea of undesirable (in that they are unexpected) consequences of the free choice offered to students.

It would be interesting, but beyond my commitment to this topic at the moment, to investigate how the images (frames) activated by this narrative are integrated by its audience.

Bearing witness to a teacher’s task - The Boston Globe

Many people believe they know what makes effective schools because they have attended school. This is akin to saying I am a physician because I’ve been in a hospital. I challenge any of this group to spend a week teaching in a public school classroom, exam schools excluded. There, they may attempt to carry out curriculum policies fashioned by politicians while simultaneously managing a group with varied cognitive abilities, language abilities, behavior issues, and family support.

This irate letter to the editor makes an interesting point. Much of the debate around education is based on images of schooling. Some of them based on the fact that the writer ‘has gone to school’ others on popular culture scripts or, more frequently, blends of the two. This is further peppered by folk theories of learning and the cummulative effect of this learning on the larger group (society).

Of course, that is the first part (italicized by me) - a process which I’ve recently started calling frame negotiation. The second part invites the critics (and by rhetorical proxy the readers/public) to join in the creation of other conceptual images and scripts that are competing with those identified by the author as harmful.

And then there is the third part that anyone interested in educational reform might want to ponder. All educational activities (including or especially reform) carry a certain logistical/transactional burden which (like a rope to the moon) also needs to be included in the process (carry its own weight). That is the source of quite a bit of cognitive dissonance in educational debates.

The Books Google Could Open

The nation’s colleges and universities should support Google’s controversial project to digitize great libraries and offer books online. It has the potential to do a lot of good for higher education in this country.
…
This powerful tool will make less well-known written works or hard-to-find research materials more accessible to students, teachers and others around the world. Geography will not hinder a student’s quest to find relevant material. Libraries can help to revive interest in underused books. And sales of books would probably increase as a result.

Book Search comes at a time when college and university libraries are hard-pressed to keep up with the publishing and technology revolutions. Budgets are stretched, and libraries must now specialize and rely on interlibrary loans for books in other subjects.

Student and faculty research has also been limited by what is on the shelves of campus libraries. A student can identify a book through an online library catalogue, but the book’s content remains unknown. It must then be shipped — an expense that may not be worthwhile if the book isn’t what was expected.

With Book Search, it’s easy to imagine a history student at a small college in Nebraska using the Internet to find an out-of-print book held only by a library in New York. Instead of requesting delivery of the book, he or she can read a snippet of it from Google’s online catalogue and request it on interlibrary loan if it seems useful. Even better, the student can purchase the book in the same session at the computer.

This is a great example of how analogical reasoning (or the scenario part of conceptual frames/cognitive models) plays out in policy making. The whole article is leads up to the last paragraph (my emphasis) where a little story is told to illustrate the “trasnformative power” of a simple move in education. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love google books and it would certainly make research much easier for me. However, there’s more than a good chance that higher education will scarcely be affected by this - there is absolutely no element in the story that would describe the potential cumulative effect of many such students in Nebraska on the system of education as a whole. There isn’t even a mention of how representative such a student in Nebraska is of the entire college student population or (more importantly) what motivation led him or her to a search for an out of print book or how likely he or she would be to actually purchase.

Similar reasoning can be found behind the recently popular Long Tail idea.

BostonHerald.com - Opinion & Editorial: Education studies show: $$ wasted on them
Choice, competition and freedom are core values that define what we are about as a nation. The Bush administration proposal to appropriate $100 million in opportunity scholarships for poor kids in failing schools is a needed program. Let’s use our limited taxpayer dollars to enhance education freedom and not on superfluous research.

Very interesting statement of values, that hides a basic contradiction: in order to make these statements about educational research, the author needed educational research in the first place. And of course, freedom is best served by information - and we should not forget that the overheads on running freedom are very high.

There is also an interesting cognitive model (conceptual frame) that is invoked here, viz. education is a marketplace, educational system is a micro nation, freedom is an essential part of our nation, freedom in the marketplace means choice and competition, and therefore education only promotes freedom if one can make choices. This allows the author to get away with this argumentative shortcut quite legitimately - even though his syllogisms are implied, the underlying ‘logic’ is still indisputable. (Although, of course he is disasterously wrong, here.)

English is Spoken Here - Yahoo! News
The second dumbest statement in the debate over Senate legislation establishing English as the national language came from Sen. Ken Salazar (D-Colo.), who said it was needlessly divisive.
ADVERTISEMENT

Wait. A law that unifies a country under a single language is divisive? What kind of logic is that?
…
many “accommodations” made to non-English (principally Spanish) speakers everywhere, from public transit to automatic teller machines to those annoying recorded messages when you call to complain about your phone bill.
…
Despite these warning signs, we’re told “We don’t need a law to declare the obvious–English is and always will be our national language.”

Not if we continue on this course. That’s why this debate is more than symbolic. Laws to strengthen English as our national language are an expected and reasonable reaction to a movement to turn America into a bi-lingual, or worse, nation, for no better reason that it’s required by “progressive” dogma. It’s a movement that will only divide us more.
…
From these folks, there’s little or no discussion about how allowing America to become a nation of second languages helps to unify us. That’s because it so obviously doesn’t. So, instead of rational argument, they variously call their opponents “mean-spirited” and “divisive.”

This is a good example of the ‘logic’ fallacy. Viz. only logically consistent arguments are valid. The author operates with the following syllogism. More unified entities have fewer parts than divided entities. One national language is less than multiple possible languages and therefore a nation with one ‘national’ language is more unified than a nation with two or more. The columnist’s appeals to rationality are a common argumentative ploy on both sides of the argument along with equally frequent appeals to selected empirical evidence (whether qualitative or quantitative).