Contrasting counters to radical Islam

The January-February issue of Utne Reader has two articles about wildly contrasting ideas about countering radical Islam.

The first is "Jihad Against Islam, America's right wing is on a witch hunt, and they're tying Muslims to the stake" by Robert Steinback, from Intelligence Report, a publication of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

It is a summary of how a large number of people in the U.S. believe that all Muslims are sympathetic to Al-Qaeda and that "mainstream Islam advocates violence against non-Muslims". Much of this is being fueled by a "coterie of core activists". Max Blumenthal called it "the Great Islamophobic Crusade." Their complaint about the Islamic center near the World Trade Center gained support from Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich. The assumption of these modern Crusaders is that the likes of Osama Bin Laden are interpreting the Koran correctly.

The second is "Bollywood's Soft Power, India's hugely popular films wage a cultural war on extremism" by Shikha Dalmia. The article was original published in The Daily. The Utne article is excerpted from Reason, a libertarian magazine.

Bollywood is "India's flamboyant film industry", and its films are shown all over Asia from Indonesia to Dubai. Dalmia likens the effect of Bollywood to extremism to the effect of rock and roll on the demise of the Soviet Union. It wasn't Reagan that brought down the Berlin Wall but the Beatles, and "Mikhail Gorbachev acknowledged to Paul McCartney that the Beatles paved the way for perestroika and glasnost".

Bollywood's allure is that it is based on Eastern values and that the actors look like the viewers. Some countries like Dubai embrace Bollywood. Others that are trying to control all aspects of life, like Pakistan, "are trying to purge Bollywood from their soil". The harder they try to limit Bollywood, the greater its popularity.

BTW, Bollywood's "three highest-grossing male leads are Muslims".

These two articles illustrate the old saw about catching more flies with honey than vinegar. And you would think that the intellectuals in the anti-Islam jihad would have learned that all the vinegar (and money and lives) that have been sloshed around in the name of defense of the U.S. would have caught on by now to the fallacy of their approach.

The conspiracy against children and the public education system

1984 has arrived with more newspeak than we can keep track of.  No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is one of the diversions supposedly to promote improved education while actually destroying public education.

What are the reasons for NLCB: Lower taxes? Lowering the ability to think critically?  Pretending to do something productive without having to do anything substantive?  Destroying the public education system?

Supposedly one of the benchmarks is improved reading scores, no matter how good or poor previous scores were.  One improves reading scores by providing lots of reading material.  However, the budgets of the most accessible sources of reading materials are being cut, especially in schools with already low scores.  See "ALA Report: Poor Middle, High School Libraries Suffer the Most Budget Cuts".

But standardized tests are not the measure of critical thinking and creativity.  They measure the ability to give correct answers to tests.  It's like supposedly being skilled in a foreign language by knowing many details of grammar and having a large vocabulary.  Passing tests based on these two aspects mean nothing without lots and lots of practice in reading, writing, speaking, and listening.

For example, I have spent many classroom hours on German and French and practically none on Swedish and Italian.  I read French OK because I've read dozens of books in French, but speaking French and German is difficult.  Speaking Italian comes easier to me because I lived in Italy and spoke it more than I ever spoke French or German.  Swedish comes even more easily to me because I spoke it at work for three years; sometimes I even think in Swedish.  Even then, these two languages are still a struggle because I don't practice.

What is really a pity on public education is that much research has been done by educators on better methods.  Politicians don't want to follow through on these ideas because they cost money, and politicians are better scientists and educators than scientists and educators.

An excellent view of what's really needed has been presented in many ways be Ken Robinson.  See an animation of his lecture, "Changing Education Paradigms".

One of his key points is "divergent thinking is an essential ingredient of creativity."  Divergent thinking is the ability to see many ideas at once rather than regurgitate the one "correct" idea.  He cites a longitudinal study of children in kindergarten scoring an average of 98% on divergent thinking and dropping dramatically as they grow older.

See also "Do Schools Destroy Creativity".  Ken Robinson says that George Harrison and Paul McCartney were not recognized as musicians by the music teacher!!

He also says that there is more money to be made by large corporations in the correction system of California than in the schools of California.  That is, short-term corporate profits are more important than long-term investment in people.