Submitted by Elaine Magliaro, Guest Blogger
In recent years, we have heard and read a lot about the failure of public schools in the United States. “Our schools are failing” has almost become a mantra with members of the media, many of our politicians, and the advocates of school reform. I have seen few people who have questioned the assertions made by the media, elected officials, and school reformers that schools in this country are not adequately educating our youth and that our educational system is a total and abject failure.
Many of those who criticize our public education system offer charter schools and the privatization of public schools as solutions to the “education problem” in this country.
I’m a retired public school educator. I have known and am friends with many current and former public school teachers. I know that there are many fine classroom practitioners working in our public schools today…and many excellent schools where our children receive a quality education. I am aware that there are also many schools where children may not be receiving the highest quality education. (What often go unmentioned in the media are the real reasons—including poverty—why some schools in this country may be failing.)
One problem with the “our schools are failing” mantra—as I see it—is that all our schools are lumped together in one basket labeled “failing.” How did this come to be? Do we Americans really believe that NO public schools in this country provide their students with an adequate education? Do we believe that all schools need to be reformed? If not, do we believe that even the schools which are actually doing an estimable job of educating their students need to be reformed?
I think it is time we start taking a good look at the individuals and organizations that are behind the push to establish thousands of charter schools and to use taxpayer money to fund private and religious schools as the means of raising the quality of education in this country.
ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council)
Last May, education historian Diane Ravitch wrote the following about one group that has been driving the school reform movement:
Since the 2010 elections, when Republicans took control of many states, there has been an explosion of legislation advancing privatization of public schools and stripping teachers of job protections and collective bargaining rights. Even some Democratic governors, seeing the strong rightward drift of our politics, have jumped on the right-wing bandwagon, seeking to remove any protection for academic freedom from public school teachers.
This outburst of anti-public school, anti-teacher legislation is no accident. It is the work of a shadowy group called the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC. Founded in 1973, ALEC is an organization of nearly 2,000 conservative state legislators. Its hallmark is promotion of privatization and corporate interests in every sphere, not only education, but healthcare, the environment, the economy, voting laws, public safety, etc. It drafts model legislation that conservative legislators take back to their states and introduce as their own “reform” ideas. ALEC is the guiding force behind state-level efforts to privatize public education and to turn teachers into at-will employees who may be fired for any reason. The ALEC agenda is today the “reform” agenda for education.
Ravitch continued:
A recent article in the Newark Star-Ledger showed how closely New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s “reform” legislation is modeled on ALEC’s work in education. Wherever you see states expanding vouchers, charters, and other forms of privatization, wherever you see states lowering standards for entry into the teaching profession, wherever you see states opening up new opportunities for profit-making entities, wherever you see the expansion of for-profit online charter schools, you are likely to find legislation that echoes the ALEC model.
ALEC has been leading the privatization movement for nearly 40 years, but the only thing new is the attention it is getting, and the fact that many of its ideas are now being enacted. Just last week, the Michigan House of Representatives expanded the number of cyber charters that may operate in the state, even though the academic results for such online schools are dismal.
ALEC Exposed provides a wealth of information about how—through ALEC—“corporations, ideologues, and their politician allies voted to spend public tax dollars to subsidize private K-12 education and attack professional teachers and teachers’ unions…” (You can find the information in Privatizing Public Education, Higher Ed Policy, and Teachers–the ALEC report prepared by The Center for American Democracy.)
Michelle Rhee and StudentsFirst
In addition to ALEC, there is another organization called StudentsFirst that has been helping to spearhead the effort to “reform” our public schools. According to Stephanie Simon, Michelle Rhee, founder and CEO of StudentsFirst, has “emerged as the leader of an unlikely coalition of politicians, philanthropists, financiers and entrepreneurs who believe the nation’s $500 billion-a-year public education system needs a massive overhaul.” Simon added that Rhee, the former chancellor of the D.C. public schools, “has vowed to raise $1 billion” for StudentsFirst, and “forever break the hold of teachers unions on education policy.”
Simon continued:
StudentsFirst has its own political action committee (PAC), its own SuperPAC, and a staff of 75, including a cadre of seasoned lobbyists Rhee sends from state to state as political battles heat up. She has flooded the airwaves with TV and radio ads in a half dozen states weighing new policies on charter schools, teacher assessment and other hot-button issues.
To her supporters, Rhee is a once-in-a-generation leader who has the smarts and the star power to make a difference on one of the nation’s most intractable public policy issues.
But critics say Rhee risks destroying the very public schools she aims to save by forging alliances with political conservatives, evangelical groups and business interests that favor turning a large chunk of public education over to the private sector. She won’t disclose her donors, but public records indicate that they include billionaire financiers and wealthy foundations.
In January the National Opportunity to Learn Campaign published its review of Rhee’s StudentsFirst State Policy Report Card for 2013:
Here’s an excerpt from the summary of the campaign’s review:
On Monday, the pro-privatization education group StudentsFirst, led by former D.C. public schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, released a State Policy Report Card, ranking states and giving each a letter grade based on their implementation of a slew of education reform policies. Rather than focus on issues facing students and families, particularly those affected by unequal access to school resources, the policy benchmarks in the new report reveal StudentsFirst’s obsession with charter schools and de-professionalizing the teaching profession. The report pushes policies that are either untested or disproven — but happen to be welcome in the halls of right-wing think tanks and politicians.
The National Opportunity to Learn Campaign listed five reasons why the StudentsFrirst Report Card is “a veritable wish list for privatization advocates and a recipe for failure for everyone else”:
1. Ironically, It Ignores The Needs of Students
2. It Opposes Personalized and Student-Centered Learning
3. It Argues That We Don’t Have Enough Quality Teachers… While Advocating That We Lower the Bar for Teacher Preparation
4. It Continues the Disastrous High-Stakes Testing Drumbeat
5. It Advocates “Equal Funding” and “Equitable Access” for Charter Corporations and Private Schools, Not Students
The DeVos Family
In May of 2011, Rachel Tabachnick wrote an article for AlterNet about the DeVos family, a wealthy family that has “remained largely under the radar, while leading a stealth assault on America’s schools” that has the “potential to do away with public education as we know it.”
Quoting Tabachnick:
Vouchers have always been a staple of the right-wing agenda. Like previous efforts, this most recent push for vouchers is led by a network of conservative think tanks, PACs, Religious Right groups and wealthy conservative donors. But “school choice,” as they euphemistically paint vouchers, is merely a means to an end. Their ultimate goal is the total elimination of our public education system.
The decades-long campaign to end public education is propelled by the super-wealthy, right-wing DeVos family. Betsy Prince DeVos is the sister of Erik Prince, founder of the notorious private military contractor Blackwater USA (now Xe), and wife of Dick DeVos, son of the co-founder of Amway, the multi-tiered home products business.
According to Tabachnick, the Devoses, who are big contributors to the Republican Party, spent millions of dollars “promoting the failed voucher initiative in Michigan in 2000.” Following that defeat, Tabachnick claims that the family decided to alter its strategy.
Tabachnick:
Instead of taking the issue directly to voters, they would support bills for vouchers in state legislatures. In 2002 Dick DeVos gave a speech on school choice at the Heritage Foundation. After an introduction by former Reagan Secretary of Education William Bennett, DeVos described a system of “rewards and consequences” to pressure state politicians to support vouchers. “That has got to be the battle. It will not be as visible,” stated DeVos. He described how his wife Betsy was putting these ideas into practice in their home state of Michigan and claimed this effort has reduced the number of anti-school choice Republicans from six to two. The millions raised from the wealthy pro-privatization contributors would be used to finance campaigns of voucher supporters and purchase ads attacking opposing candidates.
Dick DeVos advocates “stealth” strategy, Heritage Foundation, December 3, 2002
Last April, Daniel Denvir wrote an article for City Paper about the push for a school voucher program in the state of Pennsylvania. He said that names on the fliers of “legislative hopefuls” sounded like the names of “homegrown” candidates. He said that a “different picture” emerged when one followed the money:
…that of a statewide campaign, funded by wealthy donors, to stack the Pennsylvania primary battles on April 24 in favor of those supporting school vouchers, which allocate taxpayer funds for private and religious school tuition. The pro-voucher political action committee (PAC) Students First — funded by Pennsylvania hedge-fund managers and American Federation for Children, a Washington, D.C., pro-voucher group headed by Amway heiress and major right-wing donor Betsy DeVos — emerged on the state’s political scene with a bang for the 2010 elections. And they are back to spend big in 2012.
Lawrence Feinberg, co-chairman of the anti-voucher Keystone State Education Coalition, said, “I see a move by essentially a handful of very wealthy people who want to privatize public education for a wide variety of reasons. Not the least of which has to do with crushing labor unions, but they also want tax dollars going to private and religious schools.”
School Reform and The Profit Motive
In his Salon article The Bait and Switch of School “Reform,” David Sirota writes about the profit motive behind some of the reforms being advocated by “Big Money” interests.
Sirota:
As the Texas Observer recently reported in its exposé of one school-focused mega-corporation, “in the past two decades, an education-reform movement has swept the country, pushing for more standardized testing and accountability and for more alternatives to the traditional classroom — most of it supplied by private companies.”
A straightforward example of how this part of the profit-making scheme works arose just a few months ago in New York City. There, Rupert Murdoch dumped $1 million into a corporate “reform” movement pushing to both implement more standardized testing and divert money for education fundamentals (hiring teachers, buying textbooks, maintaining school buildings, etc.) into testing-assessment technology. At the same time, Murdoch was buying an educational technology company called Wireless Generation, which had just signed a lucrative contract with New York City’s school system (a sweetheart deal inked by New York City school official Joel Klein, who immediately went to work for Murdoch.
Such shenanigans are increasingly commonplace throughout America, resulting in a revenue jackpot for testing companies and high tech firms, even though many of their products have not objectively improved student achievement.
At the same time, major banks are reaping a windfall from “reformers’” successful efforts to take public money out of public schools and put it into privately administered charter schools. As the New York Daily News recently reported:
“Wealthy investors and major banks have been making windfall profits by using a little-known federal tax break to finance new charter-school construction. The program, the New Markets Tax Credit, is so lucrative that a lender who uses it can almost double his money in seven years…
“The credit can even be piggybacked on other tax breaks for historic preservation or job creation. By combining the various credits with the interest from the loan itself, a lender can almost double his investment over the seven-year period.
“No wonder JPMorgan Chase announced this week it was creating a new $325 million pool to invest in charter schools and take advantage of the New Markets Tax Credit.”
SOURCES
Ravitch: A primer on the group driving school reform (Washington Post)
Activist targeting schools, backed by big bucks (Reuters)
5 Ways Michelle Rhee’s Report Puts Students Last (National Opportunity to Learn Campaign)
Right-Wing Campaign to Privatize Public Ed Takes Hold in Pennsylvania (AlterNet)
Big corporate money in support of school vouchers hits primary races statewide. Will it tip the scales in Philly? (City Paper)
The bait and switch of school “reform” (Salon)
The Deep Pockets Behind Education Reform (Forbes)
Privatizing Public Education, Higher Ed Policy, and Teachers (The Center for American Democracy)
Kia mau ki te Kaupapa ! (Hold fast to the Vision)
http://www.ankn.uaf.edu/curriculum/Articles/GrahamSmith/
Indigenous Struggle for the Transformation of Education and Schooling
Transformative Praxis
“Underpinning the Maori intervention elements described above are important understandings about transformative praxis and by extension, critical pedagogy. The intervention strategies applied by Maori in New Zealand are complex and respond simultaneously to multiple formations of oppression and exploitation. This expansive resistance approach is important in responding to the new formations and re-shaping of cultural oppression(s) and economic exploitation(s). That is, multiply formed oppressions need to be responded to multiply formed resistance strategies.”
“The position implicit within the new formations of Maori intervention, and which may have wider significance for other indigenous populations…”
“One of the most exciting developments with respect to the organic resistance initiatives of Maori in the 1980s and 1990s has been the discernible shift and maturing in the way resistance activities are being understood and practiced.”
“Where indigenous people are in educational crises, indigenous educators and teachers must be trained to be ‘change agents’, to develop transformation of the undesirable circumstances. They must develop a ‘radical pedagogy’ (a teaching approach for change). Such pedagogy must also be informed by their own cultural preferences and respond to their own critical circumstance.”
Kia mau ki te Kaupapa ! (Hold fast to the Vision)
http://rense.com/general95/corpmedia.html
Corporate Media’s War
On Public Education
By Stephen Lendman
9-13-12
http://dissidentvoice.org/2013/01/the-testing-logjam-dynamited-teacher-style-how-standardization-race-to-the-bottom-sic-top-and-most-children-left-behind-nclb-sic-frame-how-we-talk-about-education/
The Testing Logjam Dynamited Teacher-style
How Standardization, Race to the Bottom (sic-Top) and Most Children Left Behind (NCLB – sic) frame how we talk about education
by Paul Haeder / January 24th, 2013
Can culture-civilization-the world-with-us survive as schools privatize, turn into pipelines to prison and fall prey to charter schools for the rich & broken windows and computers for the poor?
“Preface — Thanks to DV for providing teachers, et al. this column-writing space. It’s absolutely important to emphasize the School Yard Fights our culture and the globe are fomenting. As a call to others out there – theorists, higher education teachers, PK12 educators, cognitive behaviorists, creative artists, planners, anyone with a point or points to make around E-D-U-C-A-T-I-O-N – I want your stuff sent to me, at gro.eciovtnedissid@luap. It’s a great big topic. Lots of leeway. So bring it on: Poems, photographs, personal narratives, wonky stuff, and just good old opinion writing and creative non-fiction. Hell, fiction is accepted to. Capiche? And, yes, adjunct faculty writers rule, too.”
“Of course, the large majority of critics of the teachers – dedicated instructors who are not just rebelling but creating a movement toward gaining back the curriculum and the narrative — are anti-worker, anti-collective action, AKA, anti-union.”
(Read ALL);
http://dissidentvoice.org/2013/01/the-testing-logjam-dynamited-teacher-style-how-standardization-race-to-the-bottom-sic-top-and-most-children-left-behind-nclb-sic-frame-how-we-talk-about-education/
Capitalism and the War on Public Education
by Charles Sullivan / November 8th, 2010
http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/11/capitalism-and-the-war-on-public-education/
[…school reform movement…] is sweeping the country as part of a political agenda to privatize the public domain and put it under absolute corporate control.
“Right-wing politicians of the Republican and Democratic parties are wrecking what remains of the public education system. They have been doing so for decades. Some of them are castigating it as socialist. Under the guise of reform, a movement is afoot to under fund public schools and replace them with ‘for profit’ charter schools. Firing qualified teachers and busting teachers unions is part of the process. College and University education is being priced out of the reach of working class people. We are witnessing the death of the liberal arts. The war on public education is a front in the broader class war that pits workers against owners and the working class against the wealthy.”
“The war on public education is part of a broader capitalist agenda to produce a global plantation of private owners and worker drones. Their purpose is not to produce an educated citizenry, but to deliver an obedient and cheap work force to the corporate plantation.”
Undoing the New Deal : TRNN (The Real News Network)
Why the United States Is Destroying Its Education System
Posted on Apr 11, 2011
By Chris Hedges
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/why_the_united_states_is_destroying_her_education_system_20110410/
Excerpt:
A nation that destroys its systems of education, degrades its public information, guts its public libraries and turns its airwaves into vehicles for cheap, mindless amusement becomes deaf, dumb and blind. It prizes test scores above critical thinking and literacy. It celebrates rote vocational training and the singular, amoral skill of making money. It churns out stunted human products, lacking the capacity and vocabulary to challenge the assumptions and structures of the corporate state. It funnels them into a caste system of drones and systems managers. It transforms a democratic state into a feudal system of corporate masters and serfs.
Teachers, their unions under attack, are becoming as replaceable as minimum-wage employees at Burger King. We spurn real teachers—those with the capacity to inspire children to think, those who help the young discover their gifts and potential—and replace them with instructors who teach to narrow, standardized tests. These instructors obey. They teach children to obey. And that is the point. The No Child Left Behind program, modeled on the “Texas Miracle,” is a fraud. It worked no better than our deregulated financial system. But when you shut out debate these dead ideas are self-perpetuating.
Passing bubble tests celebrates and rewards a peculiar form of analytical intelligence. This kind of intelligence is prized by money managers and corporations. They don’t want employees to ask uncomfortable questions or examine existing structures and assumptions. They want them to serve the system. These tests produce men and women who are just literate and numerate enough to perform basic functions and service jobs. The tests elevate those with the financial means to prepare for them. They reward those who obey the rules, memorize the formulas and pay deference to authority. Rebels, artists, independent thinkers, eccentrics and iconoclasts—those who march to the beat of their own drum—are weeded out.
“Imagine,” said a public school teacher in New York City, who asked that I not use his name, “going to work each day knowing a great deal of what you are doing is fraudulent, knowing in no way are you preparing your students for life in an ever more brutal world, knowing that if you don’t continue along your scripted test prep course and indeed get better at it you will be out of a job. Up until very recently, the principal of a school was something like the conductor of an orchestra: a person who had deep experience and knowledge of the part and place of every member and every instrument. In the past 10 years we’ve had the emergence of both [Mayor] Mike Bloomberg’s Leadership Academy and Eli Broad’s Superintendents Academy, both created exclusively to produce instant principals and superintendents who model themselves after CEOs. How is this kind of thing even legal? How are such ‘academies’ accredited? What quality of leader needs a ‘leadership academy’? What kind of society would allow such people to run their children’s schools? The high-stakes tests may be worthless as pedagogy but they are a brilliant mechanism for undermining the school systems, instilling fear and creating a rationale for corporate takeover. There is something grotesque about the fact the education reform is being led not by educators but by financers and speculators and billionaires.”
Teachers, under assault from every direction, are fleeing the profession. Even before the “reform” blitzkrieg we were losing half of all teachers within five years after they started work—and these were people who spent years in school and many thousands of dollars to become teachers. How does the country expect to retain dignified, trained professionals under the hostility of current conditions? I suspect that the hedge fund managers behind our charter schools system—whose primary concern is certainly not with education—are delighted to replace real teachers with nonunionized, poorly trained instructors. To truly teach is to instill the values and knowledge which promote the common good and protect a society from the folly of historical amnesia. The utilitarian, corporate ideology embraced by the system of standardized tests and leadership academies has no time for the nuances and moral ambiguities inherent in a liberal arts education. Corporatism is about the cult of the self. It is about personal enrichment and profit as the sole aim of human existence. And those who do not conform are pushed aside.
The Neoliberal Attack on Education
Posted on Oct 17, 2012
By Henry A. Giroux, Truthout
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/can_democratic_education_survive_in_a_neoliberal_society_20121017/
Excerpt:
Public education is under assault by a host of religious, economic, ideological and political fundamentalists. The most serious attack is being waged by advocates of neoliberalism, whose reform efforts focus narrowly on high-stakes testing, traditional texts and memorization drills. At the heart of this approach is an aggressive attempt to disinvest in public schools, replace them with charter schools, and remove state and federal governments completely from public education in order to allow education to be organized and administered by market-driven forces.[1] Schools would “become simply another corporate asset bundled in credit default swaps,” valuable for their rate of exchange and trade value on the open market.[2] It would be an understatement to suggest that there is something very wrong with American public education. For a start, this counter-revolution is giving rise to punitive evaluation schemes, harsh disciplinary measures, and the ongoing deskilling of many teachers that together are reducing many excellent educators to the debased status of technicians and security personnel. Additionally, as more and more wealth is distributed to the richest Americans and corporations, states are drained of resources and are shifting the burden of such deficits on to public schools and other vital public services. With 40 percent of wealth going to the top 1 percent, public services are drying up from lack of revenue and more and more young people find themselves locked out of the dream of getting a decent education or a job while being robbed of any hope for the future.
As the nation’s schools and infrastructure suffer from a lack of resources, right-wing politicians are enacting policies that lower the taxes of the rich and mega corporations. For the elite, taxes constitute a form of class warfare waged by the state against the rich, who view the collection of taxes as a form of state coercion. What is ironic in this argument is the startling fact that not only are the rich not taxed fairly, but they also receive over $92 billion in corporate subsidies. But there is more at stake here than untaxed wealth and revenue, there is also the fact that wealth corrupts and buys power. And this poisonous mix of wealth, politics and power translates into an array of anti-democratic practices that creates an unhealthy society in every major index, ranging from infant mortality rates, to a dysfunctional political system.[3]
What is hidden in this empty outrage by the wealthy is that the real enemy here is any form of government that believes it needs to raise revenue in order to build infrastructures, provide basic services for those who need them, and develop investments such as a transportation system and schools that are not tied to the logic of the market. One consequence of this vile form of class warfare is a battle over crucial resources, a battle that has dire political and educational consequences especially for the poor and middle classes, if not democracy itself.
Money no longer simply controls elections; it also controls policies that shape public education. One indicator of such corruption is that hedge fund managers now sit on school boards across the country doing everything in their power to eliminate public schools and punish unionized teachers who do not support charter schools. In New Jersey, hundreds of teachers have been sacked because of alleged budget deficits. Not only is Governor Christie using the deficit argument to fire teachers, he also uses it to break unions and balance the budget on the backs of students and teachers. How else to explain Christie’s refusal to oppose reinstituting the “millionaires taxes,” or his cravenly support for lowering taxes for the top 25 hedge fund officers, who in 2009 raked in $25 billion, enough to fund 658,000 entry-level teachers.[4]
In this conservative right-wing reform culture, the role of public education, if we are to believe the Heritage Foundation and the likes of Bill Gates-type billionaires, is to produce students who laud conformity, believe job training is more important than education, and view public values as irrelevant. Students in this view are no longer educated for democratic citizenship. On the contrary, they are now being trained to fulfill the need for human capital.[5] What is lost in this approach to schooling is what Noam Chomsky calls “creating creative and independent thought and inquiry, challenging perceived beliefs, exploring new horizons and forgetting external constraints.”[6] At the same time, public schools are under assault not because they are failing (though some are) but because they are one of the few public spheres left where people can learn the knowledge and skills necessary to allow them to think critically and hold power and authority accountable. Not only are the lines between the corporate world and public education blurring, but public schooling is being reduced to what Peter Seybold calls a “corporate service station,” in which the democratic ideals at the heart of public education are now up for sale.[7] At the heart of this crisis of education are larger questions about the formative culture necessary for a democracy to survive, the nature of civic education and teaching in dark times, the role of educators as civic intellectuals and what it means to understand the purpose and meaning of education as a site of individual and collective empowerment.
Why ‘school reform’ is a misnomer — principal
Posted by Valerie Strauss
February 3, 2013
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/02/03/why-school-reform-is-a-misnomer-principal/
Excerpt:
Carol Burris is the award-winning principal of South Side High School in New York who has been at the forefront of opposition to New York State’s new teacher evaluation system. Named the 2010 New York State Outstanding Educator by the School Administrators Association of New York State, Burris is one of the co-authors of the principals’ letter against evaluating teachers by student test scores, which has been signed by 1,535 New York principals. Here are excerpts from the keynote address that Burris delivered last week to the New York Performance Standards Consortium:
We are living through a time of unrelenting change driven by political and economic agendas. It is inappropriately referred to as education reform. The label reform is not appropriate because there are three possible outcomes that can follow from externally mandated school change — our schools can become worse, they can stay the same, or they can improve. Improvement would qualify as reform.
However, I do not think improvement is the most likely outcome when the culture and values of the corporate world are forced upon public education.
And for those who seek to profit from the turmoil caused by chaotic change, public education is the new real estate bubble. It is the way of capitalism to always seek new markets. In the words of Mr. Murdoch: Public education is a $500 billion market waiting desperately to be transformed.
And so each of us has a choice to make for our students and for our profession. We can stand up and speak out against ill-conceived change, or we can cower, hunker down and allow our profession and our public schools to slowly be dismantled.
I guess that brings us to the principals’ letter against APPR and how it came to be. When my Long Island colleagues and I first heard that the New York State Education Department was seriously considering evaluating teachers by test scores, we did not really believe that it would happen. We thought the idea was ludicrous — we thought it was political pandering — and that somehow reason would prevail. We were wrong. When we saw the final plan, and realized that we were to rate teachers with numbers in order to sort them into four categories, we were both indignant and outraged. Not only was this an assault on the professionalism of teaching, we knew that the negative consequences for our students and our schools would be enormous. Although we understood that the intent of policymakers was school improvement, we knew that the opposite –school decline, was a far more likely outcome of the evaluation system called APPR.
We were naïve enough, however, to believe that the opinion of the principals of some of the most successful schools in New York State – principals who led schools on every national list of success — would matter. We thought that someone in Albany might respect what we had to say. Silly us. We didn’t know that we were waiting desperately to be transformed.
Bron: Sorry, I was working.
Particularly in the Biblical religions, the idea that confessing one’s sins clears the deck seems like a recipe for betting on sin; or more specifically, betting one can sin and make to to confession to erase it.
I, for one, am grounded in evolutionary psychology and do not believe people need God to behave. I think that long ago when people were uneducated and naive, what was repeatedly discovered by the elite was that frightening people with religion, backed up by small amounts of brutality, worked better as a tool of enslavement than large amounts of brutality alone. Religion frightens people into obeying whatever the rules may be; and one of the rules in almost all religions is abject obedience to the authority of the parents, the church, and the hierarchy in place. Revolt is punished by eternal damnation of the soul.
People do not need the threat of God to behave, patriarchs need the threat of God’s power to control people with their arbitrary, self-serving rules.
The prohibitions on murder, theft, perjury, etc do not need a God to punish them, and in fact virtually nobody actually leaves the punishment for those sins to God, those crimes get prosecuted and punished by humans.
(I find it ridiculous that an all powerful and all-knowing God would give instructions to men for punishing men when presumably he could punish the criminals Himself, with greater certainty and no error. It is just another drop of evidence in the bucket of “all made up.”)
Gene,
I didn’t imply that all religious people are fundamentalists. That’s why I used the word “some” in my sentence.
I have old and dear friends who are very religious. They’re Roman Catholics. They attended parochial school with me. They kept their faith.I lost mine when I was in my early twenties. BTW, I was taught in my Catholic high school that the Bible should not be taken literally.
Gene,
You are spot on about fundamentalism. It is dangerous whether it is the Taliban or the Religious right.
Elaine,
And therein lies the basic problem with fundamentalism (of any stripe) and treating a book of parables and allegory as literal. It’s delusional behavior. But not all religious people are fundamentalists and/or delusional. Look to our own Orolee as a prime example of a rational being with religious foundations for his ethics.
Gene,
Some religious people “know for a fact” that the Earth is thousands–not millions–of years old. They figured that out from reading a “nonfiction” book. I think you know what tome I’m talking about.
Elaine,
“Is not cheating because you’re afraid God will see you considered a form of ethical behavior?”
In outcome, certainly, but ethical intent without coercion is by far the better individual choice.
“I think a better example of ethical behavior is not cheating because you believe it’s wrong to do so.”
Yep.
Elaine,
I’ll have to agree there is a divergence between the word “many” and “most”. Many people probably do need to compunction provided by an imaginary invisible Sky-daddy looking over their shoulder. Most? Probably not. And the question you point to indirectly is “Are the injustices perpetrated by those who would use religion as a tool to control and oppress a cost worthy of the benefit of using religion instead of rationally based ethics as a guideline in modern society?”
While that point is debatable, I would tend to agree with you that no, the costs are not worth the benefits any more. Being primitive in your beliefs in the information age is a choice. We know for a fact that storms are not the anger of Poseidon.
Gene,
Is not cheating because you’re afraid God will see you considered a form of ethical behavior? I think a better example of ethical behavior is not cheating because you believe it’s wrong to do so.
Bron,
“I dont think most people can act morally without God.”
I think you’re wrong. Ethical people of principle who have empathy for their fellow man can certainly act morally without a belief in God. Haven’t we seen enough religious people who have done terribly immoral things–including members of the Catholic clergy? Haven’t we seen and learned about religious wars? Haven’t we witnessed people who have done terrible things in the name of religion? Aren’t there many religions where women are treated as second class citizens?
Bron,
I think there is truth in that. Psychological studies on cheating have revealed that people are quite a bit more willing to cheat when they don’t think they are being observed and there are no immediate consequences known. I can see where that comports to ethical behavior in general and the practice of religion.
tony c:
I think many people still need God to behave. And I think some people are atheists because they have rotten souls and are scared of the consequences.
I dont think most people can act morally without God. Granted, many act badly because of God but the majority of people are moral because of a religious belief. Please dont use Westboro Baptists and Jihadis as examples, they are but a small minority of people who pervert religion to bad ends.
Indeed, Mike.
“Everything that has a beginning has an end.” – Buddha
(I know it may come as a shock to some of you, but the Oracle borrowed that bit of wisdom.)