Sworn in as president of Czechoslovakia
(Guest post by Greg Forster)
It’s a busy couple days for death posts. Vaclav Havel is dead at 75.
I’ve already written my tribute to this hero of freedom – and what education reformers can learn from him – here.
If you want a great laugh and also a poinient deconstruction of the absurdity of trying to rule people by force, do yourself a huge favor and read The Memorandum. (Bonus: It’s short!)
Update: A few more links here.
Leave a Comment » | 
tributes | Tagged: Greg Forster, Vaclav Havel | 
Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
Ted Forstmann, co-founder of the Children’s Scholarship Fund and Wall Street pioneer, passed away after a battle with cancer. Forstmann played a big role in the early stages of the parental choice movement and will be missed.
2 Comments | tributes | Tagged: Ted Forstmann | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
The good news just keeps rolling in: The Bradley Foundation has awarded former Florida Governor Jeb Bush a prestigious Bradley Prize.
“Governor Bush has been at the forefront of education reform,” said Michael W. Grebe, president and chief executive officer of the Bradley Foundation. “During his administration and since, Florida students have made incredible gains. He has also been a vocal advocate for school choice.”
Congratulations to Governor Bush and to the entire Florida reform team!
3 Comments | instructional reform, tributes, vouchers | Tagged: Bradley Prize, Jeb Bush | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
Cato’s Andrew Coulson has an excellent piece in the Wall Street Journal today eulogizing Jaime Escalante. Andrew correctly identifies the lesson from Escalante’s experience. The dysfunction of our educational system is caused by perverse incentives, not ignorance of effective techniques or the complete absence of effective people.
Here’s the meat of the argument:
In any other field, his methods would have been widely copied. Instead, Escalante’s success was resented. And while the teachers union contract limited class sizes to 35, Escalante could not bring himself to turn students away, packing 50 or more into a room and still helping them to excel. This weakened the union’s bargaining position, so it complained.
By 1990, Escalante was stripped of his chairmanship of the math department he’d painstakingly built up over a decade. Exasperated, he left in 1991, eventually returning to his native Bolivia. Garfield’s math program went into a decline from which it has never recovered. The best tribute America can offer Jaime Escalante is to understand why our education system destroyed rather than amplified his success—and then fix it.
A succinct diagnosis of the problem was offered by President Clinton in 1993 at the launch of philanthropist Walter Annenberg’s $500 million education reform challenge. “People in this room who have devoted their lives to education,” he said, “are constantly plagued by the fact that nearly every problem has been solved by somebody somewhere, and yet we can’t seem to replicate it everywhere else.” Our greatest challenge is to create “a system to somehow take what is working and make it work everywhere.”
The most naïve approach has been to create a critical mass of exemplary “model” schools, imagining that the system would spontaneously reconstitute itself around their example. This was the implicit assumption underlying the Annenberg Challenge and, with donor matching, more than $1 billion was spent on it. As a mechanism for widely disseminating excellence, it failed utterly.
President Obama wants a government program for identifying and disseminating what works. In his blueprint for reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act released in March, he proposed the creation of “‘communities of practice’ to share best practices and replicate successful strategies.”
He’s not the first to advocate this approach. The secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education pursued the same idea—in 1837. Horace Mann, father of American public schooling, thought that a centrally planned state education apparatus would reliably identify and bring to scale the best methods and materials in use throughout the system. Despite a century-and-a-half of expansion and centralization, this approach, too, has failed. Without systematic incentives rewarding officials for wise decisions and penalizing them for bad ones, public schooling became a ferris wheel of faddism rather than a propagator of excellence.
3 Comments | school accountability, tributes | Tagged: Andrew Coulson | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
If there were a Taco Bell everywhere Taco Bell consumers wanted a Taco Bell, there would be Taco Bells everywhere. All retail space would be occupied by Taco Bell because all matter would be made up of Taco Bell, and the only thought would be Taco Bell because the entire universe, all of existence, would only be Taco Bell. So yeah, for the sake of life on Earth, it’s probably best that Taco Bell’s growth be controlled. Not for the sake of me getting some goddamned Taco Bell in Brooklyn, though.
3 Comments | Al Copeland Humanitarian Award, tributes | Tagged: Al Copeland, Glen Bell, humanitarian | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
(Guest post by Greg Forster)
You may be tempted to dismiss Pat Robertson’s remarks about Haiti on the narrow and pedantic grounds that Robertson is a crazy man. But before you do, you should know that when Pat Robertson talks about making deals with the devil, he speaks as an expert in the field.
1) He regularly cozies up to bloodthirsty dictators in nations where he has large financial interests – China, Congo, Liberia - praising them on the air as enlightened statesmen and inviting their mouthpieces onto his program to spread their propaganda. China has full and complete religious freedom! Falun Gong wants to eat your children’s eyeballs! It’s turning out that there are some things even Google won’t do for China - but not Pat Robertson.
2) The contract under which he sold his TV network to ABC (it became ABC Family) requires ABC to air his show in perpetuity, no matter how crazy he gets or how low the ratings go. He could be up there telling us to worship Mongo the Martian Monkey God and they’d still have to air it. That’s the price ABC paid to get the network. Rumor has it they’ve tried over and over again to buy the man out, and who can blame them? But he won’t sell – the only two things Pat Robertson loves more than money are his ego and his self-righteousness. And ABC put its blood on the signature line, so they’re stuck with him.
Of course, none of this is to deny that Robertson is, in fact, a crazy man. Check out this archive photo from the early days of his ministry:
It was after he shaved off the beard that his show really took off.
3 Comments | tributes | Tagged: Best of Greg, Greg Forster, Haiti, Pat Robertson | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster
(Guest post by Greg Forster)
After careful consideration of various possibilities, including:
. . . I have at last settled on my nomination:
Ralph Teetor, inventor of cruise control.
Cruise control makes driving far less burdensome, which not only makes our lives more enjoyable on a day-to-day basis, it also facilitates a great increase in long-distance travel and reduces shipping costs by reducing not only the labor burden but also the cost of gas (since cruise control is more fuel-efficient). The truckers have a bumper sticker showing a stork delivering a baby, with the tagline “everything else you have arrived by truck.” Well, if that’s true, then anything that lowers the cost of trucking must have tremendous reverberations throughout the economy – which is to say, we’ll never know just how much our lives have been enriched by it.
Oh, and it saves lives. Lots of them. The professional safety narcs strongly resisted the introduction of cruise control on grounds that it would lead to inattentive driving and more deaths. But in fact it led to more uniform driving, with everyone going the same speed and therefore a big drop in the frequency of cars passing each other, and thus a dramatic drop in deaths.
P.J. O’Rourke contacted some of the professional safety narcs to ask them whether they were sorry for having opposed something that turned out to dramatically increase safety. If memory serves, I believe they were unrepentant. No doubt they were worried they’d have to give back the Nobel Peace Prizes they’d won for opposing it.
I chose to focus on cruise control because I thought it fit the values of the Al Copeland award most closely, but it’s worth noting that Teetor was a prolific engineer and inventor – he and his cousin built their first car, with a one-cylinder engine, at age 12 – and contributed far more to our lives than cruise control. In his first job out of college he developed a better way to balance steam turbine rotors in the torpedo boat destroyers we used to kick the Kaiser’s kiester in WWI. Later he ran a company that made piston rings for car engines, supplying Packard, General Motors, Chrysler and Studebaker.
Teetor got the idea for cruise control after a jerky and uncomfortable car ride. His lawyer, driving the car, was an incessant talker and paid more attention to the conversation than the car’s speed, letting the car speed up and slow down as his attention wandered.
Teetor secured the patent for automatic car speed control in 1945, dubbing it Controlmatic. It would later be called Touchomatic, Pressomatic and Speedostat before finally being christened cruise control. The technology was first offered on three Chrysler models in 1958. By 1960 it was available on all Cadillac models.
Oh, and did I mention that Teetor did all this after being blinded in a shop accident - at age five?
I proudly nominate Ralph Teetor for the Al Copeland award.
Now if only he had developed a control for this kind of Cruise:
HT Symon Sez
3 Comments | Al Copeland Humanitarian Award, tributes | Tagged: Al Copeland, Al Copeland Humanitarian of the Year Award, cruise control, Greg Forster, Ralph Teetor | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster
After triumphing over Nazism and Communism in the 20th century, liberty faces a new threat in this century — radical Islam. This threat is being counteracted (we hope) by diplomacy with potential allies, force against enemies, and high-minded speeches to remind all that the cause of liberty is right and the cause of tyranny is wrong.
In addition to all that, there is another essential element in the arsenal of liberty — ridicule. Tyrants of all stripes, in addition to being monstrously cruel and evil, are also almost always laughably, pathetically, and outrageously ridiculous.
Charlie Chaplin realized this when he mocked Hitler in The Great Dictator. In Dr. Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick portrayed the communist leader as a weepy drunk and the war-mongering general as a paranoid suffering from ED. South Park has portrayed Osama Bin Laden as the slapstick LooneyTunes villain, Wile E. Coyote. The Daily Show and Colbert Report make their living off of puncturing the pomposity of politicians. Humor may not be the best weapon against tyrants, crooks, fools, and all other kinds of politicians, but it is a very important one.
But Chaplin, Kubrick, Parker, Stone, Stewart, and Colbert have mocked tyrants from the safety of the free world. Fasi Zaka does it from the front lines. Zaka is a Pakistani radio DJ — a shock-jock – and host of a TV news parody show, News, Views, and Confused. Given long stretches of military rule, government censorship, and death threats from extremists, Zaka can’t and doesn’t address oppression in Pakistan head-on. Instead, he flirts with the issues, poking fun at the Taliban and corrupt and incompetent Pakistani leaders with social satire more than political criticism.
For example, Zaka mocks the Taliban for smelling bad rather than for beheading opponents and suicide bombings. As an LA Times profile described his approach:
So when a guest host, a character named Mr. Enlightened Moderations, poked fun at fundos , slang for Islamic fundamentalists, it was not for any extreme religious views but for poor dress sense, aversion to after-shave and limited use of deodorant. “You sound like a fundo,” he’d say accusingly to callers. “You doesn’t even wears a deo, smelly boy.”
By mocking tyrants and their followers Zaka makes them seem uncool. Making them uncool may limit their power more than a speech on their logical errors. Remember that young men were drawn to Nazism in part because they wore shiny boots and neat brown shorts. It was a struggle whether people would perceive fascism as the trend of the future or a group of buffoons singing Springtime for Hitler. Buffoons who smell bad don’t attract girls, so young men are much less interested in movements that are uncool.
Not everyone agrees with Zaka’s humorous approach:
Some critics say Zaka is squandering a golden opportunity to be constructive and foster moderation in a confused younger generation. “It bothers me when people do silly entertainment shows when we really need people to make a difference,” says Mani, another radio host.
Radio hosts don’t have to be boring and didactic to get their message across, counters Zaka, pointing to frequent discussions on extremism, women’s equality and the violence sweeping Pakistan. “They presume preaching is the way for change,” he says. “It isn’t.”
Zaka can be serious. He is, after all, a Rhodes Scholar who was educated at Oxford. And he regularly writes op-eds with more standard political criticism. But it is his humor and ridicule that are really advancing the cause of liberty.
I make no claim that Fasi Zaka is as funny as Charlie Chaplin, Steven Colbert, and the others. The parts not in English seem even less funny, but you can check out a clip of his TV show here:
And like Chaplin, not all of Fasi Zaka’s political views are necessarily desirable. Again, Zaka is worthwhile because he mocks bad guys, not because he’s a sound political analyst.
While Zaka may not be the funniest of these satirists for freedom, he is clearly one of the most courageous. Making crap of the Taliban and military dictators is a real contribution to improving the human condition and makes Fasi Zaka worthy of a nomination for the Al Copeland Humanitarian of the Year Award.
(edited for clarity)
5 Comments | Al Copeland Humanitarian Award, politics, tributes | Tagged: Al Copeland Humanitarian of the Year Award, Charlie Chaplin, Fasi Zaka, Jay Greene, Jay P. Greene, Jon Stewart, Stanley Kubrick, Steve Colbert | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
2 Comments | tributes | Tagged: Bud Light Real Men of Genius, Texas Patriotism | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
I returned from vacation to learn that one of my graduate advisors, Samuel Huntington, passed away on Christmas eve. Huntington was the type of broad intellectual that has become a vanishing breed in academia. He had a knack for identifying the big themes that were worthy of our attention and had the courage to make bold arguments while always remaining respectful of those with whom he disagreed.
Now we are mostly left with academics who dwell on the latest methodological technique rather than what is substantively important. Just pick up a recent copy of the American Political Science Review and you will search in vain for anything important, useful, and accessible.
And the public intellectuals who still attempt to ask the big questions too often give answers that have all the depth of a self-help book. Has Thomas Friedman ever made an argument that was not already the bland conventional wisdom of the Rotary Club in a small midwestern town?
Josef Joffe said it best: “But who will embark on projects of this kind of sweep, breath and depth? Or write as elegantly as Sam has done? That’s over in American academia, as is that fabulous confluence between America’s rise to world power and the influx of some of Europe’s greatest minds, courtesy of Adolf Hitler. Never before has there been such a perfect match between the demand for and the supply of great talent. One hates to think what would happen to a young Sam today. He might still graduate from Yale at age 18, but would he have become a Harvard professor at age 23? With that independence of mind, that contrarian spirit, that relentless search for conventional notions to be slain? Would a young Sam still be able to ask the Big Questions? And sin against so many idols demanding fealty to contemporary standards of correctness?”
Huntington’s passing isn’t just the personal loss of a wonderful man, teacher, and scholar. It also marks the end of an era.
4 Comments | tributes | Tagged: Jay Greene, Jay P. Greene, Josef Joffe, Samuel Huntington, Thimas Friedman | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
You are currently browsing the archives for the tributes category.
