Do we want our children taught by humans or algorithms?

Zoe Williams in The Guardian


 

Parents ‘have been galvanised by the … sight of their children in distress’ over the tests. Photograph: Dominic Lipinski/PA



It is incredibly hard for a headteacher to shout “rubbish” in a crowded hall while an authority figure is speaking. It is like asking a lung specialist to smoke a cigarette. Yet that’s what happened when Nicky Morgan addressed the National Association of Head Teachers conference yesterday. They objected partly to her programme of turning all schools into academies by 2020 and partly to her luminously daft insistence that “testing”, “improving” and “educating” are interchangeable words. 

Her government “introduced the phonics check for six-year-olds, and 100,000 more young people are able to read better as a result,” she told the BBC when she first became education secretary, and she has been trotting out the same nonsense ever since. No amount of disagreement from professionals in the field dents her faith or alters her rhetoric. Indeed, since the Michael Gove era, teachers have been treated as recalcitrant by definition, motivated by sloth, their years of experience reframed not as wisdom but as burnout. When they object to a policy, that merely proves what a sorely needed challenge it poses to their cushy lives. When they shout “rubbish” in a conference hall, it is yet more evidence of what a dangerous bunch of trots they are.

On Tuesday, parents enter the fray, with a school boycott organised by Let Our Kids Be Kids, to protest against “unnecessary testing and a curriculum that limits enjoyment and real understanding”. Some have been galvanised by the bizarre and unnecessary sight of their children in distress, others by solidarity with the teachers – who inconveniently continue to command a great deal of respect among people who actually meet with them – and others who can’t join in the boycott because of minor administrative details such as having to go to work, but have signed the petition. It is the beginning of a new activism – muscular, cooperative and agile because it has to be.

The boycott is in protest against ‘unnecessary testing and a curriculum that limits enjoyment and real understanding’. Photograph: Barry Batchelor/PA

If the only problem is that it causes anxiety to a load of pampered under-10s, shouldn’t they just suck it up? Isn’t that the best way to learn what the world is like? The framing of this debate is precisely wrong. No serious educationalist thinks that the way to drive up standards among children is to make tests more frequent and more exacting. Nor does anybody of any expertise really believe that teachers need to be incentivised by results. It is an incredibly tough, demanding, indifferently remunerated job, which nobody would do except as a vocation. It is not for the profession or the parents to explain what the tests are doing to the kids; it is for the education secretary to explain what these tests are for. 

By coincidence, at the end of last week, Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, was in London to hand in a petition to Pearson, the education company and provider of curriculums and test delivery. The petition protested against two perceived issues: concerns about over-testing in US schools and alleged profiteering in the global south. The trajectory in US education, from universal public provision with local accountability to mass outsourcing and centralised control, is strikingly similar to what has happened here. It begins with the creation of a failure narrative, “that both the Democrats and the Republican bought into, which is, the sky is falling, the sky is falling, the sky is falling”, Weingarten told me. That creates the rationale for testing, since, without data, you can’t tell whether you’re improving. Those tests are consequential: the results can be used to fire teachers, close down schools, hold pupils back a year. All the most profound decisions in education can suddenly be made by an algorithm, with no human judgment necessary.

Simultaneously, says Weingarten, Charter schools were introduced, originally – like academies – “as part of a bigger public school system where you could incubate ideas”, but very soon remodelled as a way to supplant rather than supplement the existing system. “And in between all of this, you started seeing the marketisation and the monetisation.” Until things can be counted, there isn’t much scope to create a market.

I was never fully convinced that academisation and hyper-testing were undertaken to create the market conditions for privatisation down the line; I thought it more plausible that the testing was merely a politician’s wheeze to create data out of humans that could then be stuffed into manifestos to persuade other humans that the policies were going in the right direction. Yet the parallels between the US and England are insistent – it has become impossible to ignore the idea that our government is mimicking theirs for a reason.

Whether all this is a prelude to privatisation or a PR stunt for a chaotic government doesn’t actually matter in the medium term: to put seven-year-olds under intolerable pressure for either of those ends would be equally abhorrent. In the long term, the mutation of schools into joyless exam factories won’t be halted by resistance alone, we also need to make a proper account of what education is for.

As Weingarten describes, “We have to help kids build relationships. We have to address their life skills, so they can negotiate the world. We have to help kids build resilience. We have to help kids learn how to problem-solve, how to think, how to engage. So tell me, how are any of these things tested on a standardised test?” That’s a test question for the tin-eared secretary of state herself.

Is vegetarianism and veganism about animal welfare or moral superiority?

Leslie Cannold for the Ethics Centre in The Guardian

‘There is more than one way to fulfil our obligations to eliminate the unnecessary suffering of animals.’ Photograph: Wong Maye-E/AP




The western obsession with rights makes it difficult to see their limitations. We speak about rights as if they were the only moral value with meaning, ignoring other important moral values like responsibilities or duties. In fact, responsibilities are the counterparts to rights – you can’t have one without the other.

Philosopher Carl Cohen writes that, “If animals have any rights, they must have the right not to be killed to advance the interest of others.” Another way of putting this is that those who assert the rights of animals are in effect asserting – first and foremost – a right to life for all animals.

But for an animal to realise its right to life, farmers, hunters and researchers must collectively accept a duty not to kill them. Similarly, citizens, consumers and patients must refuse to eat, wear or use food, clothes and medicine that require an animal to die.

As I’ll be arguing in the IQ2 debate “Animal rights should trump human interests” in Sydney on Tuesday night, the assertion of an animal right to life is non-sensical. It would require us – just as one example – to stop animals from hunting one another, just like we stop humans from killing one another. But more importantly, it is unnecessary to achieve what is required to improve the lot of animals.

Even Peter Singer, one of the intellectual fathers of the animal rights movement, doesn’t believe animals have a right to life. In his seminal text Animal Liberation he says we must refuse to contribute to – and act to stop – the unnecessary suffering of animals.

But he does not contend that animals have a right to life or that they suffer by having their life taken from them.

Instead, what he claims is that intensively farmed animals suffer because of the cruel and tortuous ways they are made to live and are slaughtered. We have a duty to do what we can to stop this by boycotting businesses that treat animals cruelly.

Having done that, we have a choice. We can go without wearing make-up and without eating or wearing animal flesh that required the torture of animals, or we can source and buy cruelty-free cosmetics and eat and wear ethically-farmed and slaughtered animal products.

In other words, while it might have been true that when Animal Liberation was written in the 1970s, the result of a boycott was a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle, this is no longer the case. Today, there is more than one way to fulfil our obligations to eliminate the unnecessary suffering of animals.

Indeed, given clear, cross-cultural evidence that only around 1.5% of people are willing to try or stick with a vegan or vegetarian lifestyle – figures that have not changed over time – the promotion of an ethically carnivorous life is likely to be a far more effective way to reduce the suffering of animals.

To me, this is so obvious that I have to ask why in 2016 animal rights groups continue to advance vegetarian and veganism as the only legitimate way to end animal suffering. A 2014 study funded by Voiceless, found that 70% of Australians agreed that “human beings have an obligation to avoid harming all animals”. This sort of sentiment had led “substantial proportions” to buy “free range” meat and dairy and cruelty-free products. Despite this, the Humane Research Council – authors of the study – advised animal rights advocates that while they ought capitalise on “widespread support for incremental improvements” they must also continue to press people to “abstain from animal products entirely.”

Why not press people who have chosen to make a difference through buying cruelty-free products to buy more of them more often? Or to buy them exclusively? Is it possible that vegetarianism and veganism continues to be promoted as the sole way of meeting our obligations to animals not because it is, but because it makes the promoters feel morally superior?

If it were, it wouldn’t be the first time the eco-left stymied mass behaviour change with unpalatable prescriptions delivered in self-righteous tones.

Analysis has revealed that mass communications around climate change provoked feelings of powerlessness rather than a desire to act in many people. Often the wrong moral note was struck, too. Environmental activist and philosopher Sarah Bachelard wrote at the time, “There can be a tone of self-righteousness ... a kind of shrill moral indignation ... We know that we are on the side of the angels, and in our own way we can fail to do justice to the complex reality of most human action and motivation. We get something out of ‘being right’ ... (and) satisfaction from making those who do not agree with us wrong.”

The truth is that an ethically carnivorous life is possible so long as we ensure the animals we consume have lived and died without unnecessary suffering.

Do animal rights trump human interests? Not if the animal right we are talking about is a right to life, and the human interest at stake is health. But I join with most people in believing we do have an obligation to stop animal cruelty and to fulfill this duty through the choices we make about what we eat, wear and do every day.

Barack Obama Gives Speech At White House Correspondents' Dinner 2016

Trump says what no other candidate will: the US is no longer exceptional

With his slogan ‘Make America Great Again’, Trump is the first leader of recent times to attack American exceptionalism. In fact, he claims it is the opposite

 

The slogan that changed the trajectory of American political discourse? Only time will tell. Photograph: Matt York/AP


Tom Engelhardt for Tom Dispatch


“Low-energy Jeb”. “Little Marco”. “Lyin’ Ted”. “Crooked Hillary”. Give Donald Trump credit: he has a memorable way with insults. His have a way of etching themselves on the brain. And they’ve garnered media coverage, analysis and commentary almost beyond imagining.

Memorable as they might be however, they won’t be what lasts of Trump’s 2016 election run. That’s surely reserved for a single slogan that will sum up his candidacy when it’s all over (no matter how it ends). He arrived with it on that Trump Tower escalator in the first moments of his campaign, and it now headlines his website, where it’s also emblazoned on an array of products from hats to T-shirts.

President Trump fills world leaders with fear: 'It's gone from funny to really scary'



You already know which line I mean: “Make America Great Again!”

That exclamation point ensures you won’t miss the hyperbolic, Trumpian nature of its promise to return the country to its former glory days. In it lies the essence of his campaign, of what he’s promising his followers and Americans generally – and yet, strangely enough, of all his lines it’s the one most taken for granted, the one that’s been given the least thought and analysis. And that’s a shame, because it represents something new in our American age. The problem, I suspect, is that what first catches the eye is the phrase “make America great” and then, of course, the exclamation point, while the single most important word in the slogan, historically speaking, is barely noted: again.

With that word, Trump crossed a line in American politics that until his escalator moment represented a kind of psychological taboo for politicians of any stripe and of either party, including presidents and potential candidates for that position. He is the first American leader or potential leader of recent times not to feel the need or obligation to insist that the US, the “sole” superpower of Planet Earth, is an “exceptional” nation, an “indispensable” country, or even in an unqualified sense a “great” one. His claim is the opposite: that, at present, America is anything but exceptional, indispensable or great, though he alone could make it “great again”.

In that claim lies a curiosity that, in a court of law, might be considered an admission of guilt. Yes, it says, if one man is allowed to enter the White House in January 2017, this could be a different country, but – and herein lies the originality of the slogan – it is not great now.

Trump, in other words, is the first person to run openly and without apology on a platform of American decline. Think about that for a moment. “Make America Great Again!” is indeed an admission, in the form of a boast.

As he tells his audiences repeatedly, America, the formerly great, is today a punching bag for China, Mexico ... well, you know the pitch. You don’t have to agree with him on the specifics. What’s interesting is the overall vision of a country lacking in its former greatness.

Perhaps a little history of American greatness and presidents (as well as presidential candidates) is in order here.

‘City upon a hill’

John F Kennedy simply assumed America was great. Photograph: Paul Schutzer/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image

Once upon a time, in a distant America, the words “greatest”, “exceptional” and “indispensable” weren’t part of the political vocabulary.

American presidents didn’t bother to claim any of them for this country, largely because American wealth and global preeminence were so indisputable. We’re talking about the 1950s and early 1960s, the post-second world war and pre-Vietnam “golden” years of American power. Despite a certain hysteria about the supposed dangers of domestic communists, few Americans then doubted the singularly unchallengeable power and greatness of the country. It was such a given, in fact, that it was simply too self-evident for presidents to cite, hail or praise.

So if you look, for instance, at the speeches of John F Kennedy, you won’t find them littered with exceptionals, indispensables or their equivalents.

In a pre-inaugural speech he gave in January 1961 on the kind of government he planned to bring to Washington, for instance, he did cite the birth of a “great republic” and quoted Puritan John Winthrop on the desirability of creating a country that would be “a city upon a hill” to the rest of the world, with all of humanity’s eyes upon us.

In his inaugural address (“Ask not what your country can do for you”) he invoked a kind of unspoken greatness, saying: “We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

It was then common to speak of the US with pride as a “free nation” (as opposed to the “enslaved” ones of the communist bloc) rather than an exceptional one. His only use of “great” was to invoke the US-led and Soviet Union-led blocs as “two great and powerful groups of nations”.

Kennedy could even fall back on a certain modesty in describing the US role in the world (which in those years, from Guatemala to Iran to Cuba, all too often did not carry over into actual policy), saying in one speech: “We must face the fact that the United States is neither omnipotent or omniscient – that we are only 6% of the world’s population – that we cannot impose our will upon the other 94% of mankind – that we cannot right every wrong or reverse each adversity – and that therefore there cannot be an American solution to every world problem.” In that same speech, he typically spoke of America as “a great power” – but not “the greatest power”.

If you didn’t grow up in that era, you may not grasp that none of this in any way implied a lack of national self-esteem. Quite the opposite: it implied a deep and abiding confidence in the overwhelming power and presence of this country, a confidence so unshakeable that there was no need to speak of it.

If you want a pop cultural equivalent for this, consider America’s movie heroes of that time, actors such as John Wayne and Gary Cooper, whose westerns and, in the case of Wayne, war movies were iconic. What’s striking when you look back at them from the present moment is this: while neither of those actors was anything but an imposing figure, they were also remarkably ordinary looking. They were in no way over-muscled, nor were they over-armed in the modern fashion. It was only in the years after the Vietnam war, when the country had absorbed what felt like a grim defeat, been wracked by oppositional movements, riots and assassinations, when a general sense of loss had swept over the polity, that the over-muscled hero, the exceptional killing machine, made the scene. (Think:Rambo.)

Consider this then if you want a definition of decline: when you have to state openly (and repeatedly) what previously had been too obvious to say, you’re heading, as the opinion polls always like to phrase it, in the wrong direction; in other words, once you have to say it, especially in an overemphatic way, you no longer have it.

The Reagan reboot

What better way to attest to America’s greatness than its military might? Photograph: Scott Stewart/AP

That note of defensiveness first crept into the American political lexicon with the unlikeliest of politicians: Ronald Reagan, the man who seemed like the least defensive, most genial guy on the planet. On this subject at least, think of him as Trumpian before the advent of the Donald, or at least as the man who (thanks to his ad writers) invented the political use of the word “again”. It was, after all, employed in 1984 in the seminal ad of his political run for a second term in office. While that bucolic-looking TV commercial was titled “Prouder, Stronger, Better”, its first line ever so memorably went: “It’s morning again in America.” (“Why would we ever want to return to where we were less than four short years ago?”)

Think of this as part of a post-Vietnam Reagan reboot, a time when the US in Rambo-esque fashion was quite literally muscling up and over-arming in a major way. Reagan presided over “the biggest peacetime defense build-up in history” against what, referencing Star Wars, he called an “evil empire” – the Soviet Union. In those years he also worked to rid the country of what was then termed “the Vietnam syndrome” in part by rebranding that war a “noble cause”.

In a time when loss and decline were much on American minds, he dismissed them both, even as he set the country on a path toward the present moment of 1% dysfunction in a country that no longer invests fully in its own infrastructure, whose wages are stagnant, whose poor are a growth industry, whose wealth now flows eternally upward in a political environment awash in the money of the ultra-wealthy, and whose over-armed military continues to pursue a path of endless failure in the greater Middle East.

Reagan, who spoke directly about American declinist thinking in his time – “Let’s reject the nonsense that America is doomed to decline” – was hardly shy about his superlatives when it came to this country. He didn’t hesitate to re-channel classic American rhetoric, ranging from Winthop’s “shining city upon a hill” (perhaps cribbed from Kennedy) in his farewell address to Lincoln-esque (“the last best hope of man on Earth”) invocations such as “here in the heartland of America lives the hope of the world” or “in a world wracked by hatred, economic crisis and political tension, America remains mankind’s best hope”.

And yet in the 1980s there were still limits to what needed to be said about America. Surveying the planet, you didn’t yet have to refer to us as the “greatest” country of all or as the planet’s sole truly “exceptional” country. Think of such repeated superlatives of our own moment as defensive markers on the declinist slope. The now commonplace adjective “indispensable” as a stand-in for American greatness globally, for instance, didn’t even arrive until Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, began using it in 1996.

It only became an indispensable part of the rhetorical arsenal of American politicians, from Barack Obama on down, a decade into the 21st century, when the country’s eerie dispensability (unless you were a junkie for failed states and regional chaos) became ever more apparent.

As for the US being the planet’s “exceptional” nation, a phrase that now seems indelibly part of the American grain and that no president or presidential candidate avoids, it’s surprising how late it entered the lexicon.

As John Gans Jr wrote in the Atlantic in 2011: “Obama has talked more about American exceptionalism than Presidents Reagan, George HW Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W Bush combined: a search on UC Santa Barbara’s exhaustive presidential records library finds that no president from 1981 to today uttered the phrase ‘American exceptionalism’ except Obama.”

Barack Obama: the only president to use the term ‘American exceptionalism’, according to research. Photograph: Rex Features

As US News’s Robert Schlesinger has also noted, “American exceptionalism” is not a traditional part of the presidential vocabulary. According to his search of public records, Obama is the only president in 82 years to use the term.

And yet in recent years it has become a commonplace of Republicans and Democrats alike. As the country has become politically shakier, the rhetoric about its greatness has only escalated in an American version of “the lady doth protest too much”. Such descriptors have become the political equivalent of litmus tests: you couldn’t be president or much of anything else without eternally testifying to your unwavering belief in American greatness.

This, of course, is the line that Trump crossed in a curiously unnoticed fashion in this election campaign. He did so by initially upping the rhetorical ante, adding that exclamation point (which even Reagan avoided). Yet in the process of being more patriotically correct than thou, he somehow also waded straight into American decline so bluntly that his own audience could hardly miss it – even if his critics did.

Think of it as an irony, if you wish, but in promoting his own rise the ultimate American narcissist has also openly promoted a version of decline to striking numbers of Americans. For his followers, a major political figure has quit with the defensive BS and started saying it the way it is.

Of course, don’t furl the flag or shut down those offshore accounts or start writing the complete history of American decline quite yet. After all, the US still looms “lone” on an ever more chaotic planet. Its wealth remains stunning, its economic clout something to behold, its tycoons the envy of the world, and its military beyond compare when it comes to how much and how destructive, even if not how successful. Still, make no mistake about it – Trump is a harbinger, however bizarre, of a new American century in which this country will indeed no longer be “the greatest” or, for all but a shrinking crew, exceptional.

Mark your calendars: 2016 is the year the US first went public as a declinist power, and for that you can thank Donald (or rather Donald!) Trump.