Classroom Relativism
Brendan Nelson reckons that parents want to see how well their kids are doing relative to their classmates. Lots of parents probably do want that kind of information. But that doesn’t stop it being bullshit. That is, it’s bullshit if you think that education is about learning. So a teacher loses the plot and spends a semester teaching the class nothing at all. (This is not a fictional example). Should the report make it clear that the kids in that class have actually learned nothing? Or should they just try to offer the same relative amounts of reassurance and consternation that get offered to the parents in all other classes? Will parents be relieved to know that their kid was in the top quartile of a class that spent the semester discussing Big Brother (and not in a good way)? Take the opposite example. A teacher is able to take a class to whole new levels of achievement. She motivates, she engages, she drives high expectations and gets outstanding results from every student. Then at the end of the terms she’s called upon to determine which quarter of her students deserve to be identified as the losers of the class. Way to encourage excellence, Brendan, create a system where the reporting has nothing to do with actual levels of learning and achievement.
A tricky aspect is the one that I mentioned first. Lots of parents probably want to know this kind of stuff. They want bragging rights over the other parents. They want to see where their kid fits in the pecking order. Question is, should education policy privilege parental ego over student learning? Should it be about the best interests of students, or should it be about appealing to the lesser instincts of competitive parenting? It’s impossible to disparage parents’ wishes like these without seeming to claim to know better than they do what’s best for their children. I’m certainly not making that claim in any general sense, but I think most thoughtful parents would acknowledge the potential for conflict between their own urge for validation and reassurance as parents, and the actual best interests of their children. School reporting is a really obvious area where that sort of conflict can occur.
In the sort of classroom I’d like to have in the sort of school that I’d like to work in, school reports would be a simple formality. If a parent needs to wait until the end of term to see their child’s achievements aggregated into some meaningless letter grade before they have an idea of how the child is going, then surely something’s seriously wrong. Surely with the sort of communication tools we have available today, parents can stay in touch with every step of their child’s progress through school. They can check out school work, see comments from the teacher, and work together with the teacher and the student to get the best possible results. I’ve spoken to some school teachers who seem to resent the idea of this kind of parental involvement. They tend to see parents as an imposition on their time, an impediment to getting their job done. Of course, it doesn’t help that the odd parent is just nuts, or is a serial pest. But it seems to me that any teacher who is serious about getting the best out of his or her students must look at ways to have parents not just thoroughly informed, but thoroughly involved. A parent who has been able to share in the joys and rewards of seeing a child learn and develop and achieve is likely to share in the cynicism that many teachers feel when presented with the idea of reducing those achievements to a uniform set of class rankings. A parent who takes a hands-off approach to their child’s learning, and is prepared to delegate that task to the school, should also be prepared to defer to the judgment of professional educators when it comes to the kind of reporting mechanism which will best serve the students’ needs.
Us, Terrorism, Intimidation, Grandstanding
Via Crooked Timber, I came across this guest post by James Doyle on normblog.
On Newsnight on Tuesday night, Faisal Bodi said that Tony Blair, in his capacity as participant in the invasion and occupation of Iraq, was ‘directly responsible’ for the London bombings. On any plausible conception of what direct responsibility amounts to, of course, this cannot possibly be true; nor could the much more common claim that he is primarily responsible (implicit in the title of John Pilger’s recent New Statesman article, ‘Blair’s Bombs’). That could only be true if Blair was a responsible agent in a way that the bombers were not: the view seems to be that if one is provoked into doing something awful, the primary responsibility lies with the provoker. Blair is responsible for the bombings, they say, because if he hadn’t gone along with the Iraq war the bombings wouldn’t have happened.
It caught my eye, not only because human agency is an interest of mine (tautology?), but also because there was a similar, rather heated discussion along similar lines over the student teacher table in the staff room at school last week. I’ll try to summarise the content of the arguments:
She: Doesn’t it just _make sense_ that if someone is blowing themselves up, you should ask _why_ they’re blowing themselves up, and whether there’s anything you could do to address that cause? We know that these people are committing these attacks because of the war in Iraq, so surely the best way to stop the bombings is to admit that we were wrong to invade and take our troops out as quickly as possible.
He: That’s ridiculous. These bombers were British. They existed in a democractic society, where they have plenty of opportunities to express peaceful objections to the war in Iraq. We shouldn’t be tricked into blaming ourselves for the actions of criminals, those people who decided that, rather than write letters to the editor or run for Parliament, they’d express their objections by killing scores of innocent people. How can anybody defend that?
She: I’m not defending it, I’m just saying — isn’t it stupid not to take the opportunity to remove one of the things that contributes to these horrible things happening? Plenty of us were saying before we ever went to Iraq that the invasion would make terrorist attacks more likely. Sure enough, we invaded, and sure enough here we are with a spate of terrorist attacks which seem to be explicitly linked to the war. How stupid would we be not to get the message?
He: So what you’re saying is that the terrorists are right. You’re listening to their message. You’re buying into their rhetoric, letting them believe that violence gets results.
Believe it or not, I wasn’t one of the ones arguing. Well, maybe I was a bit. But mostly I was trying to reconcile the fact that I thought they were both right, and both wrong. They were both right in identifying probable causes and effects; they were both right to draw moral conclusions. But neither, I think, was engaging with the moral dilemma that these particular terrorist attacks have thrown up.
Before I say why, I should probably point out that I will be assuming that these bombings were, in fact, motivated at least in part by a desire on the part of the bombers to punish the Blair government for its involvement in the war. I’m sure that there are those (our Prime Minister apparently being one) who will go to their grave believing that the attacks were the result of crazed criminals and the war had nothing to do with it. That’s a belief that I’d find hard to sustain. There might be a whole lot of reasons why those guys took those rucksacks down into the tube. Certainly they were crazy, and certainly they were criminals. We might be tempted to leave it at that for fear that looking for any other cause might be seen to mitigate the criminality, or the craziness. If we think honestly, though, I think we have to stick the war in there as one of the causes, and that Britains involvement was probably a _sine qua non_ of the London tragedies. I think to be able to come to grips with the moral implications of the bombings, one has to be able to accept that fact unflinchingly, but without imagining that it was the _only_ such pre-requisite. If we’re going to say that the bombings wouldn’t have happened without the war, we can’t say that without also acknowledging that the bombings wouldn’t have happened without the flourishing of an extremist religious cult of which the men were members. They also wouldn’t have happened without the criminal involvement of certain other individuals (bomb-makers etc). Perhaps there were particular clerics without whose hateful preaching those 50-odd people would still be alive. Acknowledging any one of these as causes, even as pre-requisites, does nothing to lessen the importance of any of the other causes.
Another obvious but important point is that we need to distinguish between a) an event or action which was essential to the bombings’ taking place; and b) an event or action which made the bombings take place. If one is to make a cake, one has to have flour and sugar, but having flour and sugar in the pantry in no way compels one to make a cake. If we’re going to assert that absent the Iraq war, the bombers wouldn’t have bombed, then we also need to point out that there are presumably plenty of people who feel the same way about the Iraq war as the bombers did, but who _do not_ resort to violence in order to make their objections known. There is nothing about the Iraq invasion that _compelled_ those terrorists to behave as they did. It would be foolish to assert that they had no choice.
So maybe the mistake that Faisal Bodi is making is to confuse causes and preconditions. On the one hand, we have all sorts of events, beginning with the birth of the bombers, which led to the attacks becoming possible. Obviously, it would be dumb to blame the bombers’ parents for not having the good sense to abort those fateful pregnancies. It would be much easier to argue, though, that the radical preacher might have been aware that he was creating a precondition for terrible things to happen. It also seems easy to argue, particularly since there were plenty of people telling him at the time, that Tony Blair should have been aware that his decision to invade Iraq might have also created a precondition for particular nasty events to occur on home soil.
Note, by the way, that I don’t have to argue that Iraq is the root of all terrorism. John Howard was right when he pointed out that there were terrorist attacks before there was an invasion, but he was missing the point. Yes, the terrorist inciters already had set of perceived Western injustices (US bases in Saudi Arabia in the case of 9/11; Australian troops in East Timor in the case of Bali) which they weaved into their brainwashing of suicide bombers. No, the injustice doesn’t even have to be real for the zealots to get worked up about it. But when one hands them a very real Western njustice on a plate, one would be stupid to think that one wasn’t adding a weapon to the arsenal of the cult. In the case of the London bombings (and perhaps Madrid), it seems as if that was just the rhetorical weapon that the hate-merchants needed.
Does this mean that we should consider a withdrawal from Iraq as part of our fight against terrorism? If we can remove a central precondition for a terrorist attack, then shouldn’t we?
My answer is that this is much easier to argue in the case of a war which already seems unjust. To test whether it is valid to take terrorist threats into account when we determine our foreign policy, we should assume that the terrorists are going to attack us for a policy which we think is right. Should we, for instance, see the Bali bombing as a reason to suppose that the Australian military presence in East Timor was wrong? It seems a sound enough analogy. There’s good reason to suppose that the Bali bombers had that particular issue in mind when they carried out their murders. So when we were urging John Howard to send in the troops, should we perhaps have been wondering how our actions would be construed in the eyes of some of the region’s resident nasties? It seems completely wrong to avoid taking some action (helping out another East Timor, for example) just because some religious nutcase might twist it into an excuse for killing civilians.
There’s a flip-side to that commitment, of course. The opposition of murderous zealots is not a good reason to opt out of good actions. But it would also be wrong if we were to avoid a good action for fear that a zealot might agree with it. If the Iraq war was right in the same way that East Timor was right, then it would be appropriate for us to completely ignore all intimidation and stick to our guns. If it is right for us to stay there, then we should do so regardless of terrorist intimidation. But if it’s right for us to leave, then we shouldn’t stay just to avoid being seen to give in to the terrorists. The right thing is the right thing regardless of what the terrorists think about. If we disgregard their anger when they disagree with our decision, we also have to disregard their celebrations when they agree. If we keep doing bad things just to spite terrorists, then it means that they have, in a twisted way, dictated our moral agenda, and that’s not cool. If it’s wrong for us to be in Iraq, then we should get out, regardless of what any terrorists think. If it’s right, then we should stay, full stop. It would be wrong for us to avoid withdrawing for fear of what the terrorists might think, just as it would have been wrong for us to stay out of East Timor based on what the terrorists might think.
It’s an awkward fact that some of the things that the terrorists are supposedly looking for (withdrawal from Iraq, from Saudi Arabia, from the West Bank and Gaza) might well be the right thing to do. I’m not going to enter those arguments here (although for the record, No, Yes and Yes seem like the right answers to me). What I will say is that discussions about the rightness or wrongness of these foreign policy positions has nothing to do with terrorism. It would be wrong for us to be intimidated into going or staying. It would be wrong for us to go or stay simply to prove that we’re _not_ intimidated. If we do what we do because it’s right, not because of cowering or grandstanding, then we can leave the spies and the police to think about terrorism. It is nothing but an added bonus that a genuinely just foreign policy might well nip a certain number of terrorist attacks in the bud.