Airplane reading

I managed to finish two books (and start a third) on the plane to and from Germany. (While I was a pretty voracious reader when I was younger, I've been finding it a bit hard to find the time to read in the last few years. Well, read books that is. I read plenty of stuff online.)

(Note for the FTC: I bought the damn books myself. Now stay out of my f*cking business.)

The first was Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt. While this is a classic text, I'd have to say the title is a bit misleading. It's a series of discussions on different public policies and how they really don't have the effect that people would like them to have. I'd definitely suggest this book for anyone who wants insight into why pretty much all of the economic policies of our current (and most of our past) administrations is, at best, misguided. (I also have Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy on my bookshelf waiting to be read. I'm a bit embarassed to discover (thank you Amazon for telling me this) that I ordered this book on February 28, 2002. Apparently there's a 3rd edition of the book out already. I had no idea there was even a 2nd.)

The second book I finished was The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools by E. D. Hirsch, Jr., the author of Cultural Literacy. Again, another book I'd strongly recommend.

Hirsch is an educational reformer who's been pushing content-based schooling for many years, i.e., let's teach kids history, geography, etc., from an early age rather than simply guiding them in discovering the world on their own. He discusses some of the history of schooling in America, the philosophies of the founders of this country with respect to education, how education has changed in the 20th century and how that change has had an adverse effect on the performance of American students. He discusses the methods used to teach in our current "progressive" educational system and how these methods are actually harmful. (He does so with data, not just anecdotes, which the current educational establishment can't actually provide to support their argument. Apparently, even though they've been working at it for seventy-some years, all the failure has been because nobody has yet been able to correctly implement the necessary methods. Reminds me of the arguments about socialism -- it hasn't worked yet because nobody's gone far enough in implementing socialism yet. As if the hundred million or so dead hasn't been going far enough. But I digress.)

He's a strong believer in equal opportunity, and he believes that giving every child the necessary tools to succeed, or at least to have a chance of succeeding, is an essential part of that opportunity. One of the arguments he makes is that the social equality gap has been growing because of all of these progressive educational methods. Essentially, children in middle-class-and-above families are getting the content they need to do well at home, but children lower-economic-class homes are missing out on that enrichment. Schools aren't providing that content, so the former group manages to do okay while the latter group falls farther behind.

What's interesting is that Hirch is a liberal, but his ideas have mostly been accepted by conservatives (and subsequently earned him scorn from liberals because of the association.) It's an interesting paradox that I'd argue isn't a paradox at all. But maybe I'll save that thought for later.