Common Core

It has been around twenty years since Niel Postman declared that Economic Utility was, “the preeminent reason for schooling” (Postman 27).  However time has not changed the goal of the American education system, though it has impacted some of its mechanisms.  In the early twenty first century the United States have become increasingly dominated by the new idea of standardized testing.  Though to be totally clear the SAT and AP classes have been around for quite some time, the sheer number of tests has reached a peak in the twenty first century.  The cause behind the swing towards standardized testing was spurred on by legislation commonly referred to as Common Core.  The legislation and resulting tests were well intended, with members of both parties hoping to increase the standards for achievement for all states in the United States by making sure that a student in the Bronx, and one from Topeka, Kansas would learn the same exact things.

The attempts to regulate a national standard for learning is, however, reliant on a system to compare students nationwide, the chosen, and likely only reasonable method, was standardized testing.  In states that take part in common core, or those that wish to have statewide tests, standardized testing is commonplace, with multiple standardized tests per class per year.  The emphasis on tests as well as the monetary importance placed on them has resulted in the phenomena of teaching to the test.  This would be fine as long as the standardized tests could test everything that was taught in a subject, however that is sadly not currently the state.   As a result some teachers and schools focus only on subject matter in the tests themselves, excluding the material that is a part of the required learning but not tested at the end of the year.  This is in many cases not too harmful, but in some subjects that require an intimate knowledge of the previous class in order to achieve in the next one, it results in students being woefully under prepared, effectively harming their ability to complete future courses, therefore serving to create more disparities in education rather than fix them.

Postman, Niel. The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School. New York, Random House, 1996. Print.

Plato and Postman, a unified view on modern America

            Plato was not only a philosopher but a political theorist as well.  His ideal government was one where “the state should be governed by philosophers” (Gaarder 91).  His theory was presented in ancient Greece, since then there have been many governments classified by the name republic.  The most notable republic may well be the United States, founded by well-educated philosophers, including Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.  Since then however there appears to have been a shift in how American government functions.  Niel Postman explains that “the fundamental metaphor for political discourse is a television commercial” (Postman 126).  This description of the modern American republic is in sharp contrast to Plato’s intended style of government. 

            These differences between modern American attitudes and the thoughts of Plato are also distinct in our style of news.  Plato was one of the most notable students of Socrates, and was heavily influenced by Socrates practice of asking questions and feigning ignorance.  In contrast the American approach is largely to never ask questions, and be ignorant.  This approach is personified in television news, or perhaps more accurately television newsertainment.  This newsertainment breaks the meaningful dialogue people can pursue as Postman explains,

“There is no murder so brutal, no earthquake so devastating, no political blunder so costly—for that matter, no ball score so tantalizing or weather report so threatening—that it cannot be erased from our minds by a newscaster saying, ‘Now . . . this’” (Postman 99).

Effectively when a newscaster says “now this” the flow of information is ended, and any thought, question or view that a listener might have begun to formulate is likely terminated.  The now this phenomena has also killed another aspect of the Socratic system of dialogue using rational thought.  The death to rational thought comes about in response to the shorter news segments, that give only partial information with little context, thus making it impossible to truly make any rational conclusions.  In short if Plato could see today he may very well gravitate towards a similar view as that posited by Niel Postman.

Works Cited

Postman, Niel. Amusing ourselves to death Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New                       York: Penguin Group, 2006. Print.

Gaarder, Jostein. Sophie’s World. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. Print

To The Chagrin of Chomsky

            In a mix of lofty idealism and nonsensical conclusions, Noam Chomsky attempts to project his view of 9/11, and the actions thereafter.  Professor Chomsky posits three examples of American exceptionalism.  First, Chomsky equates the terrorist attacks carried out against the US as akin to American moves to stabilize Chile by aiding the Pinochet regime.  Second, the he argues for the trial of Osama Bin Laden, and that there should have been extra efforts to take him alive.  Last, Chomsky makes claim that the United States in taking military action in Afghanistan had violated international law.  In each case however there are glaring oversights that are to be analyzed.

            The first 9/11 as Chomsky describes was the United States helping Pinochet seize power.  However there are key differences in the “terror attack” the US committed, and the terror attack against it.  The death toll of the 9/11 attacks was upwards of 2,950 civilians, not government officials, counter coup leaders or soldiers, but unarmed civilians.  Instead Pinochet’s coup was the select imprisonment and removal of Marxist leaders, and allowing the military to take power.  The government Pinochet replaced was by no means lawful.  As Niall Ferguson, professor of history at Harvard explains, “prior to the coup d’état, the Chilean Supreme Court denounced the Allende government’s disruption of the legality of the nation in its failure to uphold judicial decisions.”  When the United States sent aid to Pinochet, they were aiding an economically liberal, and legally minded faction in a nation undergoing a rapid shift to a communist regime.  At this point it becomes paramount to explain the core differences in the theories of idealism and realism.  Idealism is the theory that things can become the ideal, and that there can be paths with no downsides in both foreign policy and domestic policy.  In contrast to the impossible to achieve idealism there is realism, which takes into account all parts of a situation and attempts to weigh the harms and benefits to find a net beneficial and achievable course of action.  The view that Pinochet was holistically a harmful character to the Chilean nation is an example of the lofty idealism so prevalent in Chomsky’s essay.  In many ways Pinochet saved Chile, he prompted a period of rapid economic growth, stabilized the country (through admittedly less than peaceful means), and peacefully handed power back to a democracy, all while maintaining massive approval from the population he governed.  In no way was this regime change akin to the US committing the mass murder of civilians for no reason but shear hatred of their ideas and people, which was the motivation of Al-Qaeda in their 9/11.

            Second, Chomsky presents that the United States should have pursued a trial in court rather, and made extra effort to capture Osama Bin Laden.  Chomsky makes the claim that if only the US had tried to extradite Bin Laden from Afghanistan it would have worked.  Two problems emerge with the claim, first the US had already attempted to extradite Bin Laden and failed, second there were issues in geography.  First as the United Nations notes in resolution 1333,

“Noting the indictment of Usama bin Laden and his associates by the United States of America for, inter alia, the 7 August 1998 bombings of the United States embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and for conspiring to kill American nationals outside the United States, and noting also the request of the United States of America to the Taliban to surrender them for trial.” 

So in fact it was quite clear how the Taliban was likely to respond, they were not likely to extradite post 9/11 if they weren’t before.  Next, Chomsky seems to forget the infrastructure, politics, and geography of Afghanistan.  The infrastructure of Afghanistan is to say the least poor, and around 2001 even worse.  The politics of Afghanistan were by no means unified, individual factions of ethnic, religious, and tribal origins controlled large portions of the country.  As a result even if the Taliban decided to try and extradite Bin Laden, he could likely have gone to a place out of their effective control.  Lastly the Afghan nation is crisscrossed by a number of mountain ranges, allowing for Bin Laden to hide effectively against the Taliban if they searched for him.  Moreover though the Nurnberg trials set a legal precedent for armed, uniformed combatants.  In other words the legal precedent of giving a terrorist the right to trial did not exist from the post WWII trial.  In practical matters as well, an explicit order to kill Bin Laden was more effective, as keeping him for trial would only further motivate radicals and fanatics endangering Americans at home and abroad.

            Finally Chomsky makes claim that the United States had violated international law by taking military action in Afghanistan.  It is important to note that international law is derived from the United Nations, and in the UN charter article 51 any state is given the right to self-defense, clarifying that, “Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations.” By even the most relaxed standards the killing of 2977 persons is an attack.  The role of the Taliban in protecting and supporting the leadership of the group that committed the attack made them guilty by association.  Therefore, the US under the most explicit of international treaties, the UN charter, the United States had the right to self-defense.  However the United States actions were even further supported by international law as evidenced by UN resolution 1373 where the security council, “Reaffirming the need to combat by all means, in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations, threats to international peace and security caused by terrorist acts,” within that statement the US was granted the right to combat threats to peace and security, which were constituted by terrorist groups including the Taliban.  Once again it would appear that Chomsky’s ideals fail to equate to the reality of international law, since within both the UN charter and later resolutions countries were given the blessing of the UN to protect their security.  So instead of breaking international law, the US actions were well within the bounds of UN law.  Another important failing of Chomsky is to recognize the fact that the United States was not invading but backing Hamid Karzai and his forces.  Hamid Karzai was the acting leader of Afghanistan post 2001, and as such his approval of American troops to continue eliminating terrorist threats in Afghanistan served to finally remove any legal question about the American intervention on behalf of the Northern alliance.

            To conclude, Chomsky’s theory that America omitted itself from following the rules was far from true, his historical example of Pinochet, overblown, his theory of international law, misguided, his view on legal precedent, faulty. 


Works Cited
Brown, Lewis. Guilty economics? Friedman, Pinochet and Chile. Event Panel. City of London: Center for Policy Studies, 2012. Document

United Nations, Charter of the United Nations, 24 October 1945. Web. 9 September 2015.

Security Council resolution 1333, S/RES/1333 (19 December 2000)