Ed,

If learning the right lessons about history and political participation is so important, doesn’t that make it more important, not less, to keep the government out of it, given that the results of bad instruction are not just stupid, but in fact dangerous?

The worst that happens with government-taught chemistry classes is that students will learn something false from an incompetant teacher and will be disabused of the notion if they ever do the extra coursework required to do anything serious in the field of chemistry. But a government-taught civics class is an invitation for an admittedly duplicitous and power-hungry State to directly propagandize a captive audience. Not all teachers will allow it to be like that, but given the direct power that governments have over educational curricula and approved materials (I’ve read some currently popular civics textbooks, and it’s not pretty), and given the incentive that most teachers have to go along with the approved curriculum most of the time, I can’t say this sounds like a promising set-up.

As for the test, the non-meaningless questions include some where the expected answers are philosophically indefensible (cf. “Where does freedom of speech come from?” Expected answer: “The Bill of Rights;” apparently all naturalized citizens are now expected to be legal positivists) or historically false (“Which President freed the slaves?” Expected answer: “Abraham Lincoln”). These sorts of myths and platitudes don’t make me think that attempts to reform the test and similar exercises, by the government that crafted this rubbish in the first place, are going to turn out as anything other than mindless propaganda.

Ian: “For this authorization to be effective requires only majority vote. Hence; democracy is the tyranny of the majority.”

So, again, what you’re saying is indeed that other people (when enough of them get together) “authorize” the government to coerce me.

The majority of people “authorize” the government to do all kinds of things not enumerated in the Constitution. An overwhelming majority of people approve, for example, of the Social Security, Medicaid, the Drug War, etc. So how is it, on your theory, that the government has the authority to enforce the terms of the Constitution but not to enforce anything else that 50%+1 of the population happens to favor? If that’s good enough to ordain and establish the Constitution, it’s good enough to ordain and establish any extra-Constitutional program you like. If majority vote legitimately authorizes the Constitution, it can also legitimately overturn absolutely any limits the Constitution tries to impose.

“Why did we have a civics curriculum in 1950 and no longer have one now?”

Because the governing party at the time felt that it served domestic propaganda interests during the Cold War.

Ed, if you think that politicians are willing to deliberately keep students ignorant in order to further their political aims, why in the world would you trust the government schools to teach people about history, the political system, the rights they should expect, how to exercise them, etc.? Do you go to used-car salesmen for consumer product testing, too?

P.S.: I notice that the sample citizenship test expects you to name the “Which President freed the slaves” (!) and that more than 10% of your grade on the test depends on your ability to recite meaningless trivia about theo-political rituals such as the flag (the first 7 questions of the test!) and the national anthem. I’m a little surprised to find no questions about the national bird, or the current state tree in your state of residence.

Brian,

But the ban is an invasion of religious liberty, and one which was pushed by western politicians deliberately targeting Muslims, n’est-ce pas?

Jenn,

Interesting post, and interesting point. I was struck, though, by this phrase: “Ultimately, I think what researchers need to do is not fall into the trap of removing the science from the presentation and to remember that our goal is not to schmooze but to act as ambassadors from the scientific community to the public.”

Maybe the self-conception of popular science lecturers as “ambassadors” to an alien and benighted people is a central part of the problem. Scientists don’t think of themselves as “ambassadors” to their colleagues when giving a presentation or as “ambassadors” to their students when giving a lecture (even though in the case of the students they are working over material for people who are presumed to be more ignorant of the discipline than they are). The notion puts a lot of distance between the scientist and the “general public” and I wonder how much that distance plays a role in the temptation to present yourself as an oracle of Scientific Knowledge, rather than as someone explaining the research and methods behind the interesting conclusions you’ve been able to draw from them. Maybe scientists need to think of themselves less as ambassadors to the public, and think of what they’re doing as different only in degree from what they do when they discuss research with their colleagues or their students.

Wild Pegasus: “#3 is going to cause problems with federal highways. It’s going to increase prices on a lot of basic goods.”

Since #3 entails the elimination of federal and state gas taxes, you need to balance whatever effects you think the tolls will have with the effects of correspondingly lower prices at the pump. In any case, though, “raising prices on basic goods” isn’t an argument against ending subsidies. If you can’t make the basic case that subsidies are economically destructive then no platform that’s libertarian at all is going to work well for you.

Wild Pegasus: “#5 is a sure-fire loser. People will rightly claim that the loss of patents and drug protections will lead to less research and slower advancement in healthcare. People want free healthcare, not bad healthcare.”

Then you point out that #5 will decimate drug prices (which is rather a hot issue these days), and you contest the idiot notion that gigantic pharmaceutial companies are the only or even the best way to do drug research.

Wild Pegasus: “#7 will lead to screams for tort reform. Juries are, generally, grossly incompetent at complex litigation. Finding norms will be difficult without the guidance of legislatures. And you’re right back to regulation.”

I don’t understand this argument. Are you claiming that legislatures or appointed bureaucrats are better at fairly settling complicated cases than juries? Using ex ante regulation rather than case-by-case judgment, no less? Or are you just claiming that people blame juries while not holding regulators to the same standards?

If it’s the former, why are you claiming that? If it’s the latter, why isn’t the solution to educate people about the failings of bureaucrats and legislators?

Kevin,

How about something on the prison-industrial complex? Or, for that matter, the good old military-industrial complex?

Also, broadly speaking, do you think that the sort of alliance you envision should only focus on undermining state capitalism, or do you think that you’re just fleshing out the point on state capitalism that would be part of a broader set of principles for action? After all, I can think of a number of other common points (abortion on demand, abolishing the death penalty, decriminalizing prostitution, a principled anti-war/anti-imperial stance, etc.) that would seem like obvious candidates for a shared platform between left Libertarians, anti-statist Greens, and anti-statist Democrats.

“If the US had not run off to the Iraq quagmire, and had stayed the course in Afghanistan and properly rebuilt it, we could have completely uprooted al-Qaeda and the Taliban, put an end to the poppy trade, and created an economic efflorescence that linked major Asian powers in the kind of trade networks that discourage war and instability.”

Why is forcing Afghan farmers not to grow opium poppies a necessary or even worthwhile policy goal for the occupying forces to pursue?

Is there some kind of requirement that all countries everywhere have to go along with the drug regulation policies popular in Washington, D.C.? Even if it involves arresting farmers and destroying their most lucrative cash crop?

LoneSnark,

I’m not defending Mugabe’s policies. I’m saying that the white planters — who are overwhelmingly either robbers, the heirs of robbers, or people who knowingly bought land from robbers — aren’t in any moral position to complain about it.

LoneSnark: “Because the statute of limitations on grand theft has expired. Or, if you prefer, because the quick-deed duration of five years has expired without contestation.”

What statute of limitations? What duration? Are these elements of positive law that the otherwise rightful owners of Zimbabwean land agreed to abide by, or are they numbers that you’ve made up for them? If the previous rightful owners can be identified then they have as good a right now as they did then unless they’ve agreed to quitclaim their interest in it. If they cannot, then that only makes the farmland unowned land available for homesteading. It does not make it the respectable personal fief of the robber.

LoneSnark: “Either-way, to make a system of land management work you have to have a way of proclaiming ownership.”

Here’s one: the land to the people who till it.

Feudal land-claims granted by the Rhodesian government do not confer any legitimate ownership, so the land either rightly belongs to the people who owned it before it was stolen (if they can be identified) or to the people who have homesteaded it by cultivating it with their labor. On large plantations with many farmworkers, that means that the greater part of the land rightly belongs to the farmworkers, not to the planter. The planter has at the most a claim to the share of the land that he personally occupies or has cultivated.

Dain: Rad, I agree with the French head scarf ban comment, but in the Sudan isn’t the aggresion going in the direction of Christians and ‘animists’?

You’re probably thinking of Khartoum’s war on southern Sudan, which was supposedly settled by a brokered peace treaty in January 2005 (after two years of negotiations). How stable that is remains to be seen, but the human rights catastrophe that currently has Sudan in the news is the ongoing genocide against farming peoples in Darfur, in western Sudan. The victims (as well as the perpetrators) in Darfur are overwhelmingly Muslim; the conflict is divided along ethnic and socioeconomic lines rather than religious or geographical ones as it was before.

I think bin Laden’s claims that this is all the result of divide-and-conquer politics by the “Crusader-Zionist” axis are silly. The imperialists in Khartoum and their hired killers in Darfur have plenty of their own reasons and interests at stake in slaughtering Muslim farmers. But setting the debate over the explanation to one side, it is empirically true that the victims in Sudan are, indeed, Muslims, and that bin Laden is correct to claim that the genocide involves professed Muslims slaughtering fellow Muslims.

“He sees France’s banning of headscarves in school as part of the Western war on Islam.”

Well, isn’t it?

“He sees Muslims as victims in Sudan.”

Well, aren’t they?