The current issue of the Weekly has a response to my Guest Opinion about UA’s libertarian-leaning Center for the Philosophy of Freedom and the high school course it created. It’s written by Michael McKenna, the current director of the “Freedom Center.” I braced myself for a serious tongue lashing. Instead I found some serious quibbles with what I wrote along with information which either confirmed or added to the facts and ideas I presented.
I plan to post about McKenna’s response in depth next week, but now I want to focus on my favorite part of his opinion piece, where he writes about how little respect I have for high school students and teachers.
Safier and those who find [David] Schmidtz’s course so outrageous should consider just how much they infantilize high school students and how little faith they apparently have in the intelligence of high school teachers. Advanced high school students with an interest in enrolling in challenging college courses can be a pretty tough audience. And most high school teachers offering such courses do have minds of their own—even if they do get the chance to be trained by Schmidtz in how to teach the course.
I don’t know if McKenna has taken the time to look into my work history even though I refer to it regularly in my posts. He may or may not know I am a retired public high school teacher who has taught thousands of high school students and worked closely with hundreds of high school teachers. I’m pretty sure most of my colleagues and former students would be surprised to hear that I held them in little regard, especially my students who know I encouraged them to think independently and deeply respected their intelligence and potential.
Reading McKenna’s paragraph above, I have to wonder if he has much respect for the power of education to shape minds and the power of teachers to change students’ perceptions of the world. Why did he choose to be a professor, I wonder. Why “profess” if you don’t believe what you say will have much impact on the people you profess to?
God yes, high school students are a “pretty tough audience” as McKenna says, for a whole host of reasons. But if a teacher can get their attention and tap into their native intelligence and inherent curiosity about the world they’re beginning to make sense of, the person standing in front of a classroom full of receptive students can have a profound influence on them, in the short and the long term. Students’ lives can be changed by a single teacher over the course of a school year—or sometimes in a single “Aha!” moment. When former students returned to visit me or dropped me a note long after they left my class telling me how much impact I had on their lives, I have to say I still cherish those moments, even decades later. Sure, high school students are a “pretty tough audience,” but that doesn’t mean they can’t be swayed by a good teacher using a well-constructed curriculum.
I mostly taught English. My students had lots of teachers teaching them about reading and writing before I had my chance, so they had enough experience with the discipline to be critical of what I was teaching. They could think, “Wait a minute, that’s not what I learned from other teachers.” The same goes for lots of other high school subject matter which adds onto what students learned from other teachers since they were in elementary school. Students have points of reference they can use to critique what their teachers are saying. But the course put together by the “Freedom Center,” Ethics, Economy, and Entrepreneurship, draws its concepts from economics and philosophy which have little precedent in what the students learned in earlier coursework. The students enter the classroom as something close to blank slates in those fields, which gives teachers lots of space to write new ideas into the students’ world view. While teachers can be persuasive in any field, they can be especially persuasive in an area where the students have little background.
Apparently, some adherents of libertarianism don’t agree with McKenna’s view that students are hyper-critical consumers of new ideas, including a libertarian professor at Brown University. Professor John Tomasi taught a freshman seminar where he emphasized, among other thinkers, Friedrich Hayek, an economist and philosopher much admired by libertarians. According to Jane Mayer’s book, Dark Money, which I can’t recommend too highly:
At Brown, which is often thought of as the most liberal of the Ivy schools, Charles Koch’s foundation gave $147,154 in 2009 to the Political Theory Project, a freshman seminar in free-market classics taught by a libertarian, Professor John Tomasi. “After a whole semester of Hayek, it’s hard to shake them off that perspective over the next four years,” Tomasi confided “slyly,” according to a conservative publication.
Give freshmen a little Hayek, Tomasi says in essence, and they’re yours.
If getting a libertarian-heavy course into high schools will have as little effect on students as McKenna suggests, it’s a puzzler why David Schmidtz, one of the creators of the course, put so much time and energy into it. In 2011, five years before the course made it into high schools, Schmidtz talked about his plans to train teachers and write materials for the courses: “We aim not only to produce the teachers, but the materials that are getting taught,” he said. He sought and received a $2.9 million grant from the Templeton Foundation to, as it states on the Foundation’s website, “foster research and produce curricular resources that will empower teachers (at the high school and college levels) to help students come to a deeper understanding of the nature of success and the virtues that are required to secure it in our distinctively American context.” The description goes on to say it hopes “activities funded by the grant will reach some 25,000 high school students—roughly 25 percent of Arizona’s high school student population.” All that time, all that energy, all that money spent trying to educate a “pretty tough audience” in the libertarian view of economics and philosophy? It sounds to me like a few people thought it was very worth their while.
As for high school teachers, they—we—absolutely have minds of our own, as McKenna states. But when teachers have a textbook and a syllabus presented to them covering subject matter which they are only somewhat familiar with, and they have “Freedom Center” profs teaching them how to teach the class—and someone from the Center visiting each class at least once a semester—it’s not just likely, it’s virtually certain that the course they teach will be highly influenced by the materials and instruction they receive.
This article appears in Nov 2-8, 2017.
How about we have the ECON department rather than the PHILOSOPHY dept teach econ??
You were certainly attacked, but it was opportunistic rather than personal. McKenna’s paragraph (that you excerpted) was polemical, notas he claimedobservational. It was a deliberate and deliberately contrived attempt to plant the notion that opposing his agenda was disrespectful to his targets.
It is a common dirty-politics technique, attempted regularly by other right wing pundits and tent preachers to push and promote entirely made-up things, simply for profit. And while it sometimes works, the technique itself is rooted in a disrespect of the listener’s ability to see through it.
It doesn’t really seem to be working this time.
Can you people ever get over yourselves? What egotistical giberish. It”s no wonder that parents are fleeing the failed public school system. It was not intended to become someones fifedom.
“How about we have the ECON department rather than the PHILOSOPHY dept teach econ??”
How about we have the ECON department realize they are teaching philosophy??
Since 1980 Employment in the United States has increased 60% while Europe’s employment has only increased 26%. This is one of the great movements in history. This is why economics exists – to be able to explain differences like this. Why this happened is obvious – explained by Nobel Prize-winning economist Edward Prescott. President Reagan reduced our top tax rate from 70% to 28% so that as our economy grew, its average tax burden did not increase, at least until 1999, and it was able to keep growing.
But, our economists are blinded by their philosophy, they can’t teach that. So, are they teaching economics? Or, philosophy? And, aren’t the Koch brothers trying to get our “education” system to teach economics?
Our education system is so blinded, that economics classes can’t even say that differences exist between us and Europe. Like the fact that our GDP per capita is 78% higher.
The course just needs to be honest in its “philosophy”. 1. Corporations are people too. 2. Poor people are solely responsible for being poor. 3. Greed is good. 4. Only governments that represent wide range of views and interests are evil, corporations are always good. 5. Taxes are paid only by suckers and little people. 6. Multi generational rich families only care about their country.
“Taxes are only paid by suckers and little people”
Exactly. Forbes did a big article on Warren Buffett’s tax payments showing that he hasn’t paid a penny on his $81 billion dollar fortune. Ditto Bezos, Zuckerberg, Gates, Google guys, etc. In other words, the people creating jobs for rich people don’t have to pay taxes.
However, the people creating jobs for poor people, the most important jobs in society, struggle under the following load:
Federal 39.6%, plus Social Security 12.4%, plus Medicare 2.9%, plus state 5%, plus sales 5%, plus regulatory load 20%= 83%
Trump, by reducing this load to 50%, can immediately put 13 million people back to work who are sitting at home discouraged.
The stock market, up $5.2 trillion since election day to $28.6 trillion is by implicitly agreeing with Trump and is forecasting over 5% growth.
The hypocrisy of liberals is that they celebrate the greed of Bezos and Buffett’s greed while beating up on small businesses being crushed by the government.
And just how much tax did Trump pay the last ten years? The world wonders. But he is a job creator. 70 foreign workers will get jobs at Mar A Lago, with hundreds in Palm Beach needing jobs. You know, Americans. That was my mistake.
John Huppenthal, I looked for the Forbes article saying Buffett “hasn’t paid a penny on his $81 billion dollar fortune.” I couldn’t find it. Could you supply us with a link? I’d love to read it. It would be helpful, but not necessary, if you would quote the passages you’re referring to.
Thank you.
One of the key messages here is the intellectual contortions well-credentialed academics will engage in to push fringe ideas that serve the narrow self-interest of their financial masters.
“In his response to Trumps claim, Buffett revealed that he paid $1.85 million in federal income tax on an income of $11.56 million in 2015,” Direct quote from Forbes
40 years of tax paying *1.85 millon = $74 million divided by $81 billion rounds to zero.
And, I can assure you, he hasn’t paid that much.
Buffett, that lying crocodile, continues to advocate for higher taxes on all of his small business competition while he pays nothing.
39.6% Fed + 12.4% Social Security + 2.9% Medicare + 5% state + 5% sales + 20% regulatory load = 85%
A crushing load that has reduced our economic growth from the 4.7% and 3.6% final two years of Reagan to the 1.9% and 1.6% final two years of Obama.
Not a word in our Economics classes about how the U.S. has a GDP per capita 78% greater than Europe, about how our small businesses will pay over a $1 trillion in taxes this year while Europe’s will pay less than $400 billion even though their rates are higher and they come from a population 180 million larger.
The U.S. has wealth because it had Reagan, because Reagan studied classical economics and knew Coolidge’s tax and revenue record.
Thanks John, I found the quote, though it’s in Fortune, not Forbes.
You originally said, Buffett “hasn’t paid a penny on his $81 billion dollar fortune.” Now you say he paid $1.85 million in 2015 and extrapolated his entire tax payments over 40 years, though how you can do that is a mystery to me, and you called the $74 million you say he paid “a rounding error.” To recap, first he paid nothing, then he paid $74 million, which is the same as nothing. I have to say, your ability to admit you were wrong and say you weren’t wrong astounds me.
For anyone who is interested, here’s the passage that quote comes from. The article, “The Biggest Difference Between Trump and Buffett on Taxes” talks about how Buffett thinks the rich should pay taxes and Trump thinks they shouldn’t. Buffett comes off pretty well. I think the author of the piece agrees.
“In his response to Trumps claim, Buffett revealed that he paid $1.85 million in federal income tax on an income of $11.56 million in 2015, an effective rate of 16%. While this rate is based upon Buffetts income before deductions, an effective rate of 16% supports Buffett Rule advocates claims that millionaires are not paying their fair share. Clearly, tax savings were not Buffetts priority: He was only able to write off $3.47 million of his $2.85 billion in charitable contributions that year, since those deductions are limited to 30% of income.
“Buffett does not advocate that high-income individuals voluntarily pay more taxes, but that the law itself be changed to require them to pay more. He has also called for raising the capital gains tax rate and for raising or removing altogether the wage cap on Social Security taxes.”