Now you can go to MIT, too, kind of
Via the German news weekly Die Zeit, I came across "MITOpenCourseWare, "a free, open, publication of MIT Course Materials". The web site explains:

MIT OpenCourseWare is:
A publication of MIT course materials
Free and open to the world.

MIT OpenCourseWare is not:
A degree- or certificate-granting program.
An MIT education.

MIT OpenCourseWare is ... pretty cool. The OpenCourseWare folks at MIT have had to get voluntary cooperation from professors. Die Zeit reporter Christoph Droesser writes:

The data collectors face a dilemma: they have a collection targets, but no way of pressuring the professors to release their treasures. Because the professors cooperate voluntarily. That's why the OCW liaisons boot up [antiquated professors'] laptops, work their way through cartons full of unsorted materials, or copy lecture materials. "It's our motto that we ask the professors to do as little as possible," says [OCW faculty liaison] Abe Dane in describing his delicate task. And thus the materials are of quite varied value. In each case, and the project tries to make this clear to the professors again and again, what is made available is raw material that the professors could not use to earn money elsewhere. They're not losing any business -- and if they want, they can turn the scripts into a course book. The copyright always stays with the author.

Among the courses:

Congress and the American Political System

America in Depression and War

Cognitive and Behavioral Genetics

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

Magic, Witchcraft, and the Spirit World (!)

Shakespeare, Film and Media

Hands-on Astronomy: Observing Stars and Planets

While I'm at it, let me also point out that several blogging professors make very interesting syllabi or even books available, including

Brett Marston: Constitutional Law, Civil Liberties, and more.

Mark Kleimann: Against Excess: Drug Policy for Results

Tim Burke: The Social History of Consumption

... and doubtless many others. But my better half says "Come on, wrap it up. Post it -- forget about it," and I hear and obey.

posted by Thomas Nephew at 5:08:00 PM -- |    

 

Happy July 4th
As it happens, I've been reading up on the Revolutionary War a bit. I've mentioned before that my little girl, Maddie, has developed a real interest in it because of a PBS cartoon series about it, "Liberty's Kids," so that "loyalist," "patriot," "Yorktown," and "Mad Anthony Wayne" are household words here these days. Admittedly, it's mainly just fun to say "Mad Anthony Wayne" if you're a five year old or enjoy cracking one up.

I bought a couple of books at Mount Vernon, where George Washington's home has been preserved. It's definitely worth a visit if you're in the area, the people do a nice job of involving human touches in the surroundings: high school students dressed for the part performed some of the music and dances of the era, others drilled interested kids in marching in formation or presenting arms, 18th century style. The view over the Potomac, when you get to that side of the mansion, is quietly spectacular.

When we took Maddie there, she was very interested in everything: ran from one building to the next, saw what a horse drawn carriage and spinning wheel looked like outside of a fairy tale book, pondered a smokehouse and the lack of refrigerators. She also asked a tour guide, "Was it nice of George Washington to have slaves?" The man gave a pretty good answer: no, not really, but he did free them in his will, and was the only President to do so of the nine Presidents who owned slaves -- Thomas Jefferson and James Madison included.

Anyway, the books are "Washington: The Indispensable Man," by James Flexner, and "Patriots: The Men Who Started the American Revolution," by A. J. Langguth. Both are engagingly written books, historical page-turners if you're so inclined. I highly recommend both.

Flexner's 1969 book is apparently an abridgement of a four volume history he'd written earlier. I think he telegraphs his point of view fairly in the title, and by the time I was halfway through the book, I was on board: I've somehow unfairly overlooked Washington. His doggedness, decency, and courage really were indispensable; we owe him a great debt. And as much for what he didn't do as what he did: he didn't run for a third term, he didn't mishandle the incipient Continental Army mutiny in 1783, he didn't summarily crush the "Whiskey Rebellion."

Langguth is a journalism professor at USC, which may explain why "Patriots" is a snappier history book than average. Chapter 1 is "Otis: 1761-1762, Chapter 2 is "Adams: 1762-63," and so on, each chapter isolating one person or event and building on the ones before it. The one weakness might be that it's a bit skimpy about events south of Virginia.

One thing stands out in this narrative that had not been as clear to me as it should have: if Washington was indispensable to winning and protecting the Revolution, then Samuel Adams was just as indispensable to making the Revolution happen in the first place. I plan to spend a few Washingtons on a few Sam Adams ("Brewer. Patriot." I just love that slogan) and drinking to both of their memories before the day is out.

Both books reminded me again what an unbelievably close thing the American Revolution was. The victories at Trenton, Saratoga, and Yorktown loom all the larger and sweeter for the unremitting series of setbacks that seemed to bedevil rebels facing the superpower of the day.

Up next: The Radicalism of the American Revolution, by Gordon Wood.

Wiggly tooth
Another historic occasion: Maddie announced with great pride on Thursday evening that she has her first wiggly tooth. She is officially a Big Girl Now. I'm unprepared. It seems to me like it was approximately a week ago that we were giving her baths in a little plastic tub and changing her diapers. Now it's Tooth Fairy time, she dances with uncanny grace, challenges tour guides sweetly, speaks in extended simulated French, loves history and asks great questions about it, seems to remember every detail of every book she's ever had read to her, and is clearly the best child on the planet. And she's still glad to see me when I come home. Yay.

In case it's not obvious, I love her to pieces. posted by Thomas Nephew at 2:31:00 AM -- |    

 

Apologies to readers
Work demands and a coughing jag that started late last week and continued through Sunday combined to keep me off blogging -- mine, anyone's. (What's been going on?) I also felt a bit obligated to make the religious school voucher post one of the next "two or three," which didn't help me write it the way I thought it would.

No question is a rhetorical question on the web
During my flurry of posts about Locke v. Davey, I noted Richard Garnett's National Review article about the case, contrasted his position about that case with Aziz Poonawalla's position* about requiring a Florida Muslim to doff her veil for a driver's license photo, and mused that

It would be interesting to get Professor Garnett's views on the Florida situation.

A student of Dr. Garnett's (he teaches law at Notre Dame) alerted him to my post, and I got a pretty nice e-mail from him, given my somewhat cursory treatment of his views. As to Florida, Garnett wrote,

On the Florida thing: I support state RFRA ["Religious Freedom Restoration Act"** -- ed.] type laws that create a presumption of religious accommodation, and that require the government to demonstrate a compelling interest before religious beliefs are burdened. I have to admit, though, I have not followed this case closely enough to have an informed view about whether this standard was met.

We corresponded about Locke v. Davey and the First Amendment, too, of course, but I don't have one of those "e-mails assumed for publication" signs up (yet), so I don't feel free to write about that too much. (I gave him a heads-up about eventually mentioning his views on the Florida case.) I do feel free to say it was a civil, constructive, and educational (for me) correspondence.


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* ... at the time, as I understood it.
** Here is one link I found about RFRAs, at a site called "religioustolerance.org." posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:09:00 AM -- |    

 

School Vouchers and the Myth of Neutrality: a response
A while back I got into a polite dispute with Eve Tushnet. The subject could be conveniently titled "Vouchers for madrassas? Just don't make me pay for them," and so I did. Eve Tushnet wrote what she said was an answer to that (and possibly a couple of other posts about the Locke v. Davey case), which she gave the title "School Vouchers and the Myth of Neutrality."

Eve took my argument to be that "I shouldn't have to pay for children to be taught views I disagree with." Eve argued that such arguments undermine regular public schooling more than they do voucher-funded religious schooling. The syllogism was that (1) all schools teach values, (2) public schools promulgate a variety of values offensive to some taxpayer or other (3) ergo, public schools will tick off as wide or wider a group of taxpayers as a given religious school would. Eve writes:

In public schools, taxpayer money directly funds the promotion of various moral beliefs, several of which (from gay clubs to abstinence-only education) offend many of the taxpayers. With vouchers, on the other hand, what we're directly funding is parental choice in education. The government need not implicitly endorse any belief other than the basic beliefs that parents are generally the best directors of their children's education and that taxpayer funds should be used to ensure that all children are educated. Via public schools, the government implicitly endorses a host of moral claims; via vouchers, only these two.

Neat. A little misleading, I think, but neat.

As I've stated before, I have no deep problem with vouchers per se. It's publicly funded vouchers for religious schools that I have a quarrel with, especially when I'm told that to accept any vouchers at all is to be required to accept religious school vouchers (a view held by Volokh, for example). Thus, what's misleading as an argument about religious school vouchers in the above is that it never mentions religion. So allow me to pencil in a couple of revisions to correct that oversight:

[...] Via public schools, the government implictly endorses a host of moral claims, but none grounded in divine authority, promulgated by a religious establishment, or immune to secular oversight; via vouchers for religious schools, it not only fails to avoid these errors, but embraces them.

My argument was that I shouldn't have to pay for children to be taught any religion, whether I agree with that religion or not - nor should any citizen. That is, it's not any particular views I disagreed with, it was the provenance of those views, whether I disagreed with them or not.

What's wrong with religious schools getting a cut of my taxpayer dollar is that they are utterly unaccountable to the public for the views they teach. With public schools, there are school boards and judges to bring the school's actions into line with the values of the community and/or to uphold the freedoms and rights of its pupils. That sounds like squaring the circle, and it is. But with religious schools, such debates would often never get off the ground: a religious school will be able to hide behind "freedom of worship" for well nigh any decision it cares to make.

Religious school vouchers are merely one instance of what I will call erosion of the "accountable public space": as a taxpayer and citizen, I see more of my government being "outsourced" in one way or another to institutions with guidelines that are unaccountable to me, even when those guidelines are sometimes OK with me. (But of course most annoyingly when they are not.) It's no accident that the same political climate that produces enthusiasm for religious school vouchers is also eager to outsource social programs to "faith-based" programs with their own God-given certainties about life on Earth and the right way to live it.

I think that a bright line between church and state, even at the cost of some equal rights, is constitutionally thinkable and politically and even religiously desirable. I think that Mr. Davey, private religious school voucher advocates, or faith-based social service programs seek to blur that line in one way or another.

People of faith also have a stake in that "bright line of separation" that many may not realize: the bright line preserves both the reality and appearance of independence and non-favored status for the locally dominant religious faiths and denominations -- which, after all, are not dominant everywhere. I think we invite a return to religious prejudice and strife as a political weapon rather than combat it by blurring that line.

In a second seemingly compelling point, Eve raises the issue of halal or kosher food, and argues,

No one would complain that he was being asked to "fund religion" if he learned that a food-stamp recipient was shopping exclusively at a kosher market. We understand that we're funding the broad category "food for the poor."

Let me join in praise of kosher food. But let me also point out that feeding the poor and educating their children are plainly different. Even I am familiar with the words "man does not live by bread alone." Religion is fundamentally about ideas, and about promulgating those ideas, and about believing those ideas. In a word, it is about education. A religious school fills a basic, essential religious function to its religion: propagating the faith, exemplifying it.

This, I hasten to add, is or can be an inspiring, good, and wonderful thing. But it is -- when truest to its principles -- a thing of faith, untestable, unassailable, and thus wholly and desirably separate from the political world we have established in this country. I take religiously based education seriously enough to believe it is not as simple as buying and eating a kosher pickle.

Eve concludes by wondering if voucher opponents "misunderstand the nature of education and of American pluralism." I wonder if religious school voucher proponents do.


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UPDATE, 07/10: I should have mentioned sooner that Eve responded briefly on July 2. posted by Thomas Nephew at 11:21:00 PM -- |