$200 Textbook vs. Free. You Do the Math.

Source: NY Times
Credits: Ashlee Vance
Dated: 2010-07-31

Mr. McNealy, the fiery co-founder and former chief executive of Sun Microsystems, shuns basic math textbooks as bloated monstrosities: their price keeps rising while the core information inside of them stays the same.

“Ten plus 10 has been 20 for a long time,” Mr. McNealy says.

Early this year, Oracle, the database software maker, acquired Sun for $7.4 billion, leaving Mr. McNealy without a job. He has since decided to aim his energy and some money at Curriki, an online hub for free textbooks and other course material that he spearheaded six years ago.

“We are spending $8 billion to $15 billion per year on textbooks” in the United States, Mr. McNealy says. “It seems to me we could put that all online for free.”

The nonprofit Curriki fits into an ever-expanding list of organizations that seek to bring the blunt force of Internet economics to bear on the education market. Even the traditional textbook publishers agree that the days of tweaking a few pages in a book just to sell a new edition are coming to an end.

“Today, we are engaged in a very different dialogue with our customers,” says Wendy Colby, a senior vice president of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. “Our customers are asking us to look at different ways to experiment and to look at different value-based pricing models.”

Mr. McNealy had his own encounter with value-based pricing models while running Sun. The company had thrived as a result of its specialized, pricey technology. And then, in what seemed liked a flash, Sun’s business came undone as a wave of cheaper computers and free, open-source software proved good enough to handle many tasks once done by Sun computers.

At first, Sun fought the open-source set, and then it joined the party by making the source code to its most valuable software available to anyone.

Too little, too late. Sun’s sales continued to decline, making it vulnerable to a takeover.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and other top textbook publishers now face their, forgive me, moment in the sun.

Over the last few years, groups nationwide have adopted the open-source mantra of the software world and started financing open-source books. Experts — often retired teachers or groups of teachers — write these books and allow anyone to distribute them in digital, printed or audio formats. Schools can rearrange the contents of the books to suit their needs and requirements.

But progress with these open-source texts has been slow.

California and Texas dominate the market for textbooks used in kindergarten through high school, and publishers do all they can to meet these states’ requirements and lock in their millions of students for years.

Both states have only recently established procedures that will let open-source textbooks begin making their way through the arduous approval process. Last year, Texas passed a law promoting the use of open, digital texts and is reviewing material that might be used in schools.

In California, a state board is studying whether open texts meet state requirements. The CK-12 Foundation, a nonprofit financed by another Sun co-founder, Vinod Khosla, has created several texts that have met the board’s criteria.

“In three and a half years, we have developed nine of the core textbooks for high school,” says Neeru Khosla, Mr. Khosla’s wife and the head of CK-12. “If you don’t try this, nothing will change.”

Aneesh Chopra, the federal chief technology officer, promoted an open physics textbook from CK-12 in his previous role as the secretary of technology for Virginia, which included more up-to-date materials than the state’s printed textbooks.

“We still had quotes that said the main component of a television was a cathode ray tube,” Mr. Chopra says. “We had to address the contemporary nature of physics topics.”

Eric Frank, the co-founder of Flat World Knowledge, argues that there is a huge financial opportunity in outflanking the traditional textbook makers. His company homes in on colleges and gives away a free online version of some textbooks. Students can then pay $30 for a black-and-white version to be printed on demand or $60 for a color version, or they can buy an audio copy.

About 55 percent of students buy a book, Mr. Frank said, adding that the leading calculus book from a traditional publisher costs more than $200.

Publishers have started de-emphasizing the textbook in favor of selling a package of supporting materials like teaching aids and training. And companies like Houghton Mifflin have created internal start-ups to embrace technology and capture for themselves some of the emerging online business.

They are responding in much the same way traditional software makers did when open-source arrived, by trying to bundle subscription services around a core product that has been undercut.

Ms. Colby of Houghton Mifflin puts the state of affairs politely: “I think the open-source movement is opening a whole new conversation, and that is what is exciting to us.”

Mr. McNealy wants to make sure there is a free, innovative option available for schools as this shift occurs.

Curriki has made only modest strides, but Mr. McNealy has pledged to inject new life. He wants to borrow from Sun’s software development systems to create an organized framework for collecting educational information.

In addition, he wants the organization to help build systems that can evaluate educational material and monitor student performance. “I want to assess everything,” he says.

MR. McNEALY, however, has found that raising money for Curriki is tougher than he imagined, even though so many people want to lower the cost of education.

“We are growing nicely,” he says, “but there is a whole bunch of stuff on simmer.”

2011-08-19 Why the wealthy elite do better : A lesson from the UK

 

Source: The Independent
Credits: Joan Smith
Dated: 2011-08-19
Refer Also:

• Another record year for A-levels prompts frantic university scramble
• Class divide entrenched – but some use A-levels to make family history
• Leading article: Celebrate success, but our school system fails too many
• Boys close the gap on girls in key subjects
• Leading article: Choices for the future 

A-level results that should shock us

They're the kind of teenagers we can't get enough of at this time of year: girls with long, glossy hair embracing each other on a lawn with mellow stone buildings in the background.

Tamara (left, in our imaginary picture) has just heard that she's achieved two A* grades in her A-levels and will be going to Warwick, while Charlotte (middle) is off to study medicine at Cambridge. Boys are allowed to feature in this annual August beauty contest for high-achievers, especially if their families belong to an ethnic minority, but the preference is for brainy girls. And there definitely isn't a hoodie or a baseball cap in sight.

Yesterday's A-level results produced the usual crop of celebratory photographs, along with a fanfare of announcements about how well candidates have done: it's been another record year for pass rates, which have risen to 97.8 per cent, and boys have achieved as many top grades as girls. This year's big story is about the scramble as aspiring students rush to get into university before next year's hike in fees, leaving 185,000 candidates competing for 29,000 unfilled places on degree courses. One angry young woman didn't improve her chances when she went on Twitter to describe the Ucas website, which crashed under the weight of disappointed candidates trying to find alternative courses, as "literally the worst thing in the world". Someone please book that girl on to the next available flight to Somalia.

This year's A-level results are impressive, and no doubt a lot of young adults have worked very hard. But there's another story here, about class and the north-south divide, which doesn't reflect anything like as well on the UK's educational system. The annual ritual of publishing A-level results contains within it an absolutely shocking story about the impact on life chances of privilege and geography. Pupils at private schools, which educate only 6.5 per cent of children in the UK, achieved 30 per cent of A* grades at A-level this year. That's the same proportion as last year, and yesterday's results are not expected to show a fairer distribution in the effect of location on results. Last year pupils in the affluent south-east of England, which accounted for 19 per cent of A-level entries, achieved 23 per cent of A* grades; the north-east produced only three per cent of A*s from four per cent of entries.

How many Geordie lads and lasses, I wonder, were photographed leaping for joy in yesterday's newspapers? Because of where they happen to live and their family background, kids from this area are less likely to sit A-levels or get the top grades that would get them into world-class universities. The standard offer at Cambridge is currently an A* and two As; research published earlier this year suggests that pupils from private schools are 55 times more likely to get a place at Oxbridge than state school pupils who receive free school meals (a recognised indicator of poverty). Geography turns out to have a significant effect on where candidates go to university, with urban universities such as the LSE, UCL and Liverpool taking a much higher proportion of students who were entitled to free school meals than Oxford or Cambridge.

One of yesterday's most dramatic revelations was the confidence gap between inner-city state schools and private establishments, where savvy teachers know how to get free publicity. Henrietta Lightwood, head of admissions at Badminton girls' school, sent out a press release promising introductions to three A-level students "who would make very good case studies – they speak extremely well and take a good picture". She enthused that one girl had "single-handedly" delivered a foal while another had designed a solar-powered car, providing an insight into a world of achievement and privilege – fees for senior school boarders at Badminton will be £9,740- a-term from September – which could hardly be further from the experience of most teenagers in this country.

The problem with the annual August frenzy over exam results is it draws attention away from hundreds of thousands of young adults who have minimal qualifications, little hope and no jobs. While commentators focus on the plight of A-level students who haven't quite achieved the grades they hoped for, huge numbers of their peers are unemployed; most didn't join in last week's riots – the north-east was largely spared, despite having the highest rate of youth unemployment in the country – but MPs have been warning for some time about the existence of a "lost generation". According to analysis carried out by the GMB union, almost a third of young adults (31.6 per cent) are out of work in Middlesbrough; the figure is 29.4 per cent in Redcar and Cleveland, while almost a quarter of people aged 16 to 24 in Sunderland have no jobs.

During the past few days, CCTV pictures have provided a rogues' gallery of young rioters, some of whom are heading for custodial sentences. Yesterday produced a contrasting set of images: high-achieving young people on their way to successful careers in law, medicine or the arts. Neither tells the whole truth about young people in this country, but they're a reminder we live in a society where class and geography matter as much as ability.

 

8 Fairy Tales And Their Not-So-Happy Endings

 

 

You might have noticed from an earlier post that I’m a bit of a Disney buff. This is kind of out of character for me, to be honest, because I’m not a huge fan of happily ever after. I like movie endings that are unexpected. After doing a little research, though, I realized that maybe fairy tales and I are a perfect match: those Disney endings where the prince and the princess end up blissfully married don’t really happen in the original stories. To make sure kids go home happy, not horrified, Disney usually has to alter the endings. Read on for the original endings to a couple of Disney classics (and some more obscure tales).

1. Cinderella

Don’t break out your violins for this gal just yet. All that cruelty poor Cinderella endured at the hands of her overbearing stepmother might have been well deserved. In the oldest versions of the story, the slightly more sinister Cinderella actually kills her first stepmother so her father will marry the housekeeper instead. Guess she wasn’t banking on the housekeeper’s six daughters moving in or that never-ending chore list.

2. Sleeping Beauty

In the original version of the tale, it’s not the kiss of a handsome prince that wakes Sleeping Beauty, but the nudging of her newborn twins. That’s right. While unconscious, the princess is impregnated by a monarch and wakes up to find out she’s a mom twice over. Then, in true Ricki Lake form, Sleeping Beauty’s “baby’s daddy” triumphantly returns and promises to send for her and the kids later, conveniently forgetting to mention that he’s married. When the trio is eventually brought to the palace, his wife tries to kill them all, but is thwarted by the king. In the end, Sleeping Beauty gets to marry the guy who violated her, and they all live happily ever after.

3. Snow White

 
At the end of the original German version penned by the brothers Grimm, the wicked queen is fatally punished for trying to kill Snow White. It’s the method she is punished by that is so strange – she is made to dance wearing a pair of red-hot iron shoes until she falls over dead.

4. The Little Mermaid

You’re likely familiar with the Disney version of the Little Mermaid story, in which Ariel and her sassy crab friend, Sebastian, overcome the wicked sea witch, and Ariel swims off to marry the man of her dreams. In Hans Christian Andersen’s original tale, however, the title character can only come on land to be with the handsome prince if she drinks a potion that makes it feel like she is walking on knives at all times. She does, and you would expect her selfless act to end with the two of them getting married. Nope. The prince marries a different woman, and the Little Mermaid throws herself into the sea, where her body dissolves into seam foam.

Now here are four more fairy tales you might not be familiar with, but you might have trouble forgetting.

1. The King Who Wished to Marry His Daughter
What It’s Like: Cinderella, with an incestuous twist

The King’s wife dies and he swears he will never marry again unless he finds a woman who fits perfectly into his dead Queen’s clothes. Guess what? His daughter does! So he insists on marrying her. Ew. Understandably, she has a problem with this and tries to figure out how to avoid wedding dear old dad. She says she won’t marry him until she gets a trunk that locks from outside and inside and can travel over land and sea. He gets it, but she says she has to make sure the chest works. To prove it, he locks her inside and floats her in the sea. Her plan works: she just keeps floating until she reaches another shore. So she escapes marrying her dad, but ends up working as a scullery maid in another land… from here you can follow the Cinderella story. She meets a prince, leaves her shoe behind, he goes around trying to see who it belongs to. The End.

2. The Lost Childen
What It’s Like: Hansel & Gretel meets Saw 2

This French fairy tale starts out just like Hansel & Gretel. A brother and sister get lost in the woods and find themselves trapped in cages, getting plumped up to be eaten. Only it’s not a wicked witch, it’s the Devil and his wife. The Devil makes a sawhorse for the little boy to bleed to death on (seriously!) and then goes for a walk, telling the girl to get her brother situated on the sawhorse before he returned. The siblings pretend to be confused and ask the Devil’s wife to demonstrate how the boy should lay on the sawhorse; when she shows them they tie her to it and slit her throat. They steal all of the Devil’s money and escape in his carriage. He chases after them once he discovers what they’ve done, but he dies in the process. Yikes.

3. The Juniper Tree
What It’s Like: Every stepchild’s worst nightmare

Cannibalism, murder, decapitation… freakiness abounds left and right in this weird Grimm story. A widower gets remarried, but the second wife loathes the son he had with his first wife because she wants her daughter to inherit the family riches. So she offers the little boy an apple from inside a chest. When he leans over to get it, she slams the lid down on him and chops his head off. Note: if you’re trying to convince your child to eat more fruits and veggies, do not tell them this story. Well, the woman doesn’t want anyone to know that she killed the boy, so she puts his head back on and wraps a handkerchief around his neck to hide the fact that it’s no longer attached. Her daughter ends up knocking his head off and getting blamed for his death. To hide what happened, they chop up the body and make him into pudding, which they feed to his poor father. Eventually the boy is reincarnated as a bird and he drops a stone on his stepmother’s head, which kills her and brings him back to life.

4. Penta of the Chopped-off Hands
What It’s Like: Um…you tell us

These old fairy tales sure do enjoy a healthy dose of incest. In this Italian tale, the king’s wife dies and he falls in love with Penta… his sister. She tries to make him fall out of love with her by chopping off her hands. The king is pretty upset by this; he has her locked in a chest and thrown out to sea. A fisherman tries to save her, but Penta is so beautiful that his jealous wife has her thrown back out to sea. Luckily, Penta is rescued by a king (who isn’t her brother). They get married and have a baby, but the baby is born while the king is away at sea. Penta tries to send the king the good news of the baby, but the jealous fisherman’s wife intercepts the message and changes it to say that Penta gave birth to a puppy. A puppy?! The evil wife then constructs another fake message, this time from the king to his servants, and says that Penta and her baby should be burned alive. OK, long story short: the king figures out what the jealous wife is up to and has her burned. Penta and the king live happily ever after. I can’t really figure out what the moral of this tale is. Chopping hands off? Giving birth to a dog? I just don’t get it. Help me out here, people.

OK, there has to be a ton of other creepy fairy tales out there that you would never read to your kids to lull them off to a peaceful slumber. Let’s hear ‘em!

America needs immigrants to get a pass in math and science

Source: LiveScience.com via Yahoo
Credits: Stephanie Pappas (Livescience Senior Writer)
Dated: 2011-05-29

70% of Science Award Finalists Are Children of Immigrants

Immigration is a boon to American science and math, a new report asserts, noting that 70 percent of the finalists in a recent prestigious science competition are the children of immigrants.

The report by the National Foundation for American Policy, a nonprofit research group in Arlington, Va., states that many immigrant parents emphasize hard science and math education for their children, viewing those fields as paths to success.

Statistics supporting that belief: According to a recent Georgetown University study on the value of undergraduate majors, the lifetime median annual income for someone with a bachelor's degree in engineering is $75,000, compared with $29,000 for a counseling or psychology major. [Infographic: Highest-paying College Majors]

That study found that the highest earners are petroleum engineers, with median annual earnings of $120,000.

Only 12 percent of Americans are foreign-born, the NFAP report says. Even so, children of immigrants took 70 percent of the finalist slots in the 2011 Intel Science Talent Search Competition, an original-research competition for high school seniors.

Of the 40 finalists, 28 had parents born in other countries: 16 from China, 10 from India, one from South Korea and one from Iran.

"In proportion to their presence in the U.S. population, one would expect only one child of an Indian (or Chinese) immigrant parent every two and a half years to be an Intel Science Search finalist, not 10 in a year," wrote the report's author, NFAP director Stuart Anderson.

Finalists interviewed for the report attributed their interest in research to their parents' attitudes.

"Our parents brought us up with love of science as a value," David Kenneth Tang-Quan, whose parents emigrated from China to California, told Anderson, according to the report.

Still, children of immigrants face barriers outside of the education system. According to the Georgetown report, racial disparities in pay persist even within science fields. Whites with an undergraduate major in engineering out-earn Asians with the same degree by about $8,000 a year. African-American and Hispanic engineering graduates fare worse, making about $60,000 and $56,000 per year, respectively, compared with whites' $80,000.

Asians out-earn whites in the fields of health, law and public policy; psychology and social work; and biology and life sciences.

The fact that children of immigrants excel in science and math should be taken into account when making immigration policy, Anderson wrote: "The results should serve as a warning against new restrictions on legal immigration, both family and employment-based immigration, since such restrictions are likely to prevent many of the next generation of outstanding scientists and researcher from emerging in America."

You can follow LiveScience senior writer Stephanie Pappas on Twitter @sipappas. Follow LiveScience for the latest in science news and discoveries on Twitter @livescience and on Facebook.

Anatomy Course

Loathsome marketing and infomercial graphics, but apparently interesting content for $37. http://www.humananatomycourse.com/

Windows/Mac

Animals and Collective Nouns

From Wikipedia

Generic terms

This table contains terms generally applicable across some common categories of animals.

Animal	Young	Female	Male	Group	Adjective	Meat
Bird	chick	hen	cock	flock	avian	poultry (if domesticated)
Bovine	calf	cow	bull	herd	bovine
Canine	pup[5]	bitch	dog[note 1]	pack	canine
Feline	kitten, cub	cat	tom	feline
Fish	fry, fingerling	school, shoal	piscine, ichthyic

[edit]Terms by species

Note that the table can be sorted by columns, by clicking the double-arrow symbols.

Animal	Young	Female	Male	Group	Adjective	Meat
Aardvark	cub	sow	boar	pack, grouping, maelstrom
African buffalo	calf	cow	bull
Alligator	hatchling	cow	bull	bask, congregation[6]	eusuchian
American Bison(Buffalo)	calf	cow	bull	herd	bovine, bubaline
Ant	larva, pupa	queen, worker, gyne	drone	army, colony, nest, swarm, byke	formic, myrmecine
Anteater	pup	sow	boar
Antelope	calf[7]	doe	buck	herd, cluster	alcelaphine, bubaline, antilopine
Ape	infant	—	—	shrewdness, troop	simian
Armadillo	pup, baby	sow	boar	herd, arrangement, pack	cingulatan
Ass/Donkey	foal	jenny	jack	pace, band, drove, herd, coffle	asinine
Baboon	infant	—		troop, tribe, flange[note 2][2], congress[citation needed]
Badger	cub	sow	boar	cete, colony, sett, company	musteline
Bat	pup	—	—	colony, cloud, cauldron	pteropine, noctillionine
Bear	cub[8]	sow	boar	sleuth, sloth	ursine
Beaver	kit, kitten, pup	—	—	family, colony
Bee	larva, pupa	queen, worker[note 3]	drone	grist, hive, swarm, colony	apic, apian, apiarian
Bison	calf	cow	bull	herd, troop
Boar	shoat			sounder
Bush baby	infant	queen	king, drake	congress, plot, gathering	galagine
Butterfly	caterpillar			rabble, flight, flutter, swarm	pieridine, pierine
Camel	calf	cow	bull	flock,herd	camelid, cameline
Cat	kitten, kit	molly, queen	tom [note 4]	clowder, clan,cluster[2], clutter, glaring[2], kindle (young)	feline
Cattle[note 5]	calf[9]	cow[10]	bull	herd, drift[2], drove, mob	bovine[note 6], vituline (young), vaccine (female), taurine (male)	beef, veal
Chamois	calf	doe	bull	herd	rupicaprine
Cheetah	cub			coalition
Chicken	chick, peep	hen, pullet	rooster, cock(-erel)[note 7]	flock, brood	galline	poultry
Chimpanzee	infant	empress	blackback	troop, group, harem	panine
Cobra				quiver[11], has	elapid
Cockroach	nymph			intrusion[11]	blattid
Cormorant	chick			gulp[11], flight
Cougar	cub	cougress		schoolyard
Coyote	cub, pup, whelp	bitch	dog	pack, train	canine
Crab	—	hen	cock, jimmy	consortium	cancrine
Crane	chick, colt[12]			herd, sedge, siege	alectorine
Crocodile	hatchling	cow	bull	bask, nest, congregation, float	crocodilian
Crow				hover, murder, parcel[2]	corvine
Deer	calf,[7] fawn	doe, hind, cow[7]	buck, stag, bull[7], hart (red deer)	herd, mob, rangale[2]	cervine, elaphine	venison, humble (organ meat)
Dog	whelp, pup[5], puppy	bitch, dam	dog, stud, sire	pack, litter (young), kennel, gang, legion	canine
Dogfish				troop[2]		capeshark (USA), rock salmon (UK), flake (UK, AUS), huss (UK), rigg (UK), kahada (CAN)[13]
Dolphin	calf, pup	cow	bull	team, school, pod, herd, team[2], alliance (male), party (female)	delphine
Donkey/Ass	foal	jenny	jack	pace, band, drove, herd, coffle	asinine
Dove	chick	hen	cock	cote, flight, dole, dule, piteousness,[2] troop	columbine
Dragonfly	nymph	queen	king, drake	cluster, flight	anisopteran
Duck	duckling	duck, hen	drake	flock, brace, bunch (on water)[2], team[note 8]	anatine, fuliguline	poultry
Dugong	calf	cow	bull	herd, nutcluster	dugongine
Eagle	eaglet	—	—	convocation, brood, aerie	aquiline
Echidna	puggle	sow	boar	flock, parade, herd	tachyglossine
Eel	leptocephalus (larva), elver (juvenile)	—	—	swarm, cell, pipe, array
Eland	calf
Elephant	calf[9]	cow[10]	bull[14]	herd, flock, parade	elephantine
Elephant seal	calf	cow	bull	herd, pack, arrangement	miroungan
Elk (wapiti)	calf[7]	cow[7]	bull[7]	gang, herd	cervine	venison
Falcon	eyass/eyas	falcon	tiercel	gross, battalion	acciptrine
Ferret	kit	jill	hob[note 9]	business, fesny(i)ng	musteline
Finch	chick	hen	cock	quiver	fringilline
Fly	maggot			swarm, cloud, business	dipterous
Fox	cub[8], kit, pup[5]	vixen	tod, dog	leash, skulk	vulpine
Frog	polliwog, tadpole, froglet	-	-	colony,bundle	ranine
Gaur	calf	cow	bull	herd	bovine, gaurine	garabeef
Gazelle	calf[7]	cow[7]	bull[7]	herd	gazelline
Gerbil	pup	doe	buck	horde	cricetine
Giant Panda	cub	sow	boar
Giraffe	calf, giraffeling	cow	bull	herd, journey, stretch, tower	giraffine
Gnu	calf			briefcase
Goat	kid	doe, doeling	buck[note 10], buckling	herd, mob, tribe	caprine, hircine	chevon, cabrito, mutton
Goose	gosling	goose	gander	gaggle (skein when in flight)[note 8]	anatine, anserine	poultry
Gorilla	infant	—	blackback, silverback	troop, group (band), flange	simian
Guanaco	chulengo				camelid
Guinea fowl	chick	hen	cock	rasp	numidine	poultry
Guinea pig	pup	sow	boar	herd
Gull	chick, scorrie[15]	hen	cock	flock	larine
Hamster	pup	doe	buck	horde, saladbowl[citation needed]	cricetid
Hare	leveret	doe, jill	buck, jack	band, down	leverine, leporine
Hawk	eyas	hen	tiercel	cast, kettle, boil[note 11]	accipitrine, falconine
Hedgehog	hoglet	sow	boar	array[2]	erinaceine
Heron				siege[note 8]
Hippopotamus	calf	cow	bull	bloat, crash, herd, thunder[11]	hippopotamine
Hornet	larvae, pupae	queen	drone	swarm	vespine
Horse[note 12]	foal, colt (male), filly (female)	mare	stallion	herd, band, mob	equine
Human	child, girl, boy	woman	man	people, band, crowd, clan, tribe, children (young)	human	long pig[16] (See cannibalism)
Hyena	cub, pup, whelp	bitch	dog	clan, cackle	hyenine
Jackal	pup			pack
Jaguar	cub			shadow
Jellyfish	planula, polyp, ephyra[17]	sow	boar	smack[2], smuck[2], smuth[18], fluther[3],bloom	sycophozan
Kangaroo	joey	flyer, doe	boomer, buck	mob, troop, court	macropodine
Komodo dragon	hatchling, chick, calf	cow, hen	bull, cock	bank	varanine
Kouprey	calf	cow	bull	herd	sauveline, bovine
Kudu	calf			fork|
Lark	chick	hen	cock	exaltation	alaudine
Lemur	infant	princess	dictator	plot, congress, conspiracy	lemurine
Leopard	cub	leopardess	leopard	leap, lepe	pardine
Lion	cub[8]	lioness	lion	pride	leonine
Llama	cria	hembra	macho	herd, flock	camelid
Loris	infant	doe	buck	colony, drove, harem, troop	lorisine
Louse	nymph	—	—	colony, infestation, lice	pediculine
Lobster		hen[3]	cock[3]	risk	homarine
Lyrebird		hen	cock	musket	menurine
Magpie	chick	hen	cock	tiding, tittering, gulp, murder, charm, flock	garruline
Mallard	duckling	hen	drake	sord, lute, brace, puddling, flush	anatine	poultry
Manatee	calf	cow	bull	herd	manatine, sirenian
Meerkat	pup	—	—	mob, clan, gang
Mink	cub, kit	sow	boar		musteline
Mole	pup	sow	boar	labour, company, movement	talpine
Monkey	infant	—	—	troop, barrel, tribe, cartload	simian
Moose	calf[7]	cow[7]	bull[14][7]	herd	cervine	venison
Mouse	pinkie, kitten, pup	doe	buck	nest, colony, harvest, horde, mischief	murine	pinkie/fuzzie/hopper (pet food)
Mosquito	nymph, wriggler, tumbler	—	—	scourge, swarm, cloud	aedine, anopheline
Mule	foal	molly, mare mule	john, horse mule	barren, pack, span, rake
Nightingale	chick	hen	cock	watch, flock, route, match	philomelian
Okapi	calf	cow	bull	herd	okapine
Oryx	calf
Ostrich	hatchling, chick			flock, troop	ratite, struthious
Otter	pup, whelp	sow	boar	romp, bevy, lodge, family, raft	musteline, lutrine
Owl	owlet			parliament, stare, wisdom	strigine
Ox	calf	cow	bull	yoke, team, drove, herd, nye	bovine
Oyster	spat			bed, hive, cast, culch	ostracine	meat
Panther	cub	pantheress			pantherine
Partridge	chick	hen, chantelle	cock	covey	perdicine
Peafowl	chick, peachick	peahen	peacock	party, muster, ostentation, pride	pavonine	poultry
Pelican	chick, nestling			scoop, pod[6]
Penguin	chick, nestling				spheniscine
Pig[note 13]	piglet, shoat/shote (a young, just weaned pig) gilt (female)	sow	boar	herd, drove,sounder, mob, drift	porcine, suilline	pork, ham, bacon
Pigeon	squab	hen	cock	flight, loft, flock, kit	pullastrine	squab
Pony	foal (either sex), colt (young, immature male), filly (young, immature female)	mare	stallion	herd, marmalade, string	equine
Porcupine	pup	sow	boar	prickle	hystricine
Quelea	chick	hen	cock	flock, swarm	queline
Rabbit	bunny, kit, kitten, nestling	doe, jill	buck, jack	warren, nest, colony, bevy, bury, drove, trace	leporine
Raccoon	cub, kit	sow	boar	nursery, gaze	procyonine
Rail	chick	reeve	ruff		ralline
Ram	lamb	ewe	ram	flock	arietine, ovine	lamb and mutton
Rat	kitten, nestling, pinkie, pup[5]	doe	buck	colony, horde, mischief, pack, plague, swarm	murine
Raven				unkindness http://bits.wikimedia.org/skins-1.5/vector/images/external-link-ltr-icon...); background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: initial; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 13px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; background-position: 100% 50%; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat;" rel="nofollow">[1], congress, conspiracy, parliament, murder, crime[citation needed]	corvine
Red deer	calf	hind	stag	herd		venison
Red panda	cub	sow	boar	pack	ailuirine
Reindeer(caribou)	calf	cow	bull	herd	rangiferine
Rhinoceros	calf	cow	bull	crash, herd	ceratorhine
Salamander	tadpole, salamanderling	sow	boar	maelstrom, band	caudatan
Sea lion	pup, beach weaner, calf	cow	bull	pod, colony, crash, flock, harem, bob, herd, rookery, team, hurdle	otarine
Seal	pup[5]	cow	bull	pod, rookery, bob, herd, harem	phocine
Seahorse	seafoal	seamare	seastallion	shoal	hippocampal
Seastar	chick	hen	cock	group, school	asteridan
Shark	cub,[8] pup[citation needed]			slew, shiver[11]
Sheep	lamb	ewe	ram[note 10]	drove, mob, flock, herd	ovine	lamb, mutton, hoggett, haggis (visceral meat)
Shrew	shrewlet, baby	sow	boar	colony, race, drove	soricine
Skunk	kit		boar[3]
Snail	-	n/a	n/a	hood	gastropodian	escargot
Snake	snakelet, hatchling (a newly-hatched snake)	—	—	pit, nest or bed	anguine, elapine, serpentine, viperine, ophidian
Spider	spiderling			cluster, clutter	arachnine, arachnoid
Squid	chick	hen	cock	roundup, audience	tethidine	calamari
Squirrel	pup, kit, kitten	doe	buck	squad, dray, scurry[11]	sciurine
Swan	cygnet, flapper	pen	cob	flock	cygnine
Tapir	calf	cow	bull	measure, herd	tapirine
Tarsier	infant	doe	buck	herd, plot, harem, troop	tarsiine
Tiger	cub[8]	tigress	tiger	streak[11]	tigrine
Toad	tadpole, toadlet	—	—	knot, lump	ranine, batrachian
Turkey	poult	hen	tom, gobbler, stag, jake (immature)	cream, rafter
Turtle	hatchling	—	—	bale, dule	chelonian
Vicuña	calf	cow, señorita	bull, señor	posse, herd	cameline
Walrus	calf	cow	bull	herd, flock	odobenine
Wasp	larva	queen, worker	drone	swarm, hive	vespine
Water buffalo	calf	cow	bull	pot		carabeef
Weasel	pup	bitch, doe, jill	buck, dog, hub, jack	sneak, gang[19]	musteline
Whale	calf[9]	cow[10]	bull	gam, pod, herd, school	cetacean, cetaceous
Wolf	cub, pup[5], whelp	bitch, she-wolf	dog	pack	lupine
Worm	wormlet			bed, bunch, clew, squirm	helminthic, vermian
Yak	calf	cow	bull	herd, cabinet
Zebra	foal	mare	stallion	dazzle[citation needed], herd	zebrine, hippotigrine

[edit]See also

http://bits.wikimedia.org/skins-1.5/vector/images/bullet-icon.png?1); padding: 0px;">
• Lists of animals

[edit]Notes

1. ^ Also used as a generic term for a canine of unspecified sex.
2. ^ The term "flange" was originally used to denote a group of baboons in a Not the Nine O'Clock News comedy sketch entitled "Gerald the Intelligent Gorilla" where it was used for comic effect. It has since been used in the scientific literature for a collection of baboons.
3. ^ A worker bee is a sexually undeveloped female.
4. ^ A castrated male cat is a gib or neuter.
5. ^ Castrated male cattle are steers in the United States, or bullocks in the United Kingdom. A young cow that has not given birth is a heifer. See Cattle for more names. Cows is often used informally to refer to cattle in general.
6. ^ Bovine refers to all species of genus Bos.
7. ^ A castrated male chicken is a capon.
8. ^ ^a b c A group of geese, herons, or ducks in flight is a skein.
9. ^ A castrated male ferret is a gib.^{[citation needed]}
10. ^ ^a b A castrated male sheep or goat is a wether. See sheep for more names.
11. ^ a "kettle" or "boil" is a group of hawks swirling and cris-crossing in a thermal air current, see http://bits.wikimedia.org/skins-1.5/vector/images/external-link-ltr-icon...); background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: initial; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 13px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; background-position: 100% 50%; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat;" rel="nofollow">"A Kettle of Hawks"
12. ^ A castrated male horse is a gelding. A male foal is a colt, and a female foal is a filly.
13. ^ A young female pig that has not given birth is a gilt. A castrated male pig is a barrow.^{[citation needed]}

Baby Yoga

Source: SFGate
Credits: Amy Graff
Dated: 2011-01-19

[ Emilie says : Techniques like this are widespread, at least in Eastern Europe and Russia, as well as in Central Asia, and as anyone who has ever observed a group of great apes (or read about them), or indeed has watched children with puppies or kittens, this is perfectly natural and reasonably safe behaviour, although one needs to build up slowly to gently tossing them as shown here, and be aware of safe angles to prevent dislocation of joints. Such exercise strengthens the children and the robust handling dramatically increases their ability to bond and establish trust while lessening the fear of new experiences and motion. Robert A. Heinlein knew about it too and references it in a number of his books, including Waldo, Inc.]

Russian woman who swings babies is for real

Lena Fokina practices baby yoga in Dahab, Egypt

The viral video of a Russian woman swirling and twirling a baby about seemed so surreal and unreal. Everyone thought it was a hoax. But it turns out Lena Fokina, the famous baby swinger, runs a legit business in Egypt, where she, well, swings babies. Fokina likes to call it "baby yoga." How much do you want to bet that a baby yoga place will open up in Noe Valley within the year?

When a five-minute video of a Russian woman swinging a baby around by its ankles and arms first started circulating around the Web, people were convinced that it was a hoax.

Gawker ran a story with the headline, "This Baby-Swinging Yoga Video Can't Be Real, Right?"

YouTube pulled the video deeming it "shocking and disgusting."

If you watch the video (below), you'll understand why. It's rather unsettling to watch this woman, who looks as if she'd fit right in at Yoga Tree, turn a baby upside by its ankles and then flip it up over her head.

It turns out this hard-bodied, 50-year-old woman is for real--and babies are a lot stronger than you ever imagined. Lena Fokina runs a yoga business in Dahab, Egypt, and Nathan Thornburgh, a daddy blogger and contributing writer for Time magazine, tracked her down and interviewed her. Here's an excerpt of what Thornburgh has up on his DadWagon blog:

The first thing everybody here thought when they saw your baby-swinging video was "Holy s-!" Then they thought, is it real or fake? So: Is it real? If so, who is the baby? The child was born in the Black Sea region. Her name is Platona, and she was two weeks old when we took that video. We have a lot of children like her here. They are early readers, singers, talkers, swimmers. You haven't seen anything like it anywhere!! And there's swimming with dolphins, scuba diving with them. Come to Dahab!

And are they early readers, talkers, and so on because of baby yoga? Not only this. It's just one reason.

What else makes them so talented then? Love for each other and to one another.

I have two small children and I was, you know, careful with them when they were newborns. So it was hard for me to watch your video. It looks like it has to injure the child. Their hands? The cartilage in the joints? Their brains? No. It makes the hands stronger.

Did you know that YouTube took the video down because it was in violation of their policy on "shocking and disgusting" content? What is your response to that? Did they notice that the babies aren't crying--they're even laughing--and that this system has been used for over thirty years in Russia and the children are all alive and healthy? If you need more proof, the best thing is to come see us.

Have you heard from people who are upset about the video? Everybody in Dahab is satisfied. What's more, a British film crew made a documentary about us, and interviewed the parents.

At the end of your video, it looks like you're trying to get the two-week-old baby to walk. Is mobility the goal of your baby yoga? Yes, more mobility, and other goals. First off, more trained skills. Second, more freedom. Third, independence. We learn from nature and teach our offspring to survive. Come to Dahab; we'll be glad to show our classes and our children.

What are your thoughts on baby swinging? Would you sign your baby up for a class?

 

Story update: SFGate just received an email from Nathan Thornburgh who interviewed the baby swinger Lena Fokina. Thornburgh shared that he's from San Francisco and graduated from Lowell High School.

Body World

Body World

The most spectacular, beautiful and educational medical exhibit I have ever experienced - and I studied medicine.

Inspirational, and it is not just me. My daughter first saw it at age 3 and couldn't stop talking about it. So we drove for 10 hours to see it again when she was 4. Two years later, she still talks about it.

I have had a serious disagreement about this show with somebody who objected to it on the grounds that the cadavers used were not donated, so I was delighted to discover that I was correct in having asserted that they were.

Beginning in 1996 with the BODY WORLDS show in Japan, exhibits featuring artfully flayed human bodies have rocked the museum circuit. BODY WORLDS is now in its fourth incarnation, and competing shows, such as Bodies Revealed, are pulling in $30 million per year. The problem is, it’s not always clear where those bodies are coming from.

Dr. Gunther von Hagens, the man behind BODY WORLDS, has documented that his bodies were donated voluntarily to his organization. However, his largest competitor, Premier Entertainment, doesn’t have a well-established donation system. Premier maintains that its cadavers are unclaimed bodies from mainland China. And therein lies the concern. Activists and journalists believe “unclaimed bodies” is a euphemism for “executed political prisoners.”

The fear isn’t unfounded. In 2006, Canada commissioned a human rights report that found Chinese political prisoners were being killed so that their organs could be “donated” to transplant patients. And in February 2008, ABC News ran an exposé featuring a former employee from one of the Chinese companies that supplied corpses to Premier Entertainment. In the interview, he claimed that one-third of the bodies he processed were political prisoners. Not surprisingly, governments have started to take notice. In January 2008, the California State Assembly passed legislation requiring body exhibits to prove that all their corpses were willfully donated.

Building a Better Teacher

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html?pagewanted=1
Credits: Elizabeth Green
Dated: 2010-03--02
Related Video: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/03/07/magazine/20100307-teacher-videos.html
Reader Comments: http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/03/can-teachers-be-taught-to-teach-better/#respond

Elizabeth Green is a Spencer fellow in education reporting at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the editor of GothamSchools.org. This is her first article for the magazine.

ON A WINTER DAY five years ago, Doug Lemov realized he had a problem. After a successful career as a teacher, a principal and a charter-school founder, he was working as a consultant, hired by troubled schools eager — desperate, in some cases — for Lemov to tell them what to do to get better. There was no shortage of prescriptions at the time for how to cure the poor performance that plagued so many American schools. Proponents of No Child Left Behind saw standardized testing as a solution. President Bush also championed a billion-dollar program to encourage schools to adopt reading curriculums with an emphasis on phonics. Others argued for smaller classes or more parental involvement or more state financing.

Lemov himself pushed for data-driven programs that would diagnose individual students’ strengths and weaknesses. But as he went from school to school that winter, he was getting the sinking feeling that there was something deeper he wasn’t reaching. On that particular day, he made a depressing visit to a school in Syracuse, N.Y., that was like so many he’d seen before: “a dispiriting exercise in good people failing,” as he described it to me recently. Sometimes Lemov could diagnose problems as soon as he walked in the door. But not here. Student test scores had dipped so low that administrators worried the state might close down the school. But the teachers seemed to care about their students. They sat down with them on the floor to read and picked activities that should have engaged them. The classes were small. The school had rigorous academic standards and state-of-the-art curriculums and used a software program to analyze test results for each student, pinpointing which skills she still needed to work on.

But when it came to actual teaching, the daily task of getting students to learn, the school floundered. Students disobeyed teachers’ instructions, and class discussions veered away from the lesson plans. In one class Lemov observed, the teacher spent several minutes debating a student about why he didn’t have a pencil. Another divided her students into two groups to practice multiplication together, only to watch them turn to the more interesting work of chatting. A single quiet student soldiered on with the problems. As Lemov drove from Syracuse back to his home in Albany, he tried to figure out what he could do to help. He knew how to advise schools to adopt a better curriculum or raise standards or develop better communication channels between teachers and principals. But he realized that he had no clue how to advise schools about their main event: how to teach.

Around the country, education researchers were beginning to address similar questions. The testing mandates in No Child Left Behind had generated a sea of data, and researchers were now able to parse student achievement in ways they never had before. A new generation of economists devised statistical methods to measure the “value added” to a student’s performance by almost every factor imaginable: class size versus per-pupil funding versus curriculum. When researchers ran the numbers in dozens of different studies, every factor under a school’s control produced just a tiny impact, except for one: which teacher the student had been assigned to. Some teachers could regularly lift their students’ test scores above the average for children of the same race, class and ability level. Others’ students left with below-average results year after year. William Sanders, a statistician studying Tennessee teachers with a colleague, found that a student with a weak teacher for three straight years would score, on average, 50 percentile points behind a similar student with a strong teacher for those years. Teachers working in the same building, teaching the same grade, produced very different outcomes. And the gaps were huge. Eric Hanushek, a Stanford economist, found that while the top 5 percent of teachers were able to impart a year and a half’s worth of learning to students in one school year, as judged by standardized tests, the weakest 5 percent advanced their students only half a year of material each year.

This record encouraged a belief in some people that good teaching must be purely instinctive, a kind of magic performed by born superstars. As Jane Hannaway, the director of the Education Policy Center at the Urban Institute and a former teacher, put it to me, successful teaching depends in part on a certain inimitable “voodoo.” You either have it or you don’t. “I think that there is an innate drive or innate ability for teaching,” Sylvia Gist, the dean of the college of education at Chicago State University, said when I visited her campus last year.

That belief has spawned a nationwide movement to improve the quality of the teaching corps by firing the bad teachers and hiring better ones. “Creating a New Teaching Profession,” a new collection of academic papers, politely calls this idea “deselection”; Joel Klein, the New York City schools chancellor, put it more bluntly when he gave a talk in Manhattan recently. “If we don’t change the personnel,” he said, “all we’re doing is changing the chairs.”

The reformers are also trying to create incentives to bring what Michelle Rhee, the schools chancellor in Washington, calls a “different caliber of person” into the profession. Rhee has proposed giving cash bonuses to those teachers whose students learn the most, as measured by factors that include standardized tests — and firing those who don’t measure up. Under her suggested compensation system, the city’s best teachers could earn as much as $130,000 a year. (The average pay for a teacher in Washington is now $65,000.) A new charter school in New York City called the Equity Project offers starting salaries of $125,000. “Merit pay,” a once-obscure free-market notion of handing cash bonuses to the best teachers, has lately become a litmus test for seriousness about improving schools. The Obama administration’s education department has embraced merit pay; the federal Teacher Incentive Fund, which finances experimental merit-pay programs across the country, rose from $97 million to $400 million this year. And states interested in competing for a piece of the $4.3 billion discretionary fund called the Race to the Top were required to change their laws to give principals and superintendents the right to judge teachers based on their students’ academic performance.

Incentives are intuitively appealing: if a teacher could make real money, maybe more people would choose teaching over finance or engineering or law, expanding the labor pool. And no one wants incompetent teachers in the classroom. Yet so far, both merit-pay efforts and programs that recruit a more-elite teaching corps, like Teach for America, have thin records of reliably improving student learning. Even if competition could coax better performance, would it be enough? Consider a bar graph presented at a recent talk on teaching, displaying the number of Americans in different professions. The shortest bar, all the way on the right, represented architects: 180,000. Farther over, slightly higher, came psychologists (185,000) and then lawyers (952,000), followed by engineers (1.3 million) and waiters (1.8 million). On the left side of the graph, the top three: janitors, maids and household cleaners (3.3 million); secretaries (3.6 million); and, finally, teachers (3.7 million). Moreover, a coming swell of baby-boomer retirements is expected to force school systems to hire up to a million new teachers between now and 2014. Expanding the pool of potential teachers is clearly important, but in a profession as large as teaching, can financial incentives alone make an impact?

Lemov spent his early career putting his faith in market forces, building accountability systems meant to reward high-performing charter schools and force the lower-performing ones to either improve or go out of business. The incentives did shock some schools into recognizing their shortcomings. But most of them were like the one in Syracuse: they knew they had to change, but they didn’t know how. “There was an implementation gap,” Lemov told me. “Incentives by themselves were not going to be enough.” Lemov calls this the Edison Parable, after the for-profit company Edison Schools, which in the 1990s tried to create a group of accountable schools but ultimately failed to outperform even the troubled Cleveland public schools.

Lemov doesn’t reject incentives. In fact, at Uncommon Schools, the network of 16 charter schools in the Northeast that he helped found and continues to help run today, he takes performance into account when setting teacher pay. Yet he has come to the conclusion that simply dangling better pay will not improve student performance on its own. And the stakes are too high: while student scores on national assessments across demographic groups have risen, the percentage of students at proficiency — just 39 percent of fourth graders in math and 33 percent in reading — is still disturbingly low. And there is still a wide gap between black and white students in reading and math. The smarter path to boosting student performance, Lemov maintains, is to improve the quality of the teachers who are already teaching.

But what makes a good teacher? There have been many quests for the one essential trait, and they have all come up empty-handed. Among the factors that do not predict whether a teacher will succeed: a graduate-school degree, a high score on the SAT, an extroverted personality, politeness, confidence, warmth, enthusiasm and having passed the teacher-certification exam on the first try. When Bill Gates announced recently that his foundation was investing millions in a project to improve teaching quality in the United States, he added a rueful caveat. “Unfortunately, it seems the field doesn’t have a clear view of what characterizes good teaching,” Gates said. “I’m personally very curious.”

When Doug Lemov conducted his own search for those magical ingredients, he noticed something about most successful teachers that he hadn’t expected to find: what looked like natural-born genius was often deliberate technique in disguise. “Stand still when you’re giving directions,” a teacher at a Boston school told him. In other words, don’t do two things at once. Lemov tried it, and suddenly, he had to ask students to take out their homework only once.

It was the tiniest decision, but what was teaching if not a series of bite-size moves just like that?

Lemov thought about soccer, another passion. If his teammates wanted him to play better, they didn’t just say, “Get better.” They told him to “mark tighter” or “close the space.” Maybe the reason he and others were struggling so mightily to talk and even to think about teaching was that the right words didn’t exist — or at least, they hadn’t been collected. And so he set out to assemble the hidden wisdom of the best teachers in America.

LEMOV WAS NOT the first educator to come to the conclusion that teachers need better training. In the spring of 1986, a group of university deans sat in an apartment near the University of Illinois at Chicago, tossing bets into a hat. They had come together to put the final touches on a manifesto that would denounce their own institutions — the more than 1,200 schools of education — for failing to adequately train the country’s teachers.

They planned to mail the document to about 100 universities, along with an invitation to join their crusade, a coalition they named the Holmes Group, after a Harvard education-school dean from the 1920s and ’30s who pushed to prioritize teacher training. The bets they scribbled on pieces of paper were their guesses as to how many of their colleagues might agree to join them.

“People were saying, ‘Well, you’re lucky to get 30,’ ” Frank Murray, the dean of the University of Delaware’s school of education, and one of those present, recalled recently.

By the end of the year, nearly every invited dean had signed on. The process of studying their own sins was “painful,” Judith Lanier, the chairwoman of the Holmes Group and then the dean ofMichigan State University’s education school, wrote in an introduction to the final report. But the consensus was inescapable. Three years before, a report from a presidential commission declared the nation to be “at risk” because of underperforming schools, citing dipping test scores and frightening illiteracy. “Our own professional schools are part of the problem,” the Holmes Group’s report declared.

Though the Holmes report stirred controversy in some quarters — the dean of the College of Education at the University of Cincinnati denounced it as “divisive” and “exclusionary” — almost nobody denied the need for change. Yet reform proved difficult to implement. The most damning testimony comes from the graduates of education schools. No professional feels completely prepared on her first day of work, but while a new lawyer might work under the tutelage of a seasoned partner, a first-year teacher usually takes charge of her classroom from the very first day. One survivor of this trial by fire is Amy Treadwell, a teacher for 10 years who received her master’s degree in education from DePaul University, a small private university in Chicago. She took courses in children’s literature and on “Race, Culture and Class”; one on the history of education, another on research, several on teaching methods. She even spent one semester as a student teacher at a Chicago elementary school. But when she walked into her first job, teaching first graders on the city’s South Side, she discovered a major shortcoming: She had no idea how to teach children to read. “I was certified and stamped with a mark of approval, and I couldn’t teach them the one thing they most needed to know how to do,” she told me.

The mechanics of teaching were not always overlooked in education schools. Modern-day teacher-educators look back admiringly to Cyrus Peirce, creator of one of the first “normal” schools (as teacher training schools were called in the 1800s), who aimed to deduce “the true methods of teaching.” Another favorite model is the Cook County Normal School, run for years by John Dewey’s precursor Francis Parker. The school graduated future teachers only if they demonstrated an ability to control a classroom at an adjacent “practice school” attended by real children; faculty members, meanwhile, used the practice school as a laboratory to hone what Parker proudly called a new “science” of education. But Peirce and Parker’s ambitions were foiled by a race to prepare teachers en masse. Between 1870 and 1900, as the country’s population surged and school became compulsory, the number of public schoolteachers in America shot from 200,000 to 400,000. Normal schools had to turn out graduates quickly; teaching students how to teach was an afterthought to getting them out the door. Thirty years later, the number was almost 850,000.

In the 20th century, as normal schools were brought under the umbrella of the modern university, other imperatives took over. Measured against the glamorous fields of history, economics and psychology, classroom technique began to look downright mundane. Many education professors adopted the tools of social science and took on schools as their subject. Others flew the banner of progressivism or its contemporary cousin constructivism: a theory of learning that emphasizes the importance of students’ taking ownership of their own work above all else.

At the same time, well-educated women and racial minorities who once made up a core of teachers began to see that they had other career options, and in increasing numbers, they took them. That left the ever-growing number of teaching jobs to a cohort with weaker academic backgrounds. The labor pool was especially shallow in cities, which, abandoned by the middle class, faced perpetual teacher shortages. Nancy Slavin, the head of teacher recruitment for the Chicago public schools, described to me a phone call in 2001 that particularly alarmed her. A prospective substitute teacher wanted to know why she hadn’t been selected for an assignment. Slavin explained that her conviction for prostitution made her ineligible. “Well,” the woman replied, a bit indignant, “I’m in a teacher-training program.”

Traditionally, education schools divide their curriculums into three parts: regular academic subjects, to make sure teachers know the basics of what they are assigned to teach; “foundations” courses that give them a sense of the history and philosophy of education; and finally “methods” courses that are supposed to offer ideas for how to teach particular subjects. Many schools add a required stint as a student teacher in a more-experienced teacher’s class. Yet schools can’t always control for the quality of the experienced teacher, and education-school professors often have little contact with actual schools. A 2006 report found that 12 percent of education-school faculty members never taught in elementary or secondary schools themselves. Even some methods professors have never set foot in a classroom or have not done so recently.

Nearly 80 percent of classroom teachers received their bachelor’s degrees in education, according to the U.S. Department of Education. Yet a 2006 report written by Arthur Levine, the former president of Teachers College, the esteemed institution at Columbia University, assessed the state of teacher education this way: “Today, the teacher-education curriculum is a confusing patchwork. Academic instruction and clinical instruction are disconnected. Graduates are insufficiently prepared for the classroom.” By emphasizing broad theories of learning rather than the particular work of the teacher, methods classes and the rest of the future teacher’s coursework often become what the historian Diane Ravitch called “the contentless curriculum.”

When Doug Lemov, who is 42, set out to become a teacher of teachers, he was painfully aware of his own limitations. A large, shy man with a Doogie Howser face, he recalls how he limped through his first year in the classroom, at a private day school in Princeton, N.J. His heartfelt lesson plans — write in your journal while listening to music; analyze Beatles songs like poems — received blank stares. “I still remember thinking: Oh, my God. I still have 45 minutes left to go,” he told me recently. Things improved over time, but very slowly. At the Academy of the Pacific Rim, a Boston charter school he helped found, he was the dean of students, a job title that is school code for chief disciplinarian, and later principal. Lemov fit the bill physically — he’s 6-foot-3 and 215 pounds — but he struggled to get students to follow his directions on the first try.

After his disappointing visit to Syracuse, he decided to seek out the best teachers he could find — as defined partly by their students’ test scores — and learn from them. A self-described data geek, he went about this task methodically, collecting test-score results and demographic information from states around the country. He plotted each school’s poverty level on one axis and its performance on state tests on the other. Each chart had a few outliers blinking in the upper-right-hand corner — schools that managed to squeeze high performance out of the poorest students. He broke those schools’ scores down by grade level and subject. If a school scored especially high on, say, sixth-grade English, he would track down the people who taught sixth graders English.

He called a wedding videographer he knew through a friend and asked him if he’d like to tag along on some school visits. Their first trip to North Star Academy, a charter school in Newark, turned into a five-year project to record teachers across the country. At first, Lemov financed the trip out of his consulting budget; later, Uncommon Schools paid for it. The odyssey produced a 357-page treatise known among its hundreds of underground fans as Lemov’s Taxonomy. (The official title, attached to a book version being released in April, is “Teach Like a Champion: The 49 Techniques That Put Students on the Path to College.”)

I first encountered the taxonomy this winter in Boston at a training workshop, one of the dozens Lemov gives each year to teachers. Central to Lemov’s argument is a belief that students can’t learn unless the teacher succeeds in capturing their attention and getting them to follow instructions. Educators refer to this art, sometimes derisively, as “classroom management.” The romantic objection to emphasizing it is that a class too focused on rules and order will only replicate the power structure; a more common view is that classroom management is essential but somewhat boring and certainly less interesting than creating lesson plans. While some education schools offer courses in classroom management, they often address only abstract ideas, like the importance of writing up systems of rules, rather than the rules themselves. Other education schools do not teach the subject at all. Lemov’s view is that getting students to pay attention is not only crucial but also a skill as specialized, intricate and learnable as playing guitar.

At the Boston seminar, Lemov played a video of a class taught by one of his teaching virtuosos, a slim man named Bob Zimmerli. Lemov used it to introduce one of the 49 techniques in his taxonomy, one he calls What to Do. The clip opens at the start of class, which Zimmerli was teaching for the first time, with children — fifth graders, all of them black, mostly boys — looking everywhere but at the board. One is playing with a pair of headphones; another is slowly paging through a giant three-ring binder. Zimmerli stands at the front of the class in a neat tie. “O.K., guys, before I get started today, here’s what I need from you,” he says. “I need that piece of paper turned over and a pencil out.” Almost no one is following his directions, but he is undeterred. “So if there’s anything else on your desk right now, please put that inside your desk.” He mimics what he wants the students to do with a neat underhand pitch. A few students in the front put papers away. “Just like you’re doing, thank you very much,” Zimmerli says, pointing to one of them. Another desk emerges neat; Zimmerli targets it. “Thank you, sir.” “I appreciate it,” he says, pointing to another. By the time he points to one last student — “Nice . . . nice” — the headphones are gone, the binder has clicked shut and everyone is paying attention.

Lemov switched off the video. “Imagine if his first direction had been, ‘Please get your things out for class,’ ” he said. Zimmerli got the students to pay attention not because of some inborn charisma, Lemov explained, but simply by being direct and specific. Children often fail to follow directions because they really don’t know what they are supposed to do. There were other tricks Zimmerli used too. Lemov pointed to technique No. 43: Positive Framing, by which teachers correct misbehavior not by chiding students for what they’re doing wrong but by offering what Lemov calls “a vision of a positive outcome.” Zimmerli’s thank-yous and just-like-you’re-doings were a perfect execution of one of Positive Framing’s sub-categories, Build Momentum/Narrate the Positive.

“It’s this positive wave; you can almost see it going across the classroom from right to left,” Lemov said. He restarted the clip and asked us to watch the boy with the binder. At the start his head is down and he is paging slowly through his binder. Ten seconds in, he looks to his left, where another boy has his paper and pencil out and is staring at Zimmerli. For the first time, he looks up at the teacher. He stops paging. “He’s like, ‘O.K., what’s this?’ ” Lemov narrated. “ ‘I guess I’m going to go with it.’ ” After 30 seconds, his binder is closed, and he’s stowing it under his desk.

All Lemov’s techniques depend on his close reading of the students’ point of view, which he is constantly imagining. In Boston, he declared himself on a personal quest to eliminate the saying of “shh” in classrooms, citing what he called “the fundamental ambiguity of ‘shh.’ Are you asking the kids not to talk, or are you asking kids to talk more quietly?” A teacher’s control, he said repeatedly, should be “an exercise in purpose, not in power.” So there is Warm/Strict, technique No. 45, in which a correction comes with a smile and an explanation for its cause — “Sweetheart, we don’t do that in this classroom because it keeps us from making the most of our learning time.”

The J-Factor, No. 46, is a list of ways to inject a classroom with joy, from giving students nicknames to handing out vocabulary words in sealed envelopes to build suspense. In Cold Call, No. 22, stolen from Harvard Business School, which Lemov attended, the students don’t raise their hands — the teacher picks the one who will answer the question. Lemov’s favorite variety has the teacher ask the question first, and then say the student’s name, forcing every single student to do the work of figuring out an answer.

All the techniques are meant to be adaptable by anyone. To illustrate cold-calling in Boston, he showed clips of four very different teachers: Mr. Rector, whose seventh graders stand up next to their chairs as he paces among them, lobbing increasingly difficult geometry problems; Ms. Lofthus, who leans back in a chair, supercasual, and smiles warmly when she surprises one second grader by calling on him twice in a row; Ms. Payne, whose kindergartners jump in their seats, clap and sing along when she introduces “in-di-vid-u-al tuu-urrns, listen for your na-aame”; and Ms. Driggs, a petite blonde with a high voice who calls the process “hot calling” and tells her fifth graders that the hardest part will be that they are not allowed to raise their hands.

But perhaps the greatest master of the techniques in the taxonomy is Lemov himself. When I first met him during the lunch break at the Boston workshop, he spent most of our conversation staring at the floor. He was perched on a windowsill in a small side room, hugging his large body close to him. “I’m a huge introvert,” he told me, explaining how, at Harvard Business School, he took a Myers-Briggs personality test that labeled him more introverted than all his other classmates. “It’s strange to me that I do what I do and that I like it as much as I do,” he said.

After lunch he returned to the main room to teach, and it was as if he had left the shy Lemov on the windowsill. A different man stood up tall and square-shouldered, with a presence that made all 30 of the teachers crane their necks toward him. When he told a joke, they laughed; when he pointed to the screen, their eyes raced after his finger. One teacher at my table, Zeke Phillips, from Harlem’s Democracy Prep Charter School, raised his eyebrows at a colleague and whispered, “This stuff is good.”

When Lemov began his project, he was working in the relative obscurity of Uncommon Schools. His decision to spend half his time building the taxonomy meant he had less time to carry out the network’s main business, opening schools. But his fellow managing directors made a calculation that the time spent building a vocabulary for teachers would be worth the slower pace. They were beginning to expand beyond their handful of schools, and they needed a hiring plan. Their first schools often relied on experienced teachers like Zimmerli, plucked from other public schools. They could continue to buy the best talent away from other schools, but as more charter-school networks emerged, the competition for the obviously great teachers was growing fierce.

They decided that rather than buy talent, they would try to build it. Today, Lemov’s taxonomy is one part of a complex training regime at Uncommon Schools that starts with new hires and continues throughout their careers. Lemov began expanding the taxonomy beyond Uncommon Schools only recently, offering workshops, like the one I attended in Boston, to a wider audience. His main clients are other charter schools, but they also include Teach for America and an immersive training program in Boston called the Match Teacher Residency that uses medical school as the model for preparing educators. His methods are also used at Teacher U, a new teacher-training program in which Uncommon Schools is a partner. Lemov is interested in offering teachers what he describes as an incentive just as powerful as cash: the chance to get better. “If it’s just a big pie, then it’s just a question of who’s getting the good teachers,” Lemov told me. “The really good question is, can you get people to improve really fast and at scale?”

ANOTHER QUESTION IS THIS: Is good classroom management enough to ensure good instruction? Heather Hill, an associate professor at Harvard University, showed me a video of a teacher called by the pseudonym Wilma. Wilma has charisma; every eye in the classroom is on her as she moves back and forth across the blackboard. But Hill saw something else. “If you look at it from a pedagogical lens, Wilma is actually a good teacher,” Hill told me. “But when you look at the math, things begin to fall apart.”

In the lesson I watched, Wilma is using a word problem to teach her class a concept called “unit rate.” The problem has to do with a boy named Dario who buys seven boxes of pasta for $6. How expensive is a box of pasta? The correct answer, 86 cents, is found by dividing six by seven, but in the quickness of the moment, Wilma wrongly divides seven by six. This produces the number of boxes Dario can buy for a dollar, not how much money it takes to buy a box. As a result, students spend the rest of the class with the wrong impression that the pasta costs $1.17, as well as the wrong idea of how to think about the problem.

Hill is a member of a group of educators, who, like Lemov, are studying great teachers. But whereas Lemov came out of the practical world of the classroom, this group is based in university research centers. And rather than focus on universal teaching techniques that can be applied across subjects and grade levels, Hill and her colleagues ask what good teachers should know about the specific subjects they teach.

The wellspring of this movement was Michigan State’s school of education, which, under the direction of Judith Lanier, one of the original Holmes Group members, took the lead in rethinking teacher education. Lanier overhauled Michigan State’s teacher-preparation program and helped open two research institutes dedicated to the study of teaching and teacher education. She recruited innovative scholars from around the country, and almost overnight East Lansing became a hotbed of education research.

One of those researchers was Deborah Loewenberg Ball, an assistant professor who also taught math part time at an East Lansing elementary school and whose classroom was a model for teachers in training. In 1990, Ball filmed her third-grade math class at the Spartan Village Elementary School, and those videos became the foundation for a great deal of teacher-training research.

On one tape from that year, Ball started her day by calling on a boy known to the researchers as Sean.

“I was just thinking about six,” Sean began. “I’m just thinking, it can be an odd number, too.” Ball did not shake her head no. Sean went on, speaking faster. “Cause there could be two, four, six, and two — three twos, that’d make six!”

“Uh-huh,” Ball said.

“And two threes,” Sean said, gaining steam. “It could be an odd and an even number. Both!”

He looked up at Ball, who was sitting in a chair among the students, wearing a black-and-red jumper and oversize eyeglasses. She continued not to contradict him, and he went on not making sense. Then Ball looked to the class. “Other people’s comments?” she asked calmly.

At this point, the class came to a pause. I was watching the video at theUniversity of Michigan’s school of education, where Ball, who has traded in her grandma glasses for black cat’s-eye frames, is now the dean — and one of the country’s foremost experts on effective teaching. (She is also on the board of the Spencer Foundation, which administers my fellowship.) Her goal in filming her class was to capture and then study, categorize and describe the work of teaching — the knowledge and skills involved in getting a class of 8-year-olds to understand a year’s worth of math. Her somewhat surprising conclusion: Teaching, even teaching third-grade math, is extraordinarily specialized, requiring both intricate skills and complex knowledge about math.

The Sean video is a case in point. Ball had a goal for that day’s lesson, and it was not to investigate the special properties of the number six. Yet by entertaining Sean’s odd idea, Ball was able to teach the class far more than if she had stuck to her lesson plan. By the end of the day, a girl from Nigeria had led the class in deriving precise definitions of even and odd; everyone — even Sean — had agreed that a number could not be both odd and even; and the class had coined a new, special type of number, one that happens to be the product of an odd number and two. They called them Sean numbers. Other memorable moments from the year include a day when they derived the concept of infinity (“You would die before you counted all the numbers!” one girl said) and another when an 8-year-old girl proved that an odd number plus an odd number will always equal an even number.

Dropping a lesson plan and fruitfully improvising requires a certain kind of knowledge — knowledge that Ball, a college French major, did not always have. In fact, she told me that math was the subject she felt least confident teaching at the beginning of her career. Frustrated, she decided to sign up for math classes at a local community college and then at Michigan State. She worked her way from calculus to number theory. “Pretty much right away,” she told me, “I saw that studying math was helping.” Suddenly, she could explain why one isn’t a prime number and why you can’t divide by zero. Most important, she finally understood math’s secret language: the kinds of questions it involves and the way ideas become proofs. But still, the effect on her teaching was fairly random. Much of the math she never used at all, while other parts of teaching still challenged her.

Working with Hyman Bass, a mathematician at the University of Michigan, Ball began to theorize that while teaching math obviously required subject knowledge, the knowledge seemed to be something distinct from what she had learned in math class. It’s one thing to know that 307 minus 168 equals 139; it is another thing to be able understand why a third grader might think that 261 is the right answer. Mathematicians need to understand a problem only for themselves; math teachers need both to know the math and to know how 30 different minds might understand (or misunderstand) it. Then they need to take each mind from not getting it to mastery. And they need to do this in 45 minutes or less. This was neither pure content knowledge nor what educators call pedagogical knowledge, a set of facts independent of subject matter, like Lemov’s techniques. It was a different animal altogether. Ball named it Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching, or M.K.T. She theorized that it included everything from the “common” math understood by most adults to math that only teachers need to know, like which visual tools to use to represent fractions (sticks? blocks? a picture of a pizza?) or a sense of the everyday errors students tend to make when they start learning about negative numbers. At the heart of M.K.T., she thought, was an ability to step outside of your own head. “Teaching depends on what other people think,” Ball told me, “not what you think.”

The idea that just knowing math was not enough to teach it seemed legitimate, but Ball wanted to test her theory. Working with Hill, the Harvard professor, and another colleague, she developed a multiple-choice test for teachers. The test included questions about common math, like whether zero is odd or even (it’s even), as well as questions evaluating the part of M.K.T. that is special to teachers. Hill then cross-referenced teachers’ results with their students’ test scores. The results were impressive: students whose teacher got an above-average M.K.T. score learned about three more weeks of material over the course of a year than those whose teacher had an average score, a boost equivalent to that of coming from a middle-class family rather than a working-class one. The finding is especially powerful given how few properties of teachers can be shown to directly affect student learning. Looking at data from New York City teachers in 2006 and 2007, a team of economists found many factors that did not predict whether their students learned successfully. One of two that were more promising: the teacher’s score on the M.K.T. test, which they took as part of a survey compiled for the study. (Another, slightly less powerful factor was the selectivity of the college a teacher attended as an undergraduate.)

Ball also administered a similar test to a group of mathematicians, 60 percent of whom bombed on the same few key questions. Wilma, incidentally, scored near the bottom on the M.K.T. test, in the 12th percentile.

Inspired by Ball, other researchers have been busily excavating parallel sets of knowledge for other subject areas. A Stanford professor named Pam Grossman is now trying to articulate a similar body of knowledge for English teachers, discerning what kinds of questions to ask about literature and how to lead a group discussion about a book.

Ball is very clear that she doesn’t think knowledge alone can make a teacher effective, and as part of her efforts to transform the University of Michigan’s teacher-training program, she has begun to classify the particular classroom actions that are also crucial. She and the faculty have settled on 19 practices they want every student to master before graduation. These include some skills related to special knowledge for teaching, but they also include some broader skills, even some that seem to belong in the classroom-management arena, like an ability to “establish norms and routines for classroom discourse.”

Ball and Lemov have never met, and Ball had not heard of Lemov’s taxonomy until I told her about it over a late dinner last December in Ann Arbor. We were joined by Bass, the mathematician, and Francesca Forzani, an alumnus of Teach for America who is managing the university’s teacher-training overhaul. Ball had just declared that teaching “is decidedly not about being yourself,” but the other two were having trouble articulating just how teachers should behave. “That’s one thing our program doesn’t address right now,” Forzani said. “How to get and hold the floor.” To answer that question, they began to dissect Ball’s methods. What did she do to capture her audience’s attention? Bass mimicked how Ball brings order at faculty meetings. “Oh, I notice Deborah is paying attention, and Francesca, and Elizabeth,” he said, going through our names. Ball laughed. “That’s a joke!” she said, explaining that she is mocking a common classroom technique that she finds manipulative — a way of embarrassing talkers by not addressing them. Her preferred approach, she said, is to say something like, “Elizabeth, I’m a little worried you might not have heard what Hy is saying.” Bass shook his head, still thinking about the faculty meetings. “But it works!” he said.

Watching their conversation was like witnessing Lemov’s taxonomy in the act of creation. The slightly manipulative narration of this-person-is-paying-attention is a version of something Lemov calls Narrate the Positive; Ball’s preferred approach, acting as if the distracted student was actually just not able to hear was Lemov’s Assume the Best; and getting and holding the floor by adopting a different persona — that was what Lemov calls Strong Voice. The more I talked about the taxonomy with Ball and her colleagues, the more it became clear that she was just as much a master of the 49 techniques as Bob Zimmerli. There were just two small differences. First, whereas Lemov’s taxonomy is content-neutral, Ball connects hers to math. The second difference was that, while these practices were so ingrained they seemed imprinted on Ball’s soul, when it came to talking about them, to passing them onto her students, she had no words.

THESE DAYS LEMOV is almost single-mindedly focused on the mechanics of teaching, the secret steps behind getting and holding the floor whether you’re teaching fractions or the American Revolution. The subject-free focus is a deliberate decision. “I believe in content-based professional development, obviously,” he told me. “But I feel like it’s insufficient. . . . It doesn’t matter what questions you’re asking if the kids are running the classroom.”

But of course, content comes up for every teacher that uses the taxonomy. I met one such teacher, Katie Bellucci, this winter when I visited Troy Prep in Troy, N.Y., just outside Albany. She had been teaching for only two months, yet her fifth-grade math class was both completely focused on her and completely quiet. Pacing happily in front of a projector screen, she showed none of the false, scripted manner so common among first-year teachers. She moved confidently from introducing the day’s material — how to calculate the mean for a set of numbers — to a quick cold-call session to review what they had already learned and finally to helping students as they tackled sample problems on their own. She even sent a disobedient student to the dean’s office without a single turned head or giggle interrupting the flow of her lesson. Her cold calls perfectly satisfied Lemov’s ideal. First, she asked the question. Then she paused a slightly uncomfortable second. And only then did she name the student destined to answer.

Bellucci, the daughter of two teachers, is a slim brunette with natural presence and a calm confidence. But her control of the classroom, she says, is thanks to the taxonomy, which she began to learn last summer, practicing different techniques in classroom simulations with her fellow teachers. The simulations were specific and practical; Bellucci told me she spent several hours practicing how to tell a student he was off task. “Without it, I’d be completely on my own,” she said. “I’d be in the dark.”

Like a good lesson, the taxonomy includes both basic and advanced material. Lately Bellucci and her mentor teacher, Eli Kramer, a dean of curriculum and instruction at Troy who also splits fifth-grade math responsibilities with Bellucci, have advanced to a technique called No Opt Out. The concept is deceptively simple: A teacher should never allow her students to avoid answering a question, however tough. “If I’m asking my students a question, and I call on somebody, and they get it wrong, I need to work on how to address that,” Bellucci explained in February. “It’s easy to be like, ‘No,’ and move on to the next person. But the hard part is to be like: ‘O.K., well, that’s your thought. Does anybody disagree? . . . I have to work on going from the student who gets it wrong to students who get it right, then back to the student who gets it wrong and ask a follow-up question to make sure they understand why they got it wrong and understood why the right answer is right.”

Part of the challenge with the higher-level techniques is that they involve not just universal teaching practices but actual math. Bellucci doesn’t just have to remember to return to the student who made the mistake; she has to figure out some way to correct that mistake in the student’s brain. For these kinds of challenges, Bellucci leans on Kramer’s seven years of experience teaching math, plus her own applied math degree from nearby Union College. She also improvises.

In other words, she could use help explaining content — the kind of thinking Ball is trying to teach education students with Math Knowledge for Teaching. Lemov and other Uncommon Schools administrators are unfamiliar with M.K.T., but some are recognizing that content can’t be completely divorced from mechanics. This fall, Uncommon Schools administrators began building new taxonomy-like tools around specific content areas. Among the subjects under analysis are elementary- and middle-school reading, upper-grade math and all levels of science.

Lemov and Ball focus on different problems, yet in another way they are compatriots in the same vanguard, arguing that great teachers are not born but made. (The Obama administration has also signaled its hopes by doubling the budget for teacher training in the 2011 budget to $235 million.) A more typical education expert is Jonah Rockoff, an economist at Columbia University, who favors policies like rewarding teachers whose students perform well and removing those who don’t but looks skeptically upon teacher training. He has an understandable reason: While study after study shows that teachers who once boosted student test scores are very likely to do so in the future, no research he can think of has shown a teacher-training program to boost student achievement. So why invest in training when, as he told me recently, “you could be throwing your money away”?

Indeed, while Ball has proved that teachers with M.K.T. help students learn more, she has not yet been able to find the best way to teach it. And while Lemov has faith in his taxonomy because he chose his champions based on their students’ test scores, this is far from scientific proof. The best evidence Lemov has now is anecdotal — the testimony of teachers like Bellucci and the impressive test scores of their students. (Among the taxonomy’s users are a New Orleans charter school that last year had the third-highest ninth-grade English scores in the city behind two selective public schools; the highest-rated middle school on New York City’s school report card; and top schools in Boston, Milwaukee, Denver and Newark.)

THOMAS KANE, a Harvard economist who studies education, used to belong to Rockoff’s skeptical camp. But he is one of several researchers who told me recently that he now has a more open mind. “I still think tenure review is important,” he said. “It’s just, I don’t think we should throw in our towel on the other things.” There is simply too much potential in improving the vast number of teachers who neither drag their students down nor pull them ahead.

By figuring out what makes the great teachers great, and passing that on to the mass of teachers in the middle, he said, “we could ensure that the average classroom tomorrow was seeing the types of gains that the top quarter of our classrooms see today.” He has made a guess about the effect that change would have. “We could close the gap between the United States and Japan on these international tests within two years.”

Kane is serious about finding the answers. He took a leave from Harvard in 2008 to work on a $335 million Gates Foundation project that will identify and support effective teaching practices. One study involves filming some 3,000 classrooms across the country and measuring them against a variety of practices, including an M.K.T.-based rubric created by Hill and her colleagues.

Lemov, for his part, finds hope in what he has already accomplished. The day that I watched Bellucci’s math class, Lemov sat next to me, beaming. He was still smiling an hour later, when we walked out of the school together to his car. “You could change the world with a first-year teacher like that,” he said.

Calendars

Thirty days hath September

Thirty days hath September,

April, June, and November;

All the rest have thirty-one,

Save February, with twenty-eight days clear,

And twenty-nine each leap year.

Distance

1 v in >	milimeter	centimeter	inch	foot	yard	meter	fathom	chain	furlong	kilometer	mile	nautical mile	light second	AU	light year
millimeter	1	0.1	0.039			.001
centimeter	10	1	0.394			.01				100000
inch	25.4	2.54	1
foot	304.8	30.48	12	1	3		6	66	660			6076
yard	914.4	91.4	36	3	1						1760
meter	1000					1				1000
fathom				6			1
chain				66				1
furlong				660					1
kilometer										1	1.609344	1.852		149 598 000	9.4605284 × 1012
mile				5280	1760	1609.344				1.609344	1			92 955 887.6
nautical mile				6076		1852				1.852		1
light second						3×108							1
AU						149.598×109				149.60×106	92.956×106			1
light year										9.4605284 × 1012					1

Electrical Relationships

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» Demonstrative Adjectives Quiz

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» Predicate Adjective

» Predicate Adjective Worksheet for All Ages

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» What Is a Comparative Adjective?

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» What Is a Participial Adjective?

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» What Is an Adjective?

Adverbs

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» List of 100 Adverbs

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» What Does the Adverb Modify?

» What Is an Adverb?

Capitalization

» 10 Rules of Capitalization

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» Capitalization Games

» Capitalization of Animal Names

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Conjunctions

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» What Is a Conjunction?

English Grammar Rules & Usage

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Grammar Games

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» List of Two-Letter Scrabble Words

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Grammar Rules and Grammar Tips

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» 5 Most Common Grammatical Errors

» Active Writing Tips

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» Finding Antonyms for Words

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» Five Tips to Writing an Effective Email

» General Tips for Writing Your Employee Self Appraisal

» Grammar Clause

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» Guide for Grammar in Writing

» Helpful Tips for Writing an Abstract

» How Do You Write a Research Proposal for Academic Writing

» Independent and Dependent Clauses

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» Printable Free 7th Grade English Grammar Crossword Puzzles

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» Rules for There and Their

» Rules for Writing Numbers

» Satire Writing Tips

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» Tips for Writing a Briefing Document

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» Tips on Writing the Contents of a Brochure

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» Tips on Writing User Manuals

» Use a Thesaurus to Find Antonyms

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» When to Use Good and When to Use Well

» When to Use Which or That

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Grammar Style and Usage

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» Benefits of Emotional Journal Writing

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» Commonly Confused Words

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» English Grammar Usage Possessives

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» Famous Birthday Quotes

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» International Business Communication Etiquette Writing

» Journal Writing Techniques

» Key Words and Statements That Are Good to Use to Describe Yourself

» Kinds of Technical Writing

» List of Transition Words

» Love Expression in Words

» Negative Words to Avoid in Writing

» Persuasive Essay Writing Made Easy

» Positive Words for Evaluating Employees

» Report Writing Format

» Rules for Writing Haiku

» Sentimental Words for Dad's Birthday

» Sexist Language

» Steps for Writing a Persuasive Speech

» Steps to Writing a Research Paper

» Strategies to Improve Summary Writing

» Thoughtful Words for a Thank You Card

» Tips for Writing Essays

» Top 10 Argumentative Essay Topics

» Types of Business Communication Writing

» Unbiased Language

» Using Contractions Correctly

» What Are Some 21st Birthday Jokes?

» What Are Some 21st Birthday Sayings?

» What Are Some 21st Birthday Toasts?

» What Are Some 40 Year Old Jokes?

» What Is Effective Writing Communication

» Words for a 75th Birthday Celebration

» Words for Birthday Wishes

» Words of Appreciation

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» Words of Encouragement to One You Love

» Words that Begin with the Letter H

» Words that Describe a First Impression

» Words that Describe a Good Friendship

» Words That Describe a Tornado

» Words That Describe Personality Traits

» Words that Describe Slow Drivers

» Words to Say at a Funeral

» Words to Thank a Teacher

» Words to Thank Volunteers

» Words to Wish You a Merry Christmas

» Writing a Business Proposal

» Writing a Commemorative Speech

» Writing a Concise Business Email

» Writing a Creative Cover Letter

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» Writing a School Election Speech

» Writing an Effective Letter to a Judge

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» Writing the One Minute Persuasive Speech

» Writing Your Valedictorian Speech

» YourDictionary Defines 2011 with 11 Trending Words

Interjections

» Interjections Worksheet

» List of Interjections

» What Is an Interjection?

Nouns

» Abstract Nouns

» Collective Noun Worksheet

» Collective Nouns

» Common and Proper Noun

» Common and Proper Noun Worksheets

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» Compound Noun Worksheet

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» Possessive Nouns

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» What Is a Determiner?

» What Is a Noun?

Prepositions

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» List of Common Prepositions

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Pronouns

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» Demonstrative Pronoun Quiz

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» Free Pronoun Worksheets

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» Indefinite Pronoun Worksheets

» Interrogative Pronoun

» List of Personal Pronouns

» Nominative Pronoun

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» Pronoun Antecedent Agreement

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» Reflexive Pronoun

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» Subject Versus Object Pronouns

» Types of Pronouns

» What Is a Demonstrative Pronoun?

» What Is a Possessive Pronoun?

» What Is a Pronoun?

» What Is a Singular Pronoun?

» Why Do People Have Difficulty with Pronoun Usage in English?

Punctuation Rules

» Apostrophe Rules

» Basic Punctuation Rules and Help

» Colons, Semicolons and Dashes

» Comma Rules

» Comma Usage

» Free Worksheets on Quotation Marks for Elementary Grades

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» Hyphen Rules

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» Titles Using Italics and Quotation Marks

» Using Quotation Marks When Citing Information

» What Are the Fourteen Punctuation Marks in English Grammar?

» When to Italicize

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» Where do you Put Quotes When Using a Registered Trademark?

Quotes

» 80's Catch Phrases

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» Funny Fortune Cookie Sayings

» Funny Jewish Sayings

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» Funny Quotes About Science

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» Funny Redneck Sayings

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» Funny Words to Live By

» Go Green Catch Phrases

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» King David's Last Words

» Last Words Paul Warner Powell

» Last Words Spoken by John Dillinger

» Quotes About Being Confused

» Quotes About Life Lessons

» Quotes About Moving On

» Quotes About Reading

» Republican Catch Phrases

» Summer Catch Phrases

» Very Sweet Love Quotes

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» What Are Some Romantic Italian Phrases?

» What are some Trippy Quotes from Alice in Wonderland?

» Words of Wisdom

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Rhymes

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» Nursery Rhyme List

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» Rhyme Generator

» Rhyme to Remember British Royalty

Sentences

» 15 Sentences Using Compound Subjects and Compound Verbs

» 20 Rules of Subject Verb Agreement

» Compound Sentences

» Diagramming Sentences

» Free Diagramming Sentences Worksheet

» Grammar Patterns for Sentences

» Rules for Combining Sentences

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» What Are the Different Parts of a Sentence?

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» Writing Complex Compound Sentences

Slang

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» 20 Examples of Slang Language

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» American Slang Dictionary

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» Dictionary of Black Slang

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» History of American Slang Words

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» How Slang Affects the English Language

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» Jewish Slang Words

» Military Slang Sayings

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» Proper English versus Slang

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» Russian Immigrants Slang

» Slang Terms for Heroin

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» Some Slang Words for Police

» Spanish Slang

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» What are Some Beatnik Slang Terms?

» What Is 420 Slang For?

» Yiddish Slang

Spelling and Spelling Activities

» 100 Most Often Mispelled Misspelled Words in English

» 150 More Often Mispelled Misspelled Words in English

» 1st Grade Spelling Words

» 2nd Grade Spelling Words

» 3rd Grade Spelling Words

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» 8th Grade Spelling Rules

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Verbs

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» English Verb Tenses 2

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» Quiz in Subject Verb Agreement

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» Transitional Verbs

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» What Are English Tenses Classifications?

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» What Is a Verb?

» What Is an Irregular Verb?

Vocabulary Words

» 10 Long Science Words

» 10 Words that Describe Recycling

» 3 Letter Palindromes

» 4th Grade Science Vocabulary Words for Sound and Light

» A List of Musical Terms

» A List of Words Ending With "Cian"

» Accounting Terms for a Balance Sheet

» CCVC Word Lists

» Common Three Letter Words

» Computer Terms for Children

» Corporate Buzz Words

» Elementary Science Vocabulary Words

» English Words that End with a Silent E

» Everyday Math Vocabulary Words

» Four Letter Words That Begin With CE

» Four Letter Words that Begin with X

» Four Letter Words That End With "ec"

» Four Letter Words that End with CE

» Funny Irish Words and Phrases

» Funny S Words

» Funny Southern Words

» Funny Words Related to Babies

» Geometry Terms and Their Definitions

» Government Accounting Terms

» Industry Buzz Words for Nanotechnology

» Italian Musical Terms Used in English

» List 3 Words that End in Gry

» List of Beautiful Words

» List of Cool Words from the 70s

» List of Descriptive Words

» List of Descriptive Words for Appearance

» List of Descriptive Words to Critique Art

» List of English Words of Foreign Origin

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» List of English Words of Hindi or Urdu Origin

» List of English Words of Italian Origin

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» List of English Words of Tagalog Origin

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» List of Four Letter Words That Start with the Letter S

» List of Power Words for a Resume

» List of Romantic Words

» List of Short Vowel Words

» List of Words and Phrases Shakespeare Invented

» List of Words that Describe Behavior

» List of Words that Describe the United States

» Longest Words in the English Language

» Medical Terms Metabolic Panel

» More About Words that End with the Letter Q

» Most Commonly Spoken Words in English

» Musical Terms for Slower

» Performance Appraisal Buzz Words

» Physical Geography Terms and Definitions

» Rare Six Letter Words

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» Singular and Plural Irregular English Verb Chart

» Six Letter Words Starting With the Letter T

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» Vocabulary Lists

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» What Are Some Words that Describe Wood?

» Words Ending in Letter Q

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» Words that Begin with the Letter A

» Words that Begin with the Letter B

» Words That Begin with the Letter C

» Words That Begin with the Letter D

» Words That Begin with the Letter E

» Words That Begin with the Letter F

» Words that Begin with the Letter G

» Words that Begin with the Letter H

» Words That Begin with the Letter I

» Words That Begin with the Letter J

» Words That Begin with the Letter K

» Words that Begin with the Letter L

» Words that Begin with the Letter M

» Words That Begin with the Letter N

» Words that Begin with the Letter O

» Words that Begin with the Letter P

» Words That Begin with the Letter Q

» Words that Begin with the Letter R

» Words that Begin with the Letter S

» Words that Begin with the Letter T

» Words that Begin With the Letter U

» Words that Begin With the Letter V

» Words that Begin with the Letter W

» Words That Begin with the Letter X

» Words that Begin with the Letter Y

» Words that Begin With the Letter Z

» Words that Describe Negative Attitudes

» Words with Double Letters

Geometry from Points to Triangles- Glossary & Pronunciation Guide

 

 

Dimensions Pronunciation

One Dimensional

Two Dimensional

Three Dimensional

Points and lines: Pronunciation

Point

Ray

Line

Line Segment

Colinear

Non-colinear

Parallel

Converging

Diverging

Eucledian Plane

Angles: Pronunciation

Acute < 90

Right = 90

Obtuse > 90

Straight = 180

Circles:

Center

Radius

Diameter

Perimeter

Circumference

Sagitta

Apothem

Polygons:

Triangles

Scalene = all sides different

Isosceles = 2 sides the same

Equilateral = 3 sides same

Acute

Right

Obtuse

Similar

Congruent

Interior Angle

Exterior Angle

Pythagorean Theorem

Hypotenuse

Adjacent

Opposite

Spheres

http://library.thinkquest.org/20991/geo/parallel.html

http://www.mathnstuff.com/math/spoken/here/2class/260/trans.htm

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_polygon#Regular_convex_polygons

Pronunciation:

Equilateral triangle {3}	Square {4}	Pentagon {5}	Hexagon {6}	Heptagon {7}	Octagon {8}	Enneagon {9}	Decagon {10}
Hendecagon {11}	Dodecagon {12}	Tridecagon {13}	Tetradecagon {14}	Pentadecagon {15}	Hexadecagon {16}	Heptadecagon {17}	Octadecagon {18}	Enneadecagon {19}
Icosagon {20}	Triacontagon {30}	Tetracontagon {40}	Pentacontagon {50}	Hexacontagon {60}	Heptacontagon {70}	Octacontagon {80}	Enneacontagon {90}	Hectogon {100}

Greetings from Idiot America

Source: http://www.esquire.com
Credits: Charles P. Pierce
Dated: 2010-10-31

Creationism. Intelligent Design. Faith-based this. Trust-your-gut that. There's never been a better time to espouse, profit from, and believe in utter, unadulterated crap. And the crap is rising so high, it's getting dangerous.

There is some undeniable art -- you might even say design -- in the way southern Ohio rolls itself into northern Kentucky. The hills build gently under you as you leave the interstate. The roads narrow beneath a cool and thickening canopy as they wind through the leafy outer precincts of Hebron -- a small Kentucky town named, as it happens, for the place near Jerusalem where the Bible tells us that David was anointed the king of the Israelites. This resulted in great literature and no little bloodshed, which is the case with a great deal of Scripture.

At the top of the hill, just past the Idlewild Concrete plant, there is an unfinished wall with an unfinished gate in the middle of it. Happy, smiling people are trickling in through the gate this fine morning, one minivan at a time. They park in whatever shade they can find, which is not much. It's hot as hell this morning.

They are almost uniformly white and almost uniformly bubbly. Their cars come from Kentucky and Tennessee and Ohio and Illinois and as far away as New Brunswick, Canada. There are elderly couples in shorts, suburban families piling out of the minivans, the children all Wrinkle-Resistant and Stain-Released. There is a clutch of Mennonite women in traditional dress -- small bonnets and long skirts. All of them wander off, chattering and waving and stopping every few steps for pictures, toward a low-slung building that seems from the outside to be the most finished part of the complex.

Outside, several of them stop to be interviewed by a video crew. They have come from Indiana, one woman says, two toddlers toddling at her feet, because they have been home-schooling their children and they have given them this adventure as a kind of field trip. The whole group then bustles into the lobby of the building, where they are greeted by the long neck of a huge, herbivorous dinosaur. The kids run past that and around a corner, where stands another, smaller dinosaur.

Which is wearing a saddle.

It is an English saddle, hornless and battered. Apparently, this was a dinosaur used for dressage competitions and stakes races. Any working dinosaur accustomed to the rigors of ranch work and herding other dinosaurs along the dusty trail almost certainly would wear a sturdy western saddle.

This is very much a show dinosaur.

The dinosaurs are the first things you see when you enter the Creation Museum, which is very much a work in progress and the dream child of an Australian named Ken Ham. Ham is the founder of Answers in Genesis, an organization of which the museum one day will be the headquarters. The people here today are on a special tour. They have paid $149 to become "charter members" of the museum.

"Dinosaurs," Ham laughs as he poses for pictures with his visitors, "always get the kids interested."

AIG is dedicated to the proposition that the biblical story of the creation of the world is inerrant in every word. Which means, in this interpretation and among other things, that dinosaurs coexisted with man (hence the saddles), that there were dinosaurs in Eden, and that Noah, who certainly had enough on his hands, had to load two brachiosaurs onto the Ark along with his wife, his sons, and their wives, to say nothing of green ally-gators and long-necked geese and humpty-backed camels and all the rest.

(Faced with the obvious question of how to keep a three-hundred-by-thirty-by-fifty-cubit ark from sinking under the weight of dinosaur couples, Ham's literature argues that the dinosaurs on the Ark were young ones, and thus did not weigh as much as they might have.)

"We," Ham exclaims to the assembled, "are taking the dinosaurs back from the evolutionists!" And everybody cheers.

Ham then goes on to celebrate the great victory won in Oklahoma, where, in the first week of June, Tulsa park officials announced a decision (later reversed) to put up a display at the city zoo based on Genesis so as to eliminate the "discrimination" long inflicted upon sensitive Christians by a statue of the Hindu god Ganesh that decorated the elephant exhibit.

This is a serious crowd. They gather in the auditorium and they listen intently, and they take copious notes as Ham draws a straight line from Adam's fall to our godless public schools, from Darwin to gay marriage. He talks about the triumph over Ganesh, and everybody cheers again.

Ultimately, the heart of the museum will be a long walkway down which patrons will be able to journey through the entire creation story. This, too, is still in the earliest stages of construction. Today, for example, one young artist is working on a scale model of the moment when Adam names all the creatures. Adam is in the delicate process of naming the saber-toothed tiger while, behind him, already named, a woolly mammoth seems to be on the verge of taking a nap.

Elsewhere in the museum, another Adam figure is full-size, if unpainted, and waiting to be installed. This Adam is reclining peacefully; eventually, if the plans stay true, he will be placed in a pool under a waterfall. As the figure depicts a prelapsarian Adam, he is completely naked. He also has no penis.

This would seem to be a departure from Scripture inconsistent with the biblical literalism of the rest of the museum. If you're willing to stretch Job's description of a "behemoth" to include baby brachiosaurs on Noah's Ark, as Ham does in his lectures, then surely, since we are depicting him before the fall, Adam should be out there waving unashamedly in the paradisaical breezes. For that matter, what is Eve doing there, across the room, with her hair falling just so to cover her breasts and midsection, as though she's doing a nude scene from some 1950s Swedish art-house film?

After all, Genesis 2:25 clearly says that at this point in their lives, "And the man and his wife were both naked, and they were not ashamed." If Adam courageously sat there unencumbered while he was naming saber-toothed tigers, then why, six thousand years later, should he be depicted as a eunuch in some family-values Eden? And if these people can take away what Scripture says was rightfully his, then why can't Charles Darwin and the accumulated science of the past 150-odd years take away all the rest of it?

These are impolite questions. Nobody asks them here by the cool pond tucked into a gentle hillside. Increasingly, nobody asks them outside the gates, either. It is impolite to wonder why our parents sent us all to college, and why generations of immigrants sweated and bled so their children could be educated, if it wasn't so that we would all one day feel confident enough to look at a museum filled with dinosaurs rigged to run six furlongs at Belmont and make the not unreasonable point that it is all batshit crazy and that anyone who believes this righteous hooey should be kept away from sharp objects and his own money.

Dinosaurs with saddles?

Dinosaurs on Noah's Ark?

Welcome to your new Eden.

Welcome to Idiot America.

Let's take a tour, shall we? For the sake of time, we'll just cover the last year or so.

A federally funded abstinence program suggests that HIV can be transmitted through tears. An Alabama legislator proposes a bill to ban all books by gay authors. The Texas House passes a bill banning suggestive cheerleading. And nobody laughs at any of it, or even points out that, in the latter case, having Texas ban suggestive cheerleading is like having Nebraska ban corn.

James Dobson, a prominent conservative Christian spokesman, compares the Supreme Court to the Ku Klux Klan. Pat Robertson, another prominent conservative preacher, says that federal judges are a more serious threat to the country than is Al Qaeda and, apparently taking his text from the Book of Gambino, later sermonizes that the United States should get with it and snuff the democratically elected president of Venezuela.

The Congress of the United States intervenes to extend into a televised spectacle the prolonged death of a woman in Florida. The majority leader of the Senate, a physician, pronounces a diagnosis based on heavily edited videotape. The majority leader of the House of Representatives argues against cutting-edge research into the use of human stem cells by saying that "an embryo is a person.... We were all at one time embryos ourselves. So was Abraham. So was Muhammad. So was Jesus of Nazareth." Nobody laughs at him or points out that the same could be said of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, or whoever invented the baby-back rib.

And, finally, in August, the cover of Time -- for almost a century the dyspeptic voice of the American establishment -- clears its throat, hems and haws and hacks like a headmaster gagging on his sherry, and asks, quite seriously: "Does God have a place in science class?"

Fights over evolution -- and its faddish new camouflage, intelligent design, a pseudoscience that posits without proof or method that science is inadequate to explain existence and that supernatural causes must be considered -- roil up school districts across the country. The president of the United States announces that he believes ID ought to be taught in the public schools on an equal footing with the theory of evolution. And in Dover, Pennsylvania, during one of these many controversies, a pastor named Ray Mummert delivers the line that both ends our tour and, in every real sense, sums it up:

"We've been attacked," he says, "by the intelligent, educated segment of the culture."

And there it is.

Idiot America is not the place where people say silly things. It's not the place where people believe in silly things. It is not the place where people go to profit from the fact that people believe in silly things. Idiot America is not even those people who believe that Adam named the dinosaurs. Those people pay attention. They take notes. They take the time and the considerable mental effort to construct a worldview that is round and complete.

The rise of Idiot America is essentially a war on expertise. It's not so much antimodernism or the distrust of intellectual elites that Richard Hofstadter deftly teased out of the national DNA forty years ago. Both of those things are part of it. However, the rise of Idiot America today represents -- for profit mainly, but also, and more cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power -- the breakdown of a consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people whom we should trust the least are the people who best know what they're talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a preacher, or a scientist, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.

In the place of expertise, we have elevated the Gut, and the Gut is a moron, as anyone who has ever tossed a golf club, punched a wall, or kicked an errant lawn mower knows. We occasionally dress up the Gut by calling it "common sense." The president's former advisor on medical ethics regularly refers to the "yuck factor." The Gut is common. It is democratic. It is the roiling repository of dark and ancient fears. Worst of all, the Gut is faith-based.

It's a dishonest phrase for a dishonest time, "faith-based," a cheap huckster's phony term of art. It sounds like an additive, an artificial flavoring to make crude biases taste of bread and wine. It's a word for people without the courage to say they are religious, and it is beloved not only by politicians too cowardly to debate something as substantial as faith but also by Idiot America, which is too lazy to do it.

After all, faith is about the heart and soul and about transcendence. Anything calling itself faith-based is admitting that it is secular and profane. In the way that it relies on the Gut to determine its science, its politics, and even the way it sends its people to war, Idiot America is not a country of faith; it's a faith-based country, fashioning itself in the world, which is not the place where faith is best fashioned.

Hofstadter saw this one coming. "Intellect is pitted against feeling," he wrote, "on the ground that it is somehow inconsistent with warm emotion. It is pitted against character, because it is widely believed that intellect stands for mere cleverness, which transmutes easily into the sly or the diabolical."

The Gut is the basis for the Great Premises of Idiot America. We hold these truths to be self-evident:
1) Any theory is valid if it sells books, soaks up ratings, or otherwise moves units.
2) Anything can be true if somebody says it on television.
3) Fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is determined by how fervently they believe it.

How does it work? This is how it works. On August 21, a newspaper account of the "intelligent design" movement contained this remarkable sentence: "They have mounted a politically savvy challenge to evolution as the bedrock of modern biology, propelling a fringe academic movement onto the front pages and putting Darwin's defenders firmly on the defensive."

A "politically savvy challenge to evolution" is as self-evidently ridiculous as an agriculturally savvy challenge to euclidean geometry would be. It makes as much sense as conducting a Gallup poll on gravity or running someone for president on the Alchemy Party ticket. It doesn't matter what percentage of people believe they ought to be able to flap their arms and fly, none of them can. It doesn't matter how many votes your candidate got, he's not going to turn lead into gold. The sentence is so arrantly foolish that the only real news in it is where it appeared.

On the front page.

Of The New York Times.

Within three days, there was a panel on the subject on Larry King Live, in which Larry asked the following question:

"All right, hold on. Dr. Forrest, your concept of how can you out-and-out turn down creationism, since if evolution is true, why are there still monkeys?"

And why do so many of them host television programs, Larry?

This is how Idiot America engages the great issues of the day. It decides, en masse, with a thousand keystrokes and clicks of the remote control, that because there are two sides to every question, they both must be right, or at least not wrong. And the poor biologist's words carry no more weight than the thunderations of some turkey-neck preacher out of the Church of Christ's Own Parking Facility in DeLand, Florida. Less weight, in fact, because our scientist is an "expert" and, therefore, an "elitist." Nobody buys his books. Nobody puts him on cable. He's brilliant, surely, but his Gut's the same as ours. He just ignores it, poor fool.

This is a great country, in no small part because it is the best country ever devised in which to be a public crank. Never has a nation so dedicated itself to the proposition that not only should its people hold nutty ideas but they should cultivate them, treasure them, shine them up, and put them right there on the mantelpiece. This is still the best country ever in which to peddle complete public lunacy. The right to do so is there in our founding documents.

After all, the Founders were men of the Enlightenment, fashioning a country out of new ideas--or out of old ones that they excavated from centuries of religious internment. Historian Charles Freeman points out that in Europe, "Christian thought...often gave irrationality the status of a universal 'truth' to the exclusion of those truths to be found through reason. So the uneducated was preferred to the educated, and the miracle to the operation of natural laws."

In America, the Founders were trying to get away from all that, to raise a nation of educated people. In pledging their faith to intellectual experimentation, however, the Founders set freedom free. They devised the best country ever in which to be completely around the bend. It's just that making a respectable living out of it used to be harder work.

They call it the Infinite Corridor, which is the kind of joke you tell when your day job is to throw science as far ahead as you can and hope that the rest of us can move fast enough to catch up. It is a series of connecting hallways that run north through the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The hallways are lined with cramped offices, their doors mottled thickly with old tape and yellowing handbills. The Infinite Corridor is not a straight line. It has branches and tributaries. It has backwaters and eddies. You can get lost there.

One of the offices belongs to Professor Kip Hodges, a young and energetic North Carolinian who studies how mountain ranges develop and grow. Suffice it to say that Hodges's data do not correspond to the six-thousand-year-old earth of the creationists, whereupon dinosaurs and naked folks doth gambol together.

Hodges is recently returned from Nepal, where he rescued his research from encroaching Maoist rebels, who were not interested in the least in how the Himalayas became the Himalayas. They were interested in land, in guns, in power, and in other things of the Gut. Moreover, part of Hodges's duties at MIT has been to mentor incoming freshmen about making careers in science for themselves.

"Scientists are always portrayed in the literature as being above the fray intellectually," Hodges says. "I guess to a certain extent that's our fault, because scientists don't do a good enough job communicating with people who are nonscientists -- that it's not a matter of brainiacs doing one thing and nonbrainiacs doing another."

Americans of a certain age grew up with science the way an earlier generation grew up with baseball and even earlier ones grew up with politics and religion. America cured diseases. It put men on the moon. It thought its way ahead in the cold war and stayed there.

"My earliest memory," Hodges recalls, "is watching John Glenn go up. It was a time that, if you were involved in science or engineering -- particularly science, at that time -- people greatly respected you if you said you were going into those fields. And nowadays, it's like there's no value placed by society on a lot of the observations that are made by people in science.

"It's more than a general dumbing down of America -- the lack of self-motivated thinking: clear, creative thinking. It's like you're happy for other people to think for you. If you should be worried about, say, global warming, well, somebody in Washington will tell me whether or not I should be worried about global warming. So it's like this abdication of intellectual responsibility -- that America now is getting to the point that more and more people would just love to let somebody else think for them."

The country was founded by people who were fundamentally curious; Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, to name only the most obvious examples, were inveterate tinkerers. (Before dispatching Lewis and Clark into the Louisiana Territory, Jefferson insisted that the pair categorize as many new plant and animal species as they found. Considering they were also mapping everything from Missouri to Oregon, this must have been a considerable pain in the canoe.) Further, they assumed that their posterity would feel much the same as they did; in 1815, appealing to Congress to fund the building of a national university, James Madison called for the development of "a nursery of enlightened preceptors."

It is a long way from that to the moment on February 18, 2004, when sixty-two scientists, including a clutch of Nobel laureates, released a report accusing the incumbent administration of manipulating science for political ends. It is a long way from Jefferson's observatory and Franklin's kite to George W. Bush, in an interview in 2005, suggesting that intelligent design be taught alongside the theory of evolution in the nation's science classes. "Both sides ought to be properly taught," said the president, "so people can understand what the debate is about."

The "debate," of course, is nothing of the sort, because two sides are required for a debate. Nevertheless, the very notion of it is a measure of how scientific discourse, and the way the country educates itself, has slipped through lassitude and inattention across the border into Idiot America -- where fact is merely that which enough people believe, and truth is measured only by how fervently they believe it.

If we have abdicated our birthright to scientific progress, we have done so by moving the debate into the realm of political and cultural argument, where we all feel more confident, because it is there that the Gut rules. Held to this standard, any scientific theory is rendered mere opinion. Scientific fact is no more immutable than a polling sample. This is how there's a "debate" over the very existence of global warming, even though the preponderance of fact among those who actually have studied the phenomenon renders the "debate" quite silly. The debate is about making people feel better about driving SUVs. The debate is less about climatology than it is about guiltlessly topping off your tank and voting in tax incentives for oil companies.

The rest of the world looks on in cockeyed wonder. The America of Franklin and Edison, of Fulton and Ford, of the Manhattan project and the Apollo program, the America of which Einstein wanted to be a part, seems to be enveloping itself in a curious fog behind which it's tying itself in knots over evolution, for pity's sake, and over the relative humanity of blastocysts versus the victims of Parkinson's disease.

"Even in the developing world, where I spend lots of time doing my work," Hodges says, "if you tell them that you're from MIT and you tell them that you do science, it's a big deal. If I go to India and tell them I'm from MIT, it's a big deal. In Thailand, it's a big deal. If I go to Iowa, they could give a rat's ass. And that's a weird thing, that we're moving in that direction as a nation."

Hence, Bush was not talking about science -- not in any real sense, anyway. Intelligent design is a theological construct, a faith-based attempt to gussy up creationism in a lab coat. Its fundamental tenets cannot be experimentally verified -- or, most important, falsified. That it enjoys a certain public cachet is irrelevant; a higher percentage of Americans believes that a government conspiracy killed John F. Kennedy than believes in intelligent design, but there is no great effort abroad in the land to include that conspiracy theory in sixth-grade history texts. Bush wasn't talking about science. He was talking about the political utility of putting saddles on the dinosaurs and breaking Ganesh's theological monopoly over the elephant paddock.

"The reason the creationists have been so effective is that they have put a premium on communication skills," explains Hodges. "It matters to them that they can talk to the guy in the bar, and it's important to them, and they are hugely effective at it."

It is the ultimate standard of Idiot America. How does it play to Joe Six-Pack in the bar? At the end of August 2004, the Zogby people discovered that 57 percent of undecided voters would rather have a beer with George Bush than with John Kerry. Now, how many people with whom you've spent time drinking beer would you trust with the nuclear launch codes? Not only is this not a question for a nation of serious citizens, it's not even a question for a nation of serious drunkards.

If even scientific discussion is going to be dragged into politics, then the discussion there at least ought to exist on a fairly sophisticated level. Again, the Founders thought it should. They considered self-government a science that required an informed and educated and enlightened populace to make all the delicate mechanisms run. Instead, today we have the Kabuki politics and marionette debates best exemplified by cable television. Instead, the discussion of everything ends up in the bar.

(It wasn't always this way. Theodore Roosevelt is reckoned to be the manliest of our manly-man presidents. He also was a lifelong science dweeb, cataloging songbirds, of all things. Of course, he shot them first, so maybe that makes all the difference.)

It is, of course, television that has allowed Idiot America to run riot within the modern politics and all forms of public discourse. It is not that there is less information on television than there once was. (That there is less news is another question entirely.) In fact, there is so much information that fact is now defined as something that so many people believe that television notices it, and truth is measured by how fervently they believe it.

"You don't need to be credible on television," explains Keith Olbermann, the erudite host of his own show on MSNBC. "You don't need to be authoritative. You don't need to be informed. You don't need to be honest. All these things that we used to associate with what we do are no longer factors.

"There is an entire network [the Fox News Channel] that bills itself as news that is devoted to reinforcing people's fears and saying to them, 'This is what you should be scared of, and here's whose fault it is,'" Olbermann says. "And that's what they get -- two or three million frustrated paranoids who sit in front of the TV and go, 'Damn right, it's those liberals' fault.' Or, 'It's those -- what's the word for it? -- college graduates' fault.' "

The reply, of course, is that Fox regularly buries Olbermann and the rest of the MSNBC lineup in breaking off a segment of a smidgen of a piece of the television audience. Truth is what moves the needle. Fact is what sells.

Idiot America is a bad place for crazy notions. Its indolent tolerance of them causes the classic American crank to drift slowly and dangerously into the mainstream, wherein the crank loses all of his charm and the country loses another piece of its mind. The best thing about American crackpots used to be that they would stand proudly aloof from a country that, by their peculiar lights, had gone mad. Not today. Today, they all have book deals, TV shows, and cases pending in federal court.

Once, it was very hard to get into the public square and very easy to fall out of it. One ill-timed word, even a whiff of public scandal, and all the hard work you did in the grange hall on all those winter nights was for nothing. No longer. You can be Bill Bennett, gambling with both fists, but if your books still sell, you can continue to scold the nation about its sins. You can be Bill O'Reilly, calling up subordinates to proposition them both luridly and comically--loofahs? falafels?--and if more people tune in to watch you than tune in to watch some other blowhard, you can keep your job lecturing America about the dangers of its secular culture. Just don't be boring. And keep the ratings up. Idiot America wants to be entertained.

Because scientific expertise was dragged into political discussion, and because political discussion is hopelessly corrupt, the distrust of scientific expertise is now as general as the distrust of politicians is. Everyone is an expert, so nobody is. For example, Sean Hannity's knowledge of, say, stem-cell research is measured precisely by his ratings book. His views on the subject are more well known than those of the people doing the actual research.

The credibility of Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania on the subject of the cultural anthropology of the American family ought to be, well, minimal. He spent the summer promoting a book in which he propounded theories on the subject that were progressively loopier. "For some parents," he writes, "the purported need to provide things for their children simply provides a convenient rationalization for pursuing a gratifying career outside the home." He goes on later to compare a woman's right to choose an abortion unfavorably with the institution of slavery. Nevertheless, he's welcome in the mainstream, at least until either he's defeated for reelection or his book doesn't sell.

"Somewhere along the line, we stopped rewarding intelligence with success and stopped equating intelligence with success," Olbermann says. We're all in the bar now, where everybody's an expert, where the Gut makes everyone so very sure. All opinions are of equal worth. No voice is more authoritative than any others; some are just louder. Of course, the problem in the bar is that sooner or later, for reasons that nobody will remember in the clear light of the next morning, some noisy asshole picks a fight. And it becomes clear that the rise of Idiot America has consequences.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, nobody in the American government knew more than Richard Clarke did on the subject of a shadowy terrorist network called Al Qaeda. He had watched it grow. He had watched it strike -- in New York and in Africa and in the harbor in Yemen. That morning, in the Situation Room in the White House, Clarke watched the buildings burn and fall, and he recognized the organization's signature as well as he'd recognize his own. Instead, in the ensuing days a lot of people around him -- people who didn't know enough about Al Qaeda to throw to a cat -- wanted to talk about Iraq. What they believed trumped what Clarke knew, over and over again. He left the government.

"In the 1970s and 1980s, when the key issue became arms control, the traditional diplomats couldn't do the negotiating because that negotiating involved science and engineering," Clarke recalls. "Interagency decision papers were models of analysis, where assumptions were laid out and tested.

"That's the world I grew up in. [The approach] still applied to issues, even terrorism. Then these people come in, and they already have the answers, how to spin it, how to get the rest of the world on board. I thought, Wait a minute. That isn't analysis. It's the important issues where we really need analysis.

"In the area of terrorism, there is a huge potential for emotional reaction. The one thing I told my team [on September 11] -- they were mad and they were crying, the whole range of emotions -- was that we didn't have time for emotion that day."

Nothing that the administration of George W. Bush has done has been inconsistent with the forces that twice elected it. The subtle, humming engine of its success -- against John Kerry, surely, but most vividly against poor, cerebral Al Gore -- was a celebration of instinct over intellect, a triumph of the Gut. No campaigns in history employed the saloon question with such devastating success or saw so clearly the path through the deliberate inexpertise of the national debate. No politician in recent times has played to the Gut so deftly.

So it ought not shock anyone when the government suddenly found itself at odds with empirical science. It ought not shock anyone in the manner in which it would go to war. Remember the beginning, when it was purely the Gut -- a bone-deep call for righteous revenge for which Afghanistan was not sufficient response. In Iraq, there would be towering stacks of chemical bombs, a limitless smorgasbord of deadly bacteria, vast lagoons of exotic poisons. There would be candy and flowers greeting our troops. The war would take six months, a year, tops. Mission Accomplished. Major combat operations are over.

"Part of the problem was that people didn't want the analytic process because they'd be shown up," Richard Clarke says. "Their assumptions would be counterfactual. One of the real areas of expertise, for example, was failed-state reconstruction. How to go into failed states and maintain security and get the economy going and defang ethnic hatred. They threw it all out.

"They ignored the experts on the Middle East. They ignored the experts who said it was the wrong target. So you ignore the experts and you go in anyway, and then you ignore all the experts on how to handle the postconflict."

One of those experts was David Phillips, a senior advisor on what was called the Future of Iraq program for the State Department. Phillips was ignored. His program was ignored. Earlier, Phillips had helped reconstruct the Balkans after the region spent a decade tearing itself apart with genocidal lunacy. Phillips knew what he knew. He just didn't believe what they believed.

"You can just as easily have a faith-based, or ideologically driven, policy," he says today. "You start with the presumption that you already know the conclusion prior to asking the question. When information surfaces that contradicts your firmly entrenched views, you dismantle the institution that brought you the information."

There was going to be candy and flowers, remember? The war was going to pay for itself. Believe.

"We went in blindfolded, and we believed our own propaganda," Phillips says. "We were going to get out in ninety days, spend $1.9 billion in the short term, and Iraqi oil would pay for the rest. Now we're deep in the hole, and people are asking questions about how we got there.

"It's delusional, allowing delusion to be the basis of policy making. Once you've told the big lie, you have to substantiate it with a sequence of lies that's repeated. You can't fix a policy if you don't admit it's broken."

Two thousand American lives later, remember the beginning. One commentator quite plainly made the case that every few years or so, the United States should "throw a small nation up against the wall" to prove that it means business. And Idiot America, which is all of us, cheered.

Goddamn right. Gimme another. And see what the superpowers in the back room will have.

August 19, 2005, was a beautiful day in Idiot America.

In Washington, William Frist, a Harvard-trained physician and the majority leader of the United States Senate, endorsed the teaching of intelligent design in the country's public schools. "I think today a pluralistic society," Frist explained, "should have access to a broad range of fact, of science, including faith."

That faith is not fact, nor should it be, and that faith is not science, nor should it be, seems to have eluded Doctor Senator Frist. It doesn't matter. He was talking to the people who believe that faith is both those things, because Bill Frist wants to be president of the United States, and because he believes those people will vote for him specifically because he talks this rot, and Idiot America will take it as an actor merely reciting his lines and let it go at that. Nonsense is a no-lose proposition.

On the same day, across town, a top aide to former secretary of state Colin Powell told CNN that Powell's pivotal presentation to the United Nations in which he described Iraq's vast array of deadly weapons was a farrago of stovepiped intelligence, wishful thinking, and utter bullshit.

"It was the lowest point in my life," the aide said.

That it has proven to be an even lower point for almost two thousand American families, and God alone knows how many Iraqis, seems to have eluded this fellow. It doesn't matter. Neither Frist with his pandering nor this apparatchik with the tender conscience -- nor Colin Powell, for all that -- will pay a substantial price for any of it because the two stories lasted one day, and, after all, it was a beautiful day in Idiot America.

Idiot America is a collaborative effort, the result of millions of decisions made and not made. It's the development of a collective Gut at the expense of a collective mind. It's what results when politicians make ridiculous statements and not merely do we abandon the right to punish them for it at the polls, but we also become too timid to punish them with ridicule on a daily basis, because the polls say they're popular anyway. It's what results when leaders are not held to account for mistakes that end up killing people.

And that's why August became a seminal month in Idiot America.

In its final week, a great American city drowned and then turned irrevocably into a Hieronymus Bosch painting in real time and on television, and with complete impunity, the president of the United States wandered the landscape and talked like a blithering nitwit.

First, he compared the violence surrounding the writing of an impromptu theocratic constitution in Baghdad to the events surrounding the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. Undaunted, he later compared the war he'd launched in Iraq to World War II. And then he compared himself to Franklin Roosevelt. One more public appearance and we might have learned that Custer was killed by Hezbollah.

Finally, we saw the apotheosis of the end of expertise, when New Orleans was virtually obliterated as a functional habitat for human beings, and the country discovered that the primary responsibility for dealing with the calamity lay with a man who'd been dismissed as an incompetent from his previous job as the director of a luxury-show-horse organization.

And the president went on television and said that nobody could have anticipated the collapse of the unfortunate city's levees. In God's sweet name, engineers anticipated it. Politicians anticipated it. The poor bastards in the Ninth Ward certainly anticipated it. Hell, four generations of folksingers anticipated it.

And the people who hated him went crazy and the people who loved him defended him. But where were the people who heard this incredible, staggeringly stupid bafflegab, uttered with conscious forethought, and realized that whatever they thought of the man, the president had gotten behind a series of podiums and done everything but drop his drawers and dance the hootchie-koo? They were out there, lost in Idiot America, where it was still a beautiful day.

Idiot America took it as a bad actor merely bungling his lines. Nonsense is a no-lose proposition. For Idiot America is a place where people choose to live. It is a place that is built consciously and deliberately, one choice at a time, made or (most often) unmade. A place where we're all like that statue of Adam now, reclining in a peaceful garden of our own creation, brainless and dickless, and falling down on the job of naming the monsters for what they are, dozing away in an Eden that, every day, looks less and less like paradise.

 

Historic Stupidity: One Nation Under Educated

Emilie Says: There is no light at the end of the tunnel. Americans are what they are because the school education system is what it is. And it just got a whole lot worse. Two books are strongly recommended to understand the disaster that already existed before this latest insanity.

Here is a review from an understanding student, C. Colt:

Honest History Does NOT Diminish America in Any Way, January 15, 2003

This review is from: Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (Paperback)
In this superb book, James Loewen argues what most Americans have understood since childhood, namely that our American History textbooks, are, boring, theme-driven, inaccurate and largely ineffective at imparting the richness of their subject. While the book's title and argument may seem like a leftist gerrymander, they are not. Loewen, a professor of Sociology at the University of Vermont (who spent several years analyzing ten high school American History textbooks totaling more than 8,000 pages), is not out to reverse the traditional cast of heroes and villains in American history. Instead, Loewen advocates an honest and inclusive history that simply reveals events as they actually happened. While this may expose some dark truths about "heroic" people and events in American history, and may cast historical "villains" in a new light, Loewen does not believe it will cause students to despise their country. On the contrary, he argues that revealing conflicts and problems that our text books ignore or conceal will make American history come alive and will almost certainly enhance students' appreciation for their country. Ironically, while many textbook editors and teachers fear that altering their inaccurate and theme-driven content will cause students to despise their country, they miss the fact that this is precisely what the specious, vapid nature of the textbooks already accomplishes. Some of Loewen's interesting observations are contained below:

COLUMBUS

Columbus was almost certainly not the first European to discover or colonize North America. He tortured and mutilated the native population of Haiti and eventually exterminated it by working the inhabitants to death searching for gold. All of these facts are available in the journals of Columbus and his colleagues.

NATIVE AMERICANS
Prior to the arrival of white settlers, North America was thickly settled with tens of millions of Indian tribes that formed a complex civilization consisting of advanced agricultural techniques (guess where white settlers learned it from), trade, roads, villages, and government. The white settlers wiped out most of these people at first inadvertently by spreading disease, and then deliberately through wars of extermination. History text books often present Indians as sparse, primitive, violent (it was actually white people who scalped Indians), and inevitable victims of progress.

RECONSTRUCTION
For more than one hundred years, history textbooks have characterized post-Civil War Reconstruction as a combination of white corruption and black ineptitude. Few mention that the ultimate cause of Reconstruction's failure was the terrorism that some white southerners perpetrated against black people and white's who favored reconstruction. Many of the so called carpetbaggers and scallywags were in fact anti racists who attempted to help rebuild the south along egalitarian lines. And when given even minimal opportunities (most of which were subsequently dismantled by the government), blacks were able to build successful businesses and to win the Kentucky Derby a few times.

LABOR AND SOCIAL CLASSES
High school textbooks never admit that America even has social classes. They treat labor problems as something that happened a long time ago and which the government fixed of its own good will.

PROGRESS
The textbooks also present the United States as the vanguard of social progress while failing to admit that many of the social issues we still strive for such as equality between men and women have already been accomplished by other nations or people in history.

CIVIL RIGHTS
According to American history text books, the government spontaneously decided to give civil rights to blacks and other oppressed minorities, but this decision did not result from a populist struggle that was initially met with state sponsored violence and brutality.

VIETNAM
Similarly U.S. history textbooks argued that the Vietnam War sort of happened and sort of ended. They don't examine why the U.S. got involved in the war and why it stopped fighting. They also overlook the brutality of the war that was waged largely against civilians on whom the United States dropped three times as much bomb tonnage as all theatres of World War II combined including Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

WHY IS HISTORY TAUGHT THIS WAY
Perhaps the most fascinating part of Loewen's book is his examination of why high school history books are permeated with boredom and lies. Surprisingly, Loewen does not blame this phenomenon on the power elite that ultimately controls the publication of these books. Instead, Loewen concludes that a number of damaging, but less insidious processes are at work. For example, since many history teachers don't really know their subject, they are afraid to challenge or teach outside of the textbooks, which become a source of pedagogical authority. Even qualified and highly motivated teachers are often afraid to deviate from the textbook because they believe that failing to paint a rosy picture of America will somehow hurt students. Finally, there is the textbook publishing industry that is understandably motivated to sell books more than it is to tell the truth.

Loewen correctly concludes that when you unmask many of the lies in U.S. History text books, America does not suddenly become odious, and while people like Columbus may become more controversial, they are not transformed into villains. Instead American history is full of conflict that displays the richness and fascination of its history. Concealing and distorting this conflict is sort of like telling a child that his/her parents are perfect. The child will not only get bored with these themes but will quickly learn that they are false. If the child learns that his/her parents made mistakes, then far from hating them, the child will probably appreciate their humanity and learn more from them. History is the same way.

---

Consistently lauded for its lively, readable prose, this revised and updated edition of A People's History of the United States turns traditional textbook history on its head. Howard Zinn infuses the often-submerged voices of blacks, women, American Indians, war resisters, and poor laborers of all nationalities into this thorough narrative that spans American history from Christopher Columbus's arrival to an afterword on the Clinton presidency.

Addressing his trademark reversals of perspective, Zinn--a teacher, historian, and social activist for more than 20 years--explains, "My point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse, judge, condemn Columbus in absentia. It is too late for that; it would be a useless scholarly exercise in morality. But the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress (Hiroshima and Vietnam, to save Western civilization; Kronstadt and Hungary, to save socialism; nuclear proliferation, to save us all)--that is still with us. One reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth."

If your last experience of American history was brought to you by junior high school textbooks--or even if you're a specialist--get ready for the other side of stories you may not even have heard. With its vivid descriptions of rarely noted events, A People's History of the United States is required reading for anyone who wants to take a fresh look at the rich, rocky history of America.

 

 

 

Texas ed board vote reflects far-right influences Source: Associated Press Credits: April Castro Dated: 2010-03-12 Dateline: Austin, Texas A far-right faction of the Texas State Board of Education succeeded Friday in injecting conservative ideals into social studies, history and economics lessons that will be taught to millions of students for the next decade. Teachers in Texas will be required to cover the Judeo-Christian influences of the nation's Founding Fathers, but not highlight the philosophical rationale for the separation of church and state. Curriculum standards also will describe the U.S. government as a "constitutional republic," rather than "democratic," and students will be required to study the decline in value of the U.S. dollar, including the abandonment of the gold standard. "We have been about conservatism versus liberalism," said Democrat Mavis Knight of Dallas, explaining her vote against the standards. "We have manipulated strands to insert what we want it to be in the document, regardless as to whether or not it's appropriate." Following three days of impassioned and acrimonious debate, the board gave preliminary approval to the new standards with a 10-5 party line vote. A final vote is expected in May, after a public comment period that could produce additional amendments and arguments. Decisions by the board — made up of lawyers, a dentist and a weekly newspaper publisher among others — can affect textbook content nationwide because Texas is one of publishers' biggest clients. Ultraconservatives wielded their power over hundreds of subjects this week, introducing and rejecting amendments on everything from the civil rights movement to global politics. Hostilities flared and prompted a walkout Thursday by one of the board's most prominent Democrats, Mary Helen Berlanga of Corpus Christi, who accused her colleagues of "whitewashing" curriculum standards. By late Thursday night, three other Democrats seemed to sense their futility and left, leaving Republicans to easily push through amendments heralding "American exceptionalism" and the U.S. free enterprise system, suggesting it thrives best absent excessive government intervention. "Some board members themselves acknowledged this morning that the process for revising curriculum standards in Texas is seriously broken, with politics and personal agendas dominating just about every decision," said Kathy Miller, president of the Texas Freedom Network, which advocates for religious freedom. Republican Terri Leo, a member of the powerful Christian conservative voting bloc, called the standards "world class" and "exceptional." Board members argued about the classification of historic periods (still B.C. and A.D., rather than B.C.E. and C.E.); whether students should be required to explain the origins of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its impact on global politics (they will);and whether former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir should be required learning (she will). In addition to learning the Bill of Rights, the board specified a reference to the Second Amendment right to bear arms in a section about citizenship in a U.S. government class. Conservatives beat back multiple attempts to include hip-hop as an example of a significant cultural movement. Numerous attempts to add the names or references to important Hispanics throughout history also were denied, inducing one amendment that would specify that Tejanos died at the Alamo alongside Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie. Another amendment deleted a requirement that sociology students "explain how institutional racism is evident in American society." Democrats did score a victory by deleting a portion of an amendment by Republican Don McLeroy suggesting that the civil rights movement led to "unrealistic expectations for equal outcomes." Fort Worth Republican Pat Hardy, a longtime teacher, voted for the new standards, but said she wished the board could work with a more cooperative spirit. "What we've done is we've taken a document that by nature is too long to begin with and then we've lengthened it some more," Hardy said, shortly after the vote. "Those long lists of names that we've put in there ... it's just too long. "I just think we failed to keep that in mind, it's hard for teachers to get through it all."

Texas Conservatives Win Curriculum Change Source: New York Times Credits: James C McKinley Jr. Dated: 2010-03-12 Dateline: Austin, Texas AUSTIN, Tex. — After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light. The vote was 10 to 5 along party lines, with all the Republicans on the board voting for it. The board, whose members are elected, has influence beyond Texas because the state is one of the largest buyers of textbooks. In the digital age, however, that influence has diminished as technological advances have made it possible for publishers to tailor books to individual states. In recent years, board members have been locked in an ideological battle between a bloc of conservatives who question Darwin’s theory of evolution and believe the Founding Fathers were guided by Christian principles, and a handful of Democrats and moderate Republicans who have fought to preserve the teaching of Darwinism and the separation of church and state. Since January, Republicans on the board have passed more than 100 amendments to the 120-page curriculum standards affecting history, sociology and economics courses from elementary to high school. The standards were proposed by a panel of teachers. “We are adding balance,” said Dr. Don McLeroy, the leader of the conservative faction on the board, after the vote. “History has already been skewed. Academia is skewed too far to the left.” Battles over what to put in science and history books have taken place for years in the 20 states where state boards must adopt textbooks, most notably in California and Texas. But rarely in recent history has a group of conservative board members left such a mark on a social studies curriculum. Efforts by Hispanic board members to include more Latino figures as role models for the state’s large Hispanic population were consistently defeated, prompting one member, Mary Helen Berlanga, to storm out of a meeting late Thursday night, saying, “They can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don’t exist.” “They are going overboard, they are not experts, they are not historians,” she said. “They are rewriting history, not only of Texas but of the United States and the world.” The curriculum standards will now be published in a state register, opening them up for 30 days of public comment. A final vote will be taken in May, but given the Republican dominance of the board, it is unlikely that many changes will be made. The standards, reviewed every decade, serve as a template for textbook publishers, who must come before the board next year with drafts of their books. The board’s makeup will have changed by then because Dr. McLeroy lost in a primary this month to a more moderate Republican, and two others — one Democrat and one conservative Republican — announced they were not seeking re-election. There are seven members of the conservative bloc on the board, but they are often joined by one of the other three Republicans on crucial votes. There were no historians, sociologists or economists consulted at the meetings, though some members of the conservative bloc held themselves out as experts on certain topics. The conservative members maintain that they are trying to correct what they see as a liberal bias among the teachers who proposed the curriculum. To that end, they made dozens of minor changes aimed at calling into question, among other things, concepts like the separation of church and state and the secular nature of the American Revolution. “I reject the notion by the left of a constitutional separation of church and state,” said David Bradley, a conservative from Beaumont who works in real estate. “I have $1,000 for the charity of your choice if you can find it in the Constitution.” They also included a plank to ensure that students learn about “the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract With America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association.” Dr. McLeroy, a dentist by training, pushed through a change to the teaching of the civil rights movement to ensure that students study the violent philosophy of the Black Panthers in addition to the nonviolent approach of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He also made sure that textbooks would mention the votes in Congress on civil rights legislation, which Republicans supported. “Republicans need a little credit for that,” he said. “I think it’s going to surprise some students.” Mr. Bradley won approval for an amendment saying students should study “the unintended consequences” of the Great Society legislation, affirmative action and Title IX legislation. He also won approval for an amendment stressing that Germans and Italians as well as Japanese were interned in the United States during World War II, to counter the idea that the internment of Japanese was motivated by racism. Other changes seem aimed at tamping down criticism of the right. Conservatives passed one amendment, for instance, requiring that the history of McCarthyism include “how the later release of the Venona papers confirmed suspicions of communist infiltration in U.S. government.” The Venona papers were transcripts of some 3,000 communications between the Soviet Union and its agents in the United States. Mavis B. Knight, a Democrat from Dallas, introduced an amendment requiring that students study the reasons “the founding fathers protected religious freedom in America by barring the government from promoting or disfavoring any particular religion above all others.” It was defeated on a party-line vote. After the vote, Ms. Knight said, “The social conservatives have perverted accurate history to fulfill their own agenda.” In economics, the revisions add Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, two champions of free-market economic theory, among the usual list of economists to be studied, like Adam Smith, Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes. They also replaced the word “capitalism” throughout their texts with the “free-enterprise system.” “Let’s face it, capitalism does have a negative connotation,” said one conservative member, Terri Leo. “You know, ‘capitalist pig!’ ” In the field of sociology, another conservative member, Barbara Cargill, won passage of an amendment requiring the teaching of “the importance of personal responsibility for life choices” in a section on teenage suicide, dating violence, sexuality, drug use and eating disorders. “The topic of sociology tends to blame society for everything,” Ms. Cargill said. Even the course on world history did not escape the board’s scalpel. Cynthia Dunbar, a lawyer from Richmond who is a strict constitutionalist and thinks the nation was founded on Christian beliefs, managed to cut Thomas Jefferson from a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century, replacing him with St. Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and William Blackstone. (Jefferson is not well liked among conservatives on the board because he coined the term “separation between church and state.”) “The Enlightenment was not the only philosophy on which these revolutions were based,” Ms. Dunbar said.

 

History and Tonypandy

Excerpt from "The Daughter of Time" by Josephine Tey (And a wonderful book altogether)

Tonypandy - The conversion of mythological events into pseudo-history even though there are people alive who know the alleged underlying events to be mythical but do not protest.

---

'Forty million school books can't be wrong,' Grant said after a little.

'Can't they?'

'Well, can they!'

'I used to think so, but I'm not so sure nowadays.'

'Aren't you being a little sudden in your scepticism?'

'Oh, it wasn't this that shook me.'

'What then?'

'A little affair called the Boston Massacre. Ever heard of it?'

'Of course.'

'Well, I discovered quite by accident, when I was looking up something at college, that the Boston Massacre consisted of a mob throwing stones at a sentry. The total casualties were four. I was brought up on the Boston Massacre, Mr Grant. My twenty-eight-inch chest used to swell at the very memory of it. My good red spinach-laden blood used to seethe at the thought of helpless civilians mowed down by the fire of British troops. You can't imagine what a shock it was to find that all it added up to in actual fact was a brawl that wouldn't get more than local reporting in a clash between police and strikers in any American lock-out.'

As Grant made no reply to this, he squinted his eyes against the light to see how Grant was taking it. But Grant was staring at the ceiling as if he were watching patterns forming there.

'That's partly why I like to research so much,' Carradine volunteered; and settled back to staring at the sparrows.

Presently Grant put his hand out, wordlessly, and Carradine gave him a cigarette and lighted it for him.

They smoked in silence.

It was Grant who interrupted the sparrows' performance.

'Tonypandy,' he said.

'How's that?'

But Grant was still far away.

'After all, I've seen the thing at work in my own day, haven't I,' he said, not to Carradine but to the ceiling. 'It's Tonypandy.'

'And what in heck is Tonypandy?' Brent asked. 'It sounds like a patent medicine. Does your child get out of sorts? Does the little face get flushed, the temper short, and the limbs easily tired? Give the little one Tonypandy, and see the radiant results.'

And then, as Grant made no answer: 'All right, then; keep your Tonypandy. I wouldn't have it as a gift.'

'Tonypandy,' Grant said, still in that sleep-walking voice, 'is a place in the South of Wales.'

'I knew it was some kind of physic.'

'If you go to South Wales you will hear that, in 1910, the Government used troops to shoot down Welsh miners who were striking for their rights. You'll probably hear that Winston Churchill, who was Home Secretary at the time, was responsible. South Wales, you will be told, will never forget Tonypandy !'

Carradine had dropped his flippant air.

'And it wasn't a bit like that?'

'The actual facts are these. The rougher section of the Rhondda valley crowd had got quite out of hand. Shops were being looted and property destroyed. The Chief Constable of Glamorgan sent a request to the Home Office for troops to protect the lieges. If a Chief Constable thinks a situation serious enough to ask for the help of the military a Home Secretary has very little choice in the matter. But Churchill was so horrified at the possibility of the troops coming face to face with a crowd of rioters and having to fire on them, that he stopped the movement of the troops and sent instead a body of plain, solid Metropolitan Police, armed with nothing but their rolled-up mackintoshes. The troops were kept in reserve, and all contact with the rioters was made by unarmed London police. The only bloodshed in the whole affair was a bloody nose or two. The Home Secretary was severely criticized in the House of Commons incidentally for his "unprecedented intervention". That was Tonypandy. That is the shooting-down by troops that Wales will never forget.'

'Yes,' Carradine said, considering. 'Yes. It's almost a parallel to the Boston affair. Someone blowing up a simple affair to huge proportions for a political end.'

'The point is not that it is a parallel. The point is that every single man who was there knows that the story is nonsense, and yet it has never been contradicted. It will never be overtaken now. It is a completely untrue story grown to legend while the men who knew it to be untrue looked on and said nothing.'

'Yes. That's very interesting; very. History as it is made.'

'Yes. History.'

'Give me research. After all, the truth of anything at all doesn't lie in someone's account of it. It lies in all the small facts of the time. An advertisement in a paper. The sale of a house. The price of a ring.'

...

'Look, Mr Grant, let's you and I start at the very beginning of this thing. Without history books, or modem versions, or anyone's opinion about anything. Truth isn't in accounts but in account books.'

'A neat phrase,' Grant said, complimentary. 'Does it mean anything?'

'It means everything. The real history is written in forms not meant as history. In Wardrobe accounts, in Privy Purse expenses, in personal letters, in estate books. If someone, say, insists that Lady Whoosit never had a child, and you find in the account book the entry: "For the son born to my lady on Michaelmas eve: five yards of blue ribbon, fourpence halfpenny", it's a reasonably fair deduction that my lady had a son on Michaelmas eve.'

...

Nothing (repeat: nothing) would surprise me about history.

Scotland has large monuments to two women martyrs drowned for their faith, in spite of the fact that they weren't drowned at all and neither was a martyr anyway.

They were convicted of treason - fifth column work for the projected invasion from Holland, I think. Anyhow on a purely civil charge. They were reprieved on their own petition by the Privy Council, and the reprieve is in the Privy Council Register to this day.

This, of course, hasn't daunted the Scottish collectors of martyrs, and the tale of their sad end, complete with heartrending dialogue, is to be found in every Scottish bookcase. Entirely different dialogue in each collection. And the gravestone of one of the women, in Wigtown churchyard, reads:

Murdered for owning Christ supreme

Head of his Church, and no more crime

But her not owning Prelacy

And not abjuring Presbytry

Within the sea tied to a stake

She suffered for Christ Jesus sake.

They are even a subject for fine Presbyterian sermons, I understand? though on that point I speak from hearsay. And tourists come and shake their heads over the monuments with their moving inscriptions, and a very profitable time is had by all.

All this in spite of the fact that the original collector of the material, canvassing, the Wigtown district only forty years after the supposed martyrdom and at the height of the Presbyterian triumph, complains that 'many deny that this happened'; and couldn't find any eyewitnesses at all.

...

P.S. It's an odd thing but when you tell someone the true facts of a mythical tale they are indignant not with the teller but with you. They don't want to have their ideas upset It rouses some vague uneasiness in them, I think, and they resent it. So they reject it and refuse to think about it. If they were merely indifferent it would be natural and understandable. But it is much stronger than that, much more positive. They are annoyed. Very odd, isn't it.

More Tonypandy, he thought.

He began to wonder just how much of the school-book which up to now had represented British history for him was Tonypandy.

...

I've got a new piece of Tonypandy for you.'

And he handed him Laura's letter about the drowned women who were never drowned.

Carradine read it with a delight that grew on him like slow sunlight coming out, until eventually he glowed.

'My, but that's wonderful. That's very superior, first growth, dyed-in-the-wool Tonypandy, isn't it. Lovely, lovely. You didn't know about this before? And you a Scotsman?'

...

'I'm only a Scot once removed,' Grant pointed out. 'No; I knew that none of these Covenanters died "for their Faith", of course; but I didn't know that one of them-or rather, two of them-hadn't died at all.'

'They didn't die for their Faith?' Carradine repeated, bewildered. 'D'you mean that the whole thing's Tonypandy?'

Grant laughed. 'I suppose it is,' he said, surprised. never thought about it before. I've known so long that "martyrs" were no more martyrs than that thug who going to his death for killing that old shop-keeper in Essex that I've ceased to think about it. No one in Scotland went to his death for anything but civil crime.'

'But I thought they were very holy people-the Covenanters, I mean.'

'You've been looking at nineteenth-century pictures conventicles. The reverent little gathering in the heather listening to the preacher; young rapt faces, and white hair blowing in the winds of God. The Covenanters were the exact equivalent of the I.R.A. in Ireland. A small irreconcilable minority, and as bloodthirsty a crowd as ever disgraced a Christian nation. If you went to church on Sunday instead of to a conventicle, you were liable to wake on Monday and find your barn burned or your horses hamstrung. If you were more open in your disapproval you were shot. The men who shot Archbishop Sharp in his daughter's presence, in broad daylight on a road in Fife, were the heroes Of the movement. "Men of courage and zeal for the cause of God", according to their admiring followers. They lived safe and swaggering among their Covenanting fans in the West for years. It was a "preacher of the gospel" who shot Bishop Honeyman in an Edinburgh street. And they shot the old parish priest of Carsphairn on his own doorstep.'

'It does sound like Ireland, doesn't it,' Carradine said.

'They were actually worse than the I.R.A. because there was a fifth column element in it. They were financed from Holland, and their arms came from Holland. There was nothing forlorn about their movement, you know. They expected to take over the Government any day, and rule Scotland. All their preaching was pure sedition. The most violent incitement to crime you could imagine. No modern Government could afford to be so patient with such a menace as the Government of the time were. The Covenanters were continually being offered amnesties.'

'Well, well. And I thought they were fighting for freedom to worship God their own way.'

'No one ever stopped them from worshipping God any way they pleased. What they were out to do was to impose their method of church government not only on Scotland but on England, believe it or not. You should read the Covenant some day. Freedom of worship was not to be allowed to anyone according to the Covenanting creed-except the Covenanters, of course.'

'And all those gravestones and monuments that tourists go to see-'

'All Tonypandy. If you ever read on a gravestone that John Whosit "suffered death for his adherence to the Word of God and Scotland's Covenanted work of Reformation", with a- touching little verse underneath about "dust sacrificed to tyranny", you can be sure that the said John Whosit was found guilty before a properly constituted court, of a civil crime punishable by death and that his death had nothing whatever to do with the Word of God.' He laughed a little under his breath. 'It's the final irony, you know, that a group whose name was anathema to the rest of Scotland in their own time should have been elevated into the position of saints and martyrs.'

'I wouldn't wonder if it wasn't onomatopoeic,' Carradine said thoughtfully.

'What?'

'Like the Cat and the Rat, you know.'

'What are you talking about?'

"Member you said, about that Cat and Rat lampoon, that rhyme, that the sound of it made it an offence?'

'Yes; made it venomous.'

'Well, the word dragoon does the same thing. I take it that the dragoons were just the policemen of the time.'

'Yes. Mounted infantry.'

'Well, to me-and I suspect to every other person reading about it-dragoons sound dreadful. They've come to mean something that they never were.'

'Yes, I see. Force majeure in being. Actually the Government had only a tiny handful of men to police an enormous area, so the odds were all on the Covenanters' side.

In more ways than one. A dragoon (read policeman) couldn't arrest anyone without a warrant (he couldn't stable his horse without the owner's permission, if it comes to that), but there was nothing to hinder a Covenanter lying snug in the heather and picking off dragoons at his leisure. Which they did, of course. And now there's a whole literature about the poor ill-used saint in the heather with his pistol; and the dragoon who died in the course of his duty is a Monster.'

Home Schooling

Source: http://blogs.static.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/20302.html
Credits: Stacey Conradt

1. Agatha Christie. Agatha was a painfully shy girl, so her mom homeschooled her even though her two older siblings attended private school.
2. Pearl S. Buck was born in West Virginia, but her family moved to China when she was just three months old. She was homeschooled by a Confucian scholar and learned English as a second language from her mom.
3. Alexander Graham Bell was homeschooled by his mother until he was about 10. It was at this point that she started to go deaf and didn’t feel she could properly educate him any more. Her deafness inspired Bell to study acoustics and sound later in life.

4. If Thomas Edison was around today, he would probably be diagnosed with ADD – he left public school after only three months because his mind wouldn’t stop wandering. His mom homeschooled him after that, and he credited her with the success of his education: “My mother was the making of me. She was so true, so sure of me; and I felt I had something to live for, someone I must not disappoint.”

5. Ansel Adams was homeschooled at the age of 12 after his “wild laughter and undisguised contempt for the inept ramblings of his teachers” disrupted the classroom. His father took on his education from that point forward.

6. Robert Frost hated school so much he would get physically ill at the thought of going. He was homeschooled until his high school

years.

7. Woodrow Wilson studied under his dad, one of the founders of the Southern Presbyterian Church in the United States (PCUS). He didn’t learn to read until he was about 12. He took a few classes at a school in Augusta, Georgia, to supplement his father’s teachings, and ended up spending a year at Davidson College before transferring to Princeton.
8. Mozart was educated by his dad as the Mozart family toured Europe from 1763-1766.
9. Laura Ingalls Wilder was homeschooled until her parents finally settled in De Smet in what was then Dakota Territory. She started teaching school herself when she was only 15 years old.

10. Louisa May Alcott studied mostly with her dad, but had a few lessons from family friends Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

In Arkansas, a Castle Rises

Source: NY Times
Credits: Christopher Hall
Dated: 2010-07-28

In Arkansas, a Castle Rises

The Ozark Medieval Fortress is expected to take 20 years to build.

 

BRAD FIRE CLOUD, stonecutter, paused from his toil on a recent steamy Arkansas morning as sweat streamed into his short, black beard. Dressed in the dun-colored tunic and pants of a feudal worker — albeit one wearing OSHA-mandated steel-toed boots — Mr. Fire Cloud assessed the 70-pound chunk of limestone he had been hewing into a smooth block with hammer and chisel. “This’ll be for an archway of the castle,” he said in the melodious drawl of his native Ozark Mountains, while nodding toward the massive fortress taking shape in the forest clearing behind him.

Mr. Fire Cloud is one of 25 full-time workers and 15 volunteers at the Ozark Medieval Fortress, a new project in northwest Arkansas to build a 13th-century-style French castle using feudal-era technology and resources. Organized in part by the founder of a similar endeavor in the Burgundy region of France and initially financed with $1.5 million from 14 French investors, the project opened May 1 on 50 rolling acres of oak, hickory and cedar trees, about 30 minutes south of Branson, Mo. The location is more happenstance than anything: a Frenchman who lives in the Ozarks visited the Burgundy castle and thought the Arkansas terrain would be equally suitable to just such a venture.

The fortress is both a serious historical reenactment and an offbeat tourist attraction, allowing the public to watch and chat with workers as they chisel stone, lift blocks with a human-powered hamster-wheel crane, forge tools and chains, and make rope or tiles. Following construction plans drafted by a French architectural historian, it will take the crew 20 years to erect a fortress with five-foot-thick walls and seven towers, including one more than 70 feet high. The walls, begun before the public opening and currently standing around six feet high, will eventually reach 25 feet.

Tool-building is not the only draw. As visitors occasionally step aside for a passing donkey or for Honey, the castle’s Belgian draft horse, they follow a self-guided route past a pen of bleating sheep, a rustic textile workshop and the quarry before reaching the construction site and stations devoted to stone facing, carpentry, pottery and blacksmithing. All of the attractions (aside from the sheep) are vital to the creation of the castle. Docent-led tours ($1) offer a more in-depth look at the history of castles and life in the Middle Ages, and a stone-cutting lesson ($5) allows visitors to create their own take-home souvenir. A gift shop is stocked with everything from tomes on medieval Europe to logo mugs and T-shirts, baskets woven by a castle worker and toy wooden cross-bows made in France.

Unlike its French counterpart, the fortress also stages occasional demonstrations of sword-fighting, falconry, boulder-hurling by catapult and other medieval pursuits. “This being America, we needed more interactive features,” said Julie Sonveau, a Kansan who worked for six years at the Burgundy castle before becoming manager of the Arkansas site. “But the spirit of the two places is the same. Even on our event days, it’s the castle that visitors like the most, and they love talking with the workers.” Catherine Koehler, a Mississippi native who is a textile worker at the castle, was gearing up for a first attempt at making dye from oak galls. “I wasn’t sure of the exact process,” said Ms. Koehler, who waved a printout of instructions she had found on the Internet in her right hand. “But look what just arrived by carrier pigeon.”

Ozark Medieval Fortress, 1671 Highway 14 West, Lead Hill, Ark.; (870) 436-7625; ozarkmedievalfortress.com. Open daily May 1 through Nov. 30, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Admission is $12; ages 6 to 16, $8; children 5 or under, free.

In Favor of a Classical Education

Source: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/a-classical-education-back-to-the-future/?src=me&ref=general
Credits: Stanley Fish
Dated: 2010-06-07

A Classical Education: Back to the Future

I wore my high school ring for more than 40 years. It became black and misshapen and I finally took it off. But now I have a new one, courtesy of the organizing committee of my 55th high school reunion, which I attended over the Memorial Day weekend.

I wore the ring (and will wear it again) because although I have degrees from two Ivy league schools and have taught at U.C. Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, Columbia and Duke, Classical High School (in Providence, RI) is the best and most demanding educational institution I have ever been associated with. The name tells the story. When I attended, offerings and requirements included four years of Latin, three years of French, two years of German, physics, chemistry, biology, algebra, geometry, calculus, trigonometry, English, history, civics, in addition to extra-curricular activities, and clubs — French Club, Latin Club, German Club, Science Club, among many others. A student body made up of the children of immigrants or first generation Americans; many, like me, the first in their families to finish high school. Nearly a 100 percent college attendance rate. A yearbook that featured student translations from Virgil and original poems in Latin.

Sounds downright antediluvian, outmoded, narrow and elitist, and maybe it was (and is; the curriculum’s still there, with some additions like Japanese), but when I returned home I found three new books waiting for me, each of which made a case for something like the education I received at Classical. The books are Leigh A. Bortins’ “The Core: Teaching Your Child the Foundations of Classical Education,” Martha C. Nussbaum’s “Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities” and Diane Ravitch’s “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education.”

Three more different perspectives from three more different authors could hardly be imagined.

Leigh A. Bortins writes as an engineer, a home schooling advocate and the C.E.O. of Classical Conversations, Inc. She sees learning “as a continuing conversation that humankind has been engaged in for centuries” and believes that the decisions we must make today will be better if they are informed by “classical content,” that is, by an awareness of what great thinkers of the past have made of the problems we encounter in the present. She wants her children and ours to “hear the collective wisdom of the ages” and “regularly consult the advice of wise and virtuous men and women” when faced with modern “predicaments.”

To this end, she proposes a two-pronged program of instruction: “classical education emphasizes using the classical skills to study classical content.” By classical skills she means imitation, memorization, drill, recitation and above all grammar, not grammar as the study of the formal structure of sentences (although that is part of it), but grammar as the study of the formal structure of anything: “Every occupation, field of study or concept has a vocabulary that the student must acquire like a foreign language . . . . A basketball player practicing the fundamentals could be considered a grammarian . . . as he repeatedly drills the basic skills, of passing dribbling, and shooting.” “Every student,” Bortins counsels, “must learn to speak the language of the subject.”

“Classical content” identifies just what the subjects to be classically studied are. They are the subjects informed and structured by “the ideas that make us human” — math, science, language, history, economics and literature, each of which, Bortins insists, can be mastered by the rigorous application of the skills of the classical Trivium, grammar, the study of basic forms, logic, the skill of abstracting from particulars and rhetoric, the ability to “speak and write persuasively and eloquently about any topic while integrating allusions and examples from one field of study to explain a point in another.” Assiduously practice, or as Bortins puts it, “overpractice” these skills, and “a student is prepared to study anything.”

Notably absent from Bortins’ vision of education is any mention of assessment outcomes, testing, job training (one of her sub-chapters is entitled “The Trivium Replaces Careerism”) and the wonders of technology. Her emphasis is solely on content and the means of delivering it. She warns against the narrowing distractions of “industrialization and technologies” and declares that “students would be better educated if they weren’t allowed to use computers . . . until they were proficient readers and writers.”

Martha Nussbaum, philosopher, classicist, ethicist and law professor, starts from the same place. She critiques the current emphasis on “science and technology” and the “applied skills suited to profit making” and she argues that the “humanistic aspects of science and social science — the imaginative and creative aspect, and the aspect of rigorous critical thought — are . . . losing ground” as the humanities and the arts “are being cut away” and dismissed as “useless frills” in the context of an overriding imperative “to stay competitive in the global market.” The result, she complains, is that “abilities crucial to the health of any democracy” are being lost, especially the ability to “think critically,” the ability, that is, “to probe, to evaluate evidence, to write papers with well-structured arguments, and to analyze the arguments presented to them in other texts.”

While not the language of the Trivium (which Nussbaum knows well), it breathes the same spirit, and we might well be reading Bortins when Nussbaum praises the kind of course that pays “attention to logical structures” and thus “gives students templates that they can then apply to texts of many different types.” But this and related abilities will look “dispensable if what we want are marketable outputs of a quantifiable nature,” if we embrace an “economic growth” paradigm rather than a “human development paradigm.”

For Nussbaum, human development means the development of the capacity to transcend the local prejudices of one’s immediate (even national) context and become a responsible citizen of the world. Students should be brought “to see themselves as members of a heterogeneous nation . . . and a still more heterogeneous world, and to understand something of this history of the diverse groups that inhabit it.” Developing intelligent world citizenship is an enormous task that can not even begin to be accomplished without the humanities and arts that “cultivate capacities for play and empathy,” encourage thinking that is “flexible, open and creative” and work against the provincialism that too often leads us to see those who are different as demonized others.

Unfortunately, at least according to Nussbaum, the trend toward a narrower and narrower vision of education is not being resisted by the Obama administration. Rather than decreasing the focus on testing and test preparation — a focus that reverses the relationship between test and content; the test becomes the content — “the administration plans to expand it.” Obama and his secretary of education, Arne Duncan (who, says Nussbaum, “presided over a rapid decline in humanities and arts funding” as head of the Chicago public schools), continue to implement the assumptions driving the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind, chiefly the assumption that “individual income and national economic progress” should be education’s main goals.

Diane Ravitch, noted historian and theorist of education, writes as someone who once strongly supported the promise and goals of No Child Left Behind but underwent a de-conversion in 2007: “Where once I had been hopeful, even enthusiastic, about the potential benefits of testing, accountability, choice, and markets, I now found myself experiencing profound doubts about these same ideas.”

Her conclusions, backed up by exhaustive research and an encyclopedic knowledge both of the literature and of situations on the ground, are devastating. The mantra of choice produced a “do your own thing” proliferation of educational schemes, “each with its own curriculum, and methods, each with its own private management, all competing for . . . public dollars” rather than laboring to discover “better ways of educating hard-to-educate students.” The emphasis on testing produced students who could “master test taking methods, but not the subject itself,” with the consequence that the progress claimed on the basis of test scores was an “illusion”: “The scores had gone up, but the students were not better educated.” A faith in markets produced gamesmanship, entrepreneurial maneuvering and outright cheating, very little reflection on “what children should know” and very little thought about the nature of the curriculum.

Ravitch, like Nussbaum, finds little hope in the policies of President Obama, who promised change but seems to have picked up “the same banner of choice, competition, and markets that had been the hallmark of his predecessors.” The result is that we continue to see “the shrinking of time available to teach anything other than reading and math; other subjects, including history, science, the arts, geography, even recess, were curtailed.”

Ravitch’s recommendations are simple, commonsensical and entirely consonant with the views of Bortins and Nussbaum. Begin with “a well conceived, coherent, sequential curriculum,” and then “adjust other parts of the education system to support the goals of learning.” This will produce a “foundation of knowledge and skills that grows stronger each year.” Forget about the latest fad and quick-fix, and buckle down to the time-honored, traditional “study and practice of the liberal arts and sciences: history, literature, geography, the sciences, civics, mathematics, the arts and foreign languages.”

In short, get knowledgeable and well-trained teachers, equip them with a carefully calibrated curriculum and a syllabus filled with challenging texts and materials, and put them in a room with students who are told where they are going and how they are going to get there.

Worked for me.

 

 

Japan Unit

Pictures From the Presentation (The costume and presentation board were all her own idea and work) Here are the source letters from our studies of Japanese history, which Hypatia referenced. As you can see above, an 8 year old could understand the threats Perry made: Perry's Second Letter From Commodore Matthew C. Perry [Sent in Connection with the Delivery of a White Flag] July 14, 1853 For years several countries have applied for trade, but you have opposed them on account of a national law. You have thus acted against divine principles and your sin cannot be greater than it is. What we say thus does not necessarily mean, as has already been communicated by the Dutch boat, that we expect mutual trade by all means. If you are still to disagree we would then take up arms and inquire into the sin against the divine principles, and you would also make sure of your law and fight in defence. When one considers such an occasion, however, one will realize the victory will naturally be ours and you shall by no means overcome us. If in such a situation you seek for a reconciliation, you should put up the white flag that we have recently presented to you, and we would accordingly stop firing and conclude peace with you, turning our battleships aside. Commodore Perry Perry's First Letter Letter of Commodore Perry to the Emperor July 7, 1853. United States Steam Frigate Susquehanna, Off the Coast of Japan. THE undersigned, commander-in-chief of all the naval forces of the United States of America stationed in the East India, China and Japan seas, has been sent by his government of this country, on a friendly mission, with ample powers to negotiate with the government of Japan, touching certain matters which have been fully set forth in the letter of the President of the United States, copies of which, together with copies of the letter of credence of the undersigned, in the English, Dutch, and Chinese languages, are herewith transmitted. The original of the President's letter, and of the letter of credence, prepared in a manner suited to the exalted station of your imperial majesty, will be presented by the undersigned in person, when it may please your majesty to appoint a day for his reception. The undersigned has been commanded to state that the President entertains the most friendly feelings towards Japan, but has been surprised and grieved to learn that when any of the people of the United States go, of their own accord, or are thrown by the perils of the sea, within the dominations of your imperial majesty, they are treated as if they were your worst enemies. The undersigned refers to the cases of the American ships Morrison, Lagoda, and Lawrence.  With the Americans, as indeed with all Christian people, it is considered a sacred duty to receive with kindness, and to succor and protect all, of whatever nation, who may be cast upon their shores, and such has been the course of the Americans with respect to all Japanese subjects who have fallen under their protection. The government of the United States desires to obtain from that of Japan some positive assurance that persons who may hereafter be shipwrecked on the coast of Japan, or driven by stress of weather into her ports, shall be treated with humanity. The undersigned is commanded to explain to the Japanese that the United States are connected with no government in Europe, and that their laws do not interfere with the religion of their own citizens, much less with that of other nations. That they inhabit a great country which lies directly between Japan and Europe, and which was discovered by the nations of Europe about the same time that Japan herself was first visited by Europeans; that the portion of the American continent lying nearest to Europe was first settled by emigrants from that part of the world; that its population has rapidly spread through the country, until it has reached the shores of the Pacific Ocean; that we have now large cities, from which, with the aid of steam vessels, we can reach Japan in eighteen or twenty days; that our commerce with all this region of the globe is rapidly increasing, and the Japan seas will soon be covered with our vessels. Therefore, as the United States and Japan are becoming every day nearer and nearer to each other, the President desires to live in peace and friendship with your imperial majesty, but no friendship can long exist, unless Japan ceases to act towards Americans as if they were her enemies. However wise this policy may originally have been, it is unwise and impracticable now that the intercourse between the two countries is so much more easy and rapid than it formerly was. The undersigned holds out all these arguments in the hope that the Japanese government will see the necessity of averting unfriendly collision between the two nations, by responding favorably to the propositions of amity, which are now made in all sincerity. Many of the large ships-of-war destined to visit Japan have not yet arrived in these seas, though they are hourly expected; and the undersigned, as an evidence of his friendly intentions, has brought but four of the smaller ones, designing, should it become necessary, to return to Edo in the ensuing spring with a much larger force. But it is expected that the government of your imperial majesty will render such return unnecessary, by acceding at once to the very reasonable and pacific overtures contained in the President's letter, and which will be further explained by the undersigned on the first fitting occasion. With the most profound respect for your imperial majesty, and entertaining a sincere hope that you may long live to enjoy health and happiness, the undersigned subscribes himself, M. C. Perry, Commander-in-chef of the United States Naval Forces in the East India, China, and Japan seas. To His Imperial Majesty, the Emperor of Japan And that from President Millard Fillmore   President Fillmore’s letter to the Emperor of Japan, delivered July 14, 1853 Japanese reply to the President’s letter Commodore Perry’s letter to Senior Councillor Hayashi, March 10, 1854 Go back to the Essay President Millard Fillmore’s letter to the Emperor of Japan (presented by Commodore Perry on July 14, 1853) MILLARD FILLMORE, President of the United States of America to his Imperial Majesty, THE EMPEROR OF JAPAN Great and Good Friend! I send you this public letter by Commodore Matthew C. Perry, an officer of the highest rank in the navy of the United States, and commander of the squadron now visiting Your imperial majesty's dominions. I have directed Commodore Perry to assure your imperial majesty that I entertain the kindest feelings toward your majesty's person and government, and that I have no other object in sending him to Japan but to propose to your imperial majesty that the United States and Japan should live in friendship and have commercial intercourse with each other. The Constitution and laws of the United States forbid all interference with the religious or political concerns of other nations. I have particularly charged Commodore Perry to abstain from every act which could possibly disturb the tranquillity of your imperial majesty's dominions. The United States of America reach from ocean to ocean, and our Territory of Oregon and State of California lie directly opposite to the dominions of your imperial majesty. Our steamships can go from California to Japan in eighteen days. Our great State of California produces about sixty millions of dollars in gold every year, besides silver, quicksilver, precious stones, and many other valuable articles. Japan is also a rich and fertile country, and produces many very valuable articles. Your imperial majesty's subjects are skilled in many of the arts. I am desirous that our two countries should trade with each other, for the benefit both of Japan and the United States. We know that the ancient laws of your imperial majesty's government do not allow of foreign trade, except with the Chinese and the Dutch; but as the state of the world changes and new governments are formed, it seems to be wise, from time to time, to make new laws. There was a time when the ancient laws of your imperial majesty's government were first made. About the same time America, which is sometimes called the New World, was first discovered and settled by the Europeans. For a long time there were but a few people, and they were poor. They have now become quite numerous; their commerce is very extensive; and they think that if your imperial majesty were so far to change the ancient laws as to allow a free trade between the two countries it would be extremely beneficial to both. If your imperial majesty is not satisfied that it would be safe altogether to abrogate the ancient laws which forbid foreign trade, they might be suspended for five or ten years, so as to try the experiment. If it does not prove as beneficial as was hoped, the ancient laws can be restored. The United States often limit their treaties with foreign States to a few years, and then renew them or not, as they please. I have directed Commodore Perry to mention another thing to your imperial majesty. Many of our ships pass every year from California to China; and great numbers of our people pursue the whale fishery near the shores of Japan. It sometimes happens, in stormy weather, that one of our ships is wrecked on your imperial majesty's shores. In all such cases we ask, and expect, that our unfortunate people should be treated with kindness, and that their property should be protected, till we can send a vessel and bring them away. We are very much in earnest in this. Commodore Perry is also directed by me to represent to your imperial majesty that we understand there is a great abundance of coal and provisions in the Empire of Japan. Our steamships, in crossing the great ocean, burn a great deal of coal, and it is not convenient to bring it all the way from America. We wish that our steamships and other vessels should be allowed to stop in Japan and supply themselves with coal, provisions, and water. They will pay for them in money, or anything else your imperial majesty's subjects may prefer; and we request your imperial majesty to appoint a convenient port, in the southern part of the Empire, where our vessels may stop for this purpose. We are very desirous of this. These are the only objects for which I have sent Commodore Perry, with a powerful squadron, to pay a visit to your imperial majesty's renowned city of Yedo: friendship, commerce, a supply of coal and provisions, and protection for our shipwrecked people. We have directed Commodore Perry to beg your imperial majesty's acceptance of a few presents. They are of no great value in themselves; but some of them may serve as specimens of the articles manufactured in the United States, and they are intended as tokens of our sincere and respectful friendship. May the Almighty have your imperial majesty in His great and holy keeping! In witness whereof, I have caused the great seal of the United States to be hereunto affixed, and have subscribed the same with my name, at the city of Washington, in America, the seat of my government, on the thirteenth day of the month of November, in the year one thousand eight hundred and fifty-two. [Seal attached] Your good friend, MILLARD FILLMORE, President Translation of Japanese Reply to President Fillmore’s Letter   The return of Your Excellency as Ambassador of the United States to this Empire has been expected according to the letter of his majesty the President, which your excellency delivered last year to his majesty the Emperor of this nation. It is quite impossible to give satisfactory answers at once to all the proposals of your government. Although a change is most positively forbidden by the laws of our imperial ancestors, for us to continue attached to ancient laws, seems to misunderstand the spirit of the age. Nonetheless we are governed now by imperative necessity. At the visit of your excellency to this Empire last year, his majesty the former Emperor was sick and is now dead. Subsequently his majesty the present Emperor ascended the throne. The many occupations in consequence thereof are not yet finished and there is no time to settle other business thoroughly. Moreover his majesty the new Emperor at his succession to the throne promised to the princes and high officers of the empire to observe the laws; it is therefore evident that he cannot now bring about any alterations in the ancient laws. Last autumn at the departure of the Dutch ship, the superintendent of the Dutch trade in Japan was requested to inform your government of this event, and we have been informed in writing that he did so. The Russian ambassador arrived recently at Nagasaki to communicate a wish of his government. He has since left the said place, because no answer would be given to whatever nation that might communicate similar wishes. We recognize necessity, however, and shall entirely comply with the proposals of your government concerning coal, wood, water, provisions, and the saving of ships and their crews in distress. After being informed which harbor your excellency selects, that harbor shall be prepared, which preparation it is estimated will take about five years. Meanwhile commencement can be made with the coal at Nagasaki, by the first month of the next Japanese year (16th of February 1855). Having no precedent with respect to coal, we request your excellency to furnish us with an estimate, and upon due consideration this will be complied with if not in opposition to our laws. What do you mean by provisions and how much coal will be required? Finally, anything ships may be in want of that can be furnished from the production of this Empire shall be supplied; the prices of merchandise and articles of barter to be fixed by Kurokawa Kahei and Moriyama Einosuke. After settling the points before mentioned, the treaty can be concluded and signed at the next interview. Seals attached by order of the high Gentleman (signed) Moriyama Einosuke And Commodore Perry’s letter to Senior Councillor Hayashi, March 10, 1854 United States Flag Ship Powhatan At anchor off the Town of Yokohama Edo Bay, 10 March 1854 To His Highness, Hayashi, Daigaku-no-kami etc. etc. etc. Your Highness, In reply to the communication of your highness, which was brought to me yesterday by Kurokawa Kahei, and the chief interpreter, Moriyama Einosuke, I hasten to remark that it has given me the greatest satisfaction to learn from its contents, that the imperial government of Japan has at last awakened to a conviction of the necessity of so altering its policy with respect to foreign nations, as to consent to an interchange of friendly intercourse with the United States. Though the propositions set forth in the communication of your highness furnish strong evidence of the enlightened spirit with which the imperial commissioners are disposed to meet the suggestions which I have had the honor to submit, they fall far short of my anticipations, and I do not hesitate to say that they would not satisfy the views of the President. I cheerfully accede to those of the propositions of your highness which offer to guarantee kind treatment to such vessels of the United States as may hereafter visit the parts of Japan, or be wrecked upon its coasts with protection, and suitable hospitality to the people who may belong to them. Also, that provisions and other supplies shall be furnished to them and payment received for the same. Also, that American steamers shall be supplied with reasonable quantities of coal, and at fair and equitable prices. These are all very well so far as they go, and can be incorporated in the treaty which I shall expect to make; but my instructions require me to look for an intercourse of a more enlarged and liberal character, and I feel assured that the Imperial government, in consideration of the spirit of the age, and with the full knowledge of my strong desire to conduct my mission in peace and friendship, will no longer hesitate to enter with cordiality into a treaty that will be mutually honorable and advantageous to both nations. The convenience of the immense and growing commerce of the United States in these seas will require, certainly, as many ports of resort in Japan as are specified in the treaty with China, and these must be free from any restrictions not recognized, by the usages of free and independent nations. In a word, I again earnestly urge upon your highness the policy of fixing upon some written compact that will be binding as well upon the citizens of the United States as the subjects of Japan. It would be needless in me again to express the sincerest desire of my heart to bring these negotiations to an amicable and satisfactory termination; nor will I again allude to the importance of such an issue, important as well to save time as to prevent the necessity of sending from America more ships and men, and possibly with instructions of more stringent import. I have the power and the wish to meet the Imperial commissioners in all good faith, believing that there can be no more favorable time than the present to settle all the questions under consideration in such manner as will bring about a good understanding between two nations, whose geographical positions, lying in comparative proximity, would seem to enjoin, as a measure of wise foresight, a mutual interchange of those acts of kindness and good will which will serve to cement the friendship happily commenced, and to endure, I trust, for many years. With the most profound respect (signed) M. C. Perry Commander-in-chief U.S. Naval Forces East India, China, and Japan Seas And Special Ambassador to Japan. [Ref.: U.S. Senate, 33rd Congress, 2nd. Sess. (1854-55): Executive Documents, vol. 6, pp. 137-9] Some Useful Sites: http://library.brown.edu/cds/perry/Perry_Journal.html A general narrative from a US perspective. http://ocw.mit.edu/ans7870/21f/21f.027/black_ships_and_samurai/cur_student/bss_cur_toc.html An invaluable set of lessons in the multiperspective analysis of history through role play. The Perry Mission to Japan 1853-1854 in 8 Volumes by W.G. Beasley 2002 Japan opened: compiled chiefly from the narrative of the American expedition By Matthew Calbraith Perry http://www.navyandmarine.org/ondeck/1800perryjapan.htm A superb resource (follows) Mathew Perry & The Opening of Japan Researched by C. Veit   (Note: I cannot lay claim to anything original here; all that I have done is gather information from sources in print and online and woven them together to provide an overview of this important historical event. S.E. Morrison's "Old Bruin" remains the final word on Perry, but does not go into detail about the efforts of the Russian  Admiral Putiatin or make more than passing reference to  Sampachi, the Japanese national who sailed with the Yankee fleet. There simply was not all that much online about the expedition; hopefully this article will help fill that void. Readers are encouraged to follow the links under "Sources" for the original articles. Links to photos and drawings are highlighted throughout the text, while a page of thumbnail images from which larger pictures may be accessed is directly available here). Occurring only seven years before the start of the Civil War, many of the men involved in the Perry Expedition were still in the service in 1861 – even if on opposite sides. The experiences of the voyage to Japan figured large in the minds of the men and officers of the U.S. fleet. Here is the story of the Japan Expedition – of Mathew “Old Bruin” Perry (so called because his deep voice could be heard in the fiercest gale), Russian Admiral Efimii Vasil'evich Putiatin (who came within weeks of beating Perry), Eliphalet Brown (one of the first daguerreotypists), William Heine (German immigrant and official artist), and Sam Patch (Sampachi) – a shipwrecked Japanese fisherman who became an American citizen and returned to his homeland as an enlisted U.S. sailor. D D D In the middle of the harbor of Nagasaki in the far west of Japan sits the manmade island of Dejima. Since the 1600s, the island had been the home of the Dutch trade mission in Japan. No Europeans were allowed into Japan except the Dutch -- and they were allowed to land only one ship every year. The Dutch had enough political pull to make sure that no foreign nations except themselves were allowed to trade with Japan. The last director of Dejima, Donker Curtius, arrived in Nagasaki in 1852 and submitted to the Nagasaki Magistrate an official letter from the governor of the Dutch East Indies. The letter predicted the arrival of the Americans and requested that Japan sign a trade pact with the Netherlands before that event. The Japanese government ignored the letter. In August of the following year, Russian Admiral Evfimii Putiatin, under orders to open Japan, entered Nagasaki harbor. Putiatin was familiar with the Japanese: in 1842-43 he had negotiated with them towards the same end, but was rebuffed. Now the government in St. Petersburg felt the time was right to make the attempt again. Unfortunately for the Russian admiral, the Americans had sailed into Edo [Tokyo] Bay a scant two weeks before – just as the Dutch had warned. The "China Market" was always a significant lure for American merchants. Following the conclusion of the First Opium War in 1842, Britain forced China to grant it special privileges, including exclusive British use of coastal ports. Not wanting to miss out on similar opportunities, President John Tyler asked Caleb Cushing of Massachusetts to undertake a mission to open Chinese ports to American trade. In 1844 Cushing negotiated the Treaty of Wangxia. This agreement granted to American merchants the same rights as Britain based upon the "most-favored nation" principle. The next obvious move was a similar treaty with Japan – which proved much more difficult, as the experiences of four different European powers showed. Japan had been effectively sealed against foreign contacts for more than two centuries. Although previously well-disposed towards foreign trade and Christian missionaries, Shogun Ieyasu of the House of Tokagawa in 1603 began to expel all foreigners and suppress the alien religion. Ieyasu feared lest native Christians set up a fifth column for Spanish or Portuguese invaders. Japan was a feudal state at this time, and Ieyasu’s paranoia undoubtedly stemmed from this. While the House of Tokugawa became dominant, receiving the title of Shogun from the politically powerless emperor, Ieyasu did not establish a completely centralized state. Instead, he replaced opposing feudal lords with relatives and allies, who were free to rule within their domains with only a few restrictions. The Tokugawa Shoguns prevented alliances against them by forbidding marriages among the other feudal lords' family members and forcing them to spend every other year under the Shogun's eye in Edo (now Tokyo), the Shogunal capital, in a kind of organized hostage system. In 1638 under the third Shogun, Tokugawa Iemitsu, came the absolute prohibition of any contact with the outside world. Iemitsu believed that influences from abroad would shift the balance that existed between the Shogun and the feudal lords. Japanese nationals were not permitted to leave the country – even accidentally: sailors who drifted across the Pacific, carried away from Japanese shores by typhoons, were not allowed to return on pain of death. The severity of this self-isolation did not diminish with the passage of time. An influential argument was made in 1825 by the scholar Aizawa Seishisai in his book “New Proposals” (Shinron). His work had been triggered by a Shogunate decree that again banned foreign ships. Aizawa warned that Japanese weakness “for novel gadgets" could "lure ignorant people" to the spell of "treacherous foreigners." The result would be the internal corruption and the decay of Japanese society or outright foreign conquest. In 1839 one group of intellectuals was so active in learning from the Dutch and spreading the information that several committed suicide fearing that their activities embarrassed their daimyo master in the eyes of the Shogun. The tension illustrated by these suicides--the tension created between the seeking of outside news to protect Japan and the fear that spreading of such foreign influence could create disorder or even civil war--shaped the background that foreigners never understood. For 250 years the Tokugawa Shogunate maintained that internal order and Japan's very survival required cutting off the inherently disorderly and usually uncontrollable affairs of the outside world. Westerners were not welcome, and almost no one in Europe or America had ever met a Japanese. Foreign sailors who were shipwrecked in Japanese waters were badly treated. They were captured and sent directly to the port of Nagasaki to be shipped home. Nagasaki was the only place that Europeans, mostly Dutch, were allowed to live; here they existed in primitive conditions on the small island of Dejima in Nagasaki harbor. Except for a few Chinese, who also traded at Nagasaki, and some Koreans, who came on official diplomatic missions, Japan was largely cut off from the outside world. For Americans – who saw the Pacific as an extension of the “Manifest Destiny” that had carried them across their own continent – relations with Japan would provide a critical link in the chain of ports they had recently forged across the Pacific. It was hoped these bases would allow them to beat the aggressive British and capture the whole of the Oriental trade. In 1842, President John Tyler announced that Hawaii was to be treated as a special U.S. reserve – warning off other powers that might seek control of the island chain. In 1844 the Treaty of Wangxia opened Chinese ports to U.S. vessels. The 1846-48 Mexican War conquest of California gave America ports along the Pacific rim, saving thousands of miles over the existing routes around Africa or South America. Japan became increasingly important as a way station along the path from California to Shanghai. The opportunity was noted by Secretary of the Treasury Robert Walker in 1848: "By our recent acquisitions in the Pacific, Asia has suddenly become our neighbor, with a placid intervening ocean inviting our steamships upon the track of a commerce greater than that of all Europe combined.” Moreover the American Church, which possessed its own "mission" ideals of "civilizing and Christianizing Asia," saw Japan as a particularly important target for its activities. Missionary societies therefore joined in lobbying Congress for an expedition to Japan. D Previous Contact with Japan D The United States’ relationship with Japan at the end of the 1840s was one of extreme caution; very little, in fact, was known about Japan. Between 1790 and 1853 at least twenty-seven U.S. ships (including three warships) visited Japan, only to be turned away. In 1832, as part of his navigation of the Pacific, Edmund Roberts received orders from the Jackson administration to make a treaty with Japan, but he died before reaching the islands. Five years later, the Morrison, owned by Americans in Canton, tried to enter Japan with the excuse that it was returning shipwrecked Japanese sailors. The crew, however, hoped to Christianize Japanese as well as "trade a little." When shore cannon opened fire, the Morrison beat it back to China. However, in 1845, the whaleship Manhattan was allowed to land 22 Japanese castaways at Uraga and obtain provisions. This seemed a good augury and President Polk instructed Commodore James Biddle to have a try at opening Japan. On July 20, 1846 Biddle anchored Columbus and Vincennes off Uraga at the entrance to Edo Bay – where they were immediately surround by hundreds of armed guard boats. In an attempt to appear friendly, Biddle allowed Japanese sightseers to swarm freely over the ships, accepted gifts, and entrusted the President’s letter to a minor official. The Shogun refused to accept the letter and ordered the ships away, adding that they must never return. The officer of the guard boat that brought this reply ordered Commodore Biddle to come aboard and get it in person. At first Biddle refused, then made the mistake of complying. As he was about to step onto the vessel, one of the Japanese soldiers gave him a blow that sent him toppling back into his cutter. The Japanese authorities expressed their regret, but since Biddle had orders “not to do anything to excite a hostile feeling or distrust of the United States,” he simply departed in peace on July 29. This action was interpreted by the Japanese as weakness and the whole episode considered a “victory” over “the American big ships.” Captain James Glynn of the Preble was the next American to deal with the Japanese. On April 17, 1849, the Preble dropped anchor off Nagasaki on a mission to rescue American sailors from the whalers Lagoda and Lawrence which had gone down off the coast of Japan. The men had been cruelly treated, and their lives spared only by the pleas of the Dutch at Dejima. Sailing orders to Captain Glynn addressed the issue of international relations: In your correspondence with the Japanese, your conduct will be conciliatory but firm. You will be careful not to violate the laws or customs of the country, or by any means prejudice the success of any pacific policy our government may be inclined to pursue. Nevertheless you may be placed in situations which cannot be foreseen. In all such cases, every confidence is reposed in your discretion and ability to guard the interests as well as the honor of your country. At the arrival of the Preble in Nagasaki, the Japanese again attempted to surround the ship with the numerous guard boats that had stopped Biddle. Glynn would have none of this, instead forcing his way through the cordon and anchoring within easy cannon shot of the city. Small boats were sent out from which notes attached to bamboo sticks were thrown on board the Preble’s deck. Captain Glynn immediately threw them overboard insisting on being afforded the respect of speaking with a representative in person. Over the next three days, several officials and interpreters came aboard to negotiate with Captain Glynn. The Captain, under frequent questioning about his rank and the disposition of the United States naval forces, stood his ground and continually argued to speak with higher-ranking officials. Glynn delivered an ultimatum on April 22, saying that unless the prisoners were delivered to him within two days, he would open fire on the city. The next day the American prisoners were released to Dutch traders on shore and conveyed to the Preble. Captain Glynn did not converse with any officials after that and the Preble reported back to the East India Squadron in Hong Kong with the rescued passengers. Glynn reported to Washington that conditions were favorable for another attempt to open Japan, but that a strong naval force should be sent to do it. In May 1851, Secretary of State Webster heard from Captain John H. Aulick, who was to take command of the East Asia squadron, that the return of seventeen shipwrecked Japanese then in San Francisco might provide the opportunity for "opening commercial relations with Japan." The Secretary of State put Aulick in charge of the mission. Captain Glynn gave President Millard Fillmore and Aulick good advice: do not treat Japanese "as being less civilized than ourselves," do not get into arguments over treatment of U.S. sailors, and do focus only on obtaining a trade treaty. Moreover, Glynn shrewdly added, do not ask for exclusive U.S. privileges, but for access to Japan for all nations. Thus the powerful British will have reason to support, rather than oppose, the American demands. On May 10, 1851, Webster drafted a letter from President Fillmore to the Japanese Emperor. Assuring the Emperor that Aulick was on no religious enterprise, the letter asked for "friendship and commerce," as well as help (especially coal) for ships that used the northern route to China. Of special interest, Webster's draft of the note emphasized recent U.S. triumphs on land and in technology: You know [Fillmore told the Emperor] that the United States of America now extend from sea to sea; that the great countries of Oregon & California are parts of the United States; and that from these countries, which are rich in gold & silver & precious stones, our steamers can reach the shores of your happy land in less than twenty days.... [These ships] must pass along the coast of your Empire; storms & winds may cause them to be wrecked on your shores, and we ask & expect from your kindness & your greatness, kindness for our men.... We wish that our people may be permitted to trade with your people, but we shall not authorize them to break any laws of your Empire.... Your Empire has a great abundance of coal; this is an article which our Steamships, in going from California to China, must use. Japan, as Webster nicely phrased it to a friend, was the key because God had placed coal "in the depths of the Japanese islands for the benefit of the human family." Aulick, however, fumbled his chance to become famous. Charged with mistreating a Brazilian diplomat, he was replaced by Fillmore with Commodore Matthew C. Perry. The commodore initially protested he preferred commanding the U.S. Mediterranean squadron instead of trying to make yet another attempt to open Japan. But Perry had more diplomatic experience than any other American officer, and his dignified, if pompous, manner would serve him well in his negotiations with the Japanese. Born in Rhode Island in 1794, Perry had served in the War of 1812 under his famous brother, Oliver Hazard Perry. By 1837 Matthew had risen through the ranks and commanded one of the first U.S. steam warships. He was an ardent Navy man and advocate of the transition to steam power. Perry it would be – but on Perry’s terms. D The Japan Fleet D After overcoming his reluctance to accept command of the expedition, Perry prepared thoroughly. He carried on extensive talks with business figures interested in Asian trade. The commodore also demanded greater latitude in his orders from Webster, a demand the Secretary of State granted just before his death in October 1852. Perry sailed for Japan with "full and discretionary powers," in Webster's words, but the commodore was to "be held to a strict responsibility" for his actions. The "discretionary powers" included possible use of force if the Japanese tried to treat him as they had the unfortunate Commodore Biddle. Perry refused to allow any diplomats to accompany him. Commodore Aulick had insisted that the Japan fleet have at least three first class steamships and a sloop of war. Aulick wanted the steamers for two reasons. The first was that he thought a ship without sails would scare the Japanese and the second reason was for their speed. He also asked that the ships be equipped with heavy caliber guns, explosive shells, rockets, etc. to scare the Japanese or destroy them if necessary. Perry wanted an even larger fleet of ships for the expedition. He made the Secretary of the Navy, William Graham, promise to increase the size of the fleet if he was to take command. The squadron’s size was expanded to include the steamers Mississippi, Susquehanna, Powhatan, and the Allegheny. The sloops Plymouth and Saratoga were also promised, as was the ship-of-the-line Vermont and the Macedonian. Perry quickly realized that this would be a historic mission. He studied as much as possible about Japan and gathered experts to join him on his mission. He asked recently arrived German painter William Heine to become the expedition's official artist. Interested in the new and experimental field of photography, he convinced Eliphalet M. Brown, Jr., an able young daguerreotypist, to join the expedition as its official photographer. The State Department provided him with the agricultural specialist and botanist, Dr. James Morrow. Convinced that he needed an Asia expert, he hired the China scholar, S. Wells Williams, who had been to Japan with the Morrison in 1837, as official interpreter. Perry also recruited several Japanese castaways as unofficial interpreters. Perry chose his officers from among those who has served him in the Mexican War. Three close friends, Commanders Franklin Buchanan, Sidney S. Lee, and Joel Abbot were appointed commanding officers of the Susquehanna, Mississippi, and Macedonian, respectively. Commander Henry A. Adams became the Commodore’s chief of staff with the title Captain of the Fleet. Lieutenant Silas Bent (who had been to Nagasaki with Glynn in the Preble) became flag lieutenant. Major Jacob Zeilin (future seventh commandant of the Marine Corps) was the ranking Marine aboard the Mississippi. Two of Perry’s most successful selections were a seagoing French chief and an Italian bandmaster to train and conduct his flag musicians. Perry observed that naval enlisted cooks were incapable of tickling foreign palates. And he valued music not only to entertain the natives, but to maintain shipboard morale. Because the practice of flogging had only recently been abolished in the Navy, Perry advised his captains to recruit mostly landsmen and boys who would “in a very short time become more effective men in a steamer than middle-aged men of questionable constitution.” He feared lest “old salts” prove difficult to handle without the threat of flogging. “We shall now learn how the philanthropic principle of moral suasion answers,” he wrote to Commander Buchanan. Perry wrote to the Secretary of the Navy on March 27, 1852 for permission to take government stores as gifts. He requested small arms no longer of practical use, but highly valuable as presents for foreign dignitaries. Although the Secretary agreed, and Perry requisitioned stores from the New York Navy Yard, it appears that he did not take them, but instead took ordnance stores provided by the Army. Loaded aboard the Mississippi in April 1852 from the Army arsenals at New York, Watervliet, Frankford, and Washington were 40 Hall rifles (with 4,000 cartridges), 20 percussion pistols (with 2,000 cartridges), 20 artillery swords, 20 muskets with Maynard percussion locks, 40 light cavalry sabers, and 60 strips of Maynard primers. In June, Commodore Charles Morris, Chief of Ordnance and Hydrography, contracted Samuel Colt for 100 of his revolvers for Perry’s trip; these were received aboard the Mississippi by July 10. D Sam Patch D Enroute to Japan, Perry would add a final unique member to his crew – from whom great things were hoped for. This was a Japanese castaway who went by the Americanized name Sam Patch. Documentary evidence shows that Japanese castaways were being encountered in the Pacific as early as 1617. As the whaling grounds off the coast of Japan and the North Pacific were increasingly exploited from the 1840s and American trading vessels began to make more regular visits to the Far Eastern waters, the frequency of these encounters increased. Sources in Tokyo show that in the 1850s, there were at least four instances of American vessels rescuing Japanese castaways. In most cases, they were taken to Hawaii and never visited the United States. There was one instance, however, of the entire crew of a shipwrecked Japanese vessel being brought to San Francisco in 1851. The 18-man crew of the Eiriki-Maru were brought to San Francisco on February 3, 1851, only 45 days after they were found in the Pacific, and stayed there for over a year. The wreck of the Eiriki-Maru, the rescue of her crew, and their stay in San Francisco are recounted in Narrative of a Japanese by Joseph Heco (Hikotaro) – the thirteen-year old cabin boy aboard the fishing vessel. When the crew reached San Francisco, they were transferred to the U.S.S. Polk, a vessel belonging to the United States Revenue Service. They remained aboard the Polk until they left San Francisco for Hong Kong on board the U.S.S. St. Mary on 13 March 1852. During that time, they were photographed by Harvey R. Marks, a daguerreotypist from Baltimore. Comparisons of later photographs and wood block prints in Tokyo recently confirm that the picture included in this article is of Simpachi, the cook of the Eiriki-Maru  – the first Japanese national to be photographed. Perry was aware of the Japanese castaways in Hong Kong. The United States government hoped to use the return of these men as a lever in opening Japan to foreign trade, and awaiting them at Hong Kong to take them back to Japan was the U.S.S. Susquehanna, one of the vessels in Perry’s squadron. The Japanese, however, were fearful that they would be suspected of having abetted the Americans, and several left the group to try and find their own way back to Japan, while others, including Hikotaro, went back to California. When the Susquehanna eventually set sail for Japan, only one member of the original group, Simpachi, remained on board, having learnt enough English to enlist in the United States Navy as a third-class seaman. Commodore Perry took a personal interest in ‘Sam Patch’, as he was nicknamed, and wrote later that by the time the expedition reached Uraga, ‘Sam had taken his place as one of the crew, and had won the good will of his shipmates by his good nature’. While not an official interpreter, it was hoped that Sam would play a key role as a go-between. Perry was happy to entrust Sam to the care of Jonathan Goble, a devout Christian in the Marine contingent; he wrote in his report of the expedition that: It is not unreasonable to hope that Sam, with the education of his faithful American friend, may be an instrument, in the event of his return to Japan, under a further development of our relations with that empire, of aiding in the introduction of a higher and better civilization into his own country. All honor be to the American Christian Marine for his benevolence. D The Fleet Sails D Perry's fleet set sail from Norfolk, Virginia, on November 24, 1852. He had been given specific instructions to expand America's trade relations in the Asian region and to acquire rights to establish coaling stations in ports along the Japanese coast or in the uninhabited islands around Japan. Perry thoroughly studied Japan and its relations with the surrounding areas. In one report sent to the American Naval Commander in 1852, Perry noted that if Japan were not to respond favorably to his calls for an end to the sakoku (isolation) policy, he would anchor his ships nearby in intimidatory fashion. He proposed that the Ryukyus would be best-suited. In his view, the Ryukyus were under the direct control of one of Japan's most powerful daimyo, Shimazu, but that the people of the Ryukyus (who were inveterate pacifists) suffered nothing but oppression under his regime. In his own words, "liberating the islanders from this regime and occupying the region would be the most appropriate and morally correct course of action. As far as I'm concerned, it would greatly improve the lives of the [Ryukyu] islanders. Without doubt, the Ryukyuans would welcome America." The Commodore had a shrewd appreciation of the strategic value of Okinawa as the keystone of the Pacific: the British, by establishing bases at Singapore, North Borneo, and Hong Kong, already controlled every approach to China from the westward. An American base at Okinawa would enable the United States Navy to control access to these same waters from across the pacific and thereby balance British power in the Far East. Perry's "Ryukyu Proposal" was given the go-ahead by the American President, though he was instructed to procure goods from the islanders at fair prices and to make sure that his crew behaved impeccably whilst there. Military force was sanctioned only in such circumstances that Perry or his crew came under attack. Perry, aboard the Mississippi, took the long traditional route along the Atlantic, around the Cape of Good Hope, through the Indian Ocean, then to Singapore, Hong Kong (where he picked up the sloops Plymouth and Saratoga), Shanghai (adding the sidewheeler Susquehanna), and the Loochoo Islands before approaching Japan. Perry's fleet arrived at Naha Port in the Ryukyus in May of 1853. Contrary to instructions, he threatened, and applied, force readily, telling the Ryukyu government that if he were not allowed access or lease to required facilities and areas for a coaling station and for trading purposes, he would send 200 troops to occupy Shuri castle. The Ryukyu government surrendered unconditionally. In the month that followed, Perry drilled his men at small arms and the ship’s guns, landing the Marines ashore for hours of drill, and distributing the cache of weapons brought from home aboard the Mississippi. On July 2, 1853, sailed for Edo (Tokyo) Bay, arriving at 5a.m. on July 8, 1853. The four ships steamed in column between the Izu Peninsula and volcanic island of O Shima, entering Sagami Bay as thousands of Japanese on shore watched the “burning ships” in amazement. On signal from Susquehanna, decks were cleared for action, cannon loaded, small arms made ready, and men took their battle stations. The smooth sea was dotted with fishing boats and lumbering junks. Upon seeing Perry's fleet sailing into their harbor, the Japanese called them the "black ships (korofune) of evil mien." At 5p.m. Perry’s squadron anchored in line of battle in Tokyo Bay, within thirty miles of the capitol. As anchor chains rattled out of hawsepipes, a fort ashore fired two guns – a signal to the bakufu (government) at Edo, which sent out a general alarm and mobilization of defense forces numbering over 20,000 men. The American ships were almost immediately surrounded by Japanese guard boats, each carrying a score of soldiers. Fastening lines to the ships, these soldiers attempted to climb aboard over the chains or the bobstays. Commodore Biddle had allowed that, but Perry was determined to prevent it. By his orders, sailors cast overboard or cut the lines and repelled would-be boarders with pikes and cutlasses. No foreign ship had ever dared to do that. The boats’ officers roared angrily and one approached with a large sign in French (supplied by the Dutch): “Depart immediately and dare not anchor!” A Dutch interpreter with the Japanese explained that a high personage was on board and wished to be received. Although the Dutch had warned the Shogun's government, the bakufu, that Americans were coming, the Japanese were nevertheless surprised that Perry appeared so soon. Their surprise mounted when the commodore ignored low-level officials and insisted--pointedly as he stood beneath the cannons of his warship--on dealing only with bugyo (someone given specific powers directly by the Shogun). Their surprise changed into near horror when they further learned that President Fillmore's letter was addressed to the Emperor as if Emperor Komei were a mere equal. Because Perry refused to deal with anyone of less than imperial rank, second in command Captain Henry A. Adams served as preliminary negotiator. The stunned bakufu decided to play for time, using their women to appease and distract the powerful while they built up their forces. One U.S. officer recorded that "the inhabitants ... by the most unmistakable signs invited our intercourse with their women." As one historian explained, "The Americans had guns, the Japanese lifted their skirts." Nor was Sam Patch able to prove to be as useful as Perry had hoped. On the two occasions he met with the Japanese representatives, ‘Sam’ acted as any low-born Japanese at that time would in his situation, and immediately prostrated himself before them. He had to be ordered to rise by the ship’s officers, who were embarrassed that "such obsequiousness should be shown on the deck of an American man-of-war, and under the flag of the United States, to anything wearing the human form". The shore was a scene of bustling activity as the mobilization decreed by the bakufu began. The daimyo responsible for the defense of Edo Bay sent contingents of cavalry, long-swordsmen, archers with eight-foot bows, musketeers carrying ancient smoothbores, spearmen with ten-foot pikes – a brave and beautiful spectacle that did little to faze the watching Americans. Despite the great numbers of men and the existence of some twenty forts – as well as earthworks being thrown up behind canvas screens so that Perry’s officers called them “dungaree forts” – the tars ascertained that the Japanese had no weapons which they need fear. Unbeknownst to Perry, all of this was mere show: the bakufu had no real means to rid itself of the Americans. The Japanese had no modern weapons with which to defend Edo or even to prevent a blockade of the capitol – the provisions for which all came by sea. Despite ordering that no one discuss the foreign ships, word spread through the country and every day they remained the bakufu lost face with the Japanese people. While eager to do almost anything to be rid of the Americans, officials were aware that one wrong move might give them cause to remain. Strict orders were issued to withhold all gunfire, for fear that, if given such an excuse, the Perry would act as the British had in China, occupying the port and setting up an American Hong Kong. Nomatter how “insolent” the “outer barbarians” grew, an incident must be avoided. So the government decided to accept Perry’s letter, but to delay as long as possible in hopes that another kamikaze (divine wind) would blow up and destroy the black ships. If that did not happen, they would make as few concessions as possible to get rid of the Americans. In the meantime, the Americans sent out sounding parties. On the 11th of July a cutter from the Mississippi under Lieutenant Silas Bent was confronted by forty Japanese guard boats filled with soldiers and bristling with spears and matchlocks. Bent altered course to avoid them and sent a boat back to the flagship to ask Captain Lee to move the ship closer. On the steamer’s approach the guard boats retired. Perry named the nearest point of land Point Rubicon because no foreign ship had crossed it in three hundred years. Perry’s purpose in sounding the channel to Edo was so that, in case no proper person was sent to receive the President’s letter, he could land close to the Shogunal capitol and deliver it himself under cover of the ships’ guns. A Japanese official sent aboard Mississippi to protest these forays was told that the Americans were charting the bay in order to fight their way into the Edo in the event the bakufu procrastinated too long. The threat and the candor with which it was delivered impressed the Japanese, for the next day, July 12, bakufu officials arrived to arrange a meeting between Perry and Prince Izu, one of the emperor’s counselors. The meeting would take place a Kurihama in two days time. At break of day on Thursday, July 14, the two steamers weighed anchor, proceeded the short distance to Kurihama, and anchored with springs on their cables so as to be able to bring a full broadside to bear in the event of treachery. The shore was lined with thousands of Japanese troops, so Perry ordered his men heavily armed: sailors carried musket, pistol, and cutlass, and every other man was armed with a boarding pike. With the full panoply of his rank, Perry went ashore at 9a.m. on July 14 for the ceremony of handing over the president’s letter. The 250 sailors and Marines that accompanied him in fifteen ships’ boats under Commander Buchanan were outnumbered by the Japanese twenty to one. Recognizing the importance of pageantry and “face” in dealing with the Japanese, “Beriri” (as the Japanese called him) arranged for a thirteen gun salute to be fired from Susquehanna as he stepped into his boat – just as Buchanan jumped ashore. When the Commodore landed, Major Zeilin’s Marines presented arms and the bands struck up “Hail Columbia!” Zeilin’s Marines (wearing plumed shakos) led the way, followed by a contingent of sailors and the one of the bands. Two ship’s boys came next, bearing President Fillmore’s letter and the Commodore’s letter of credence. After them came Perry, flanked by two huge Negro seamen serving as bodyguards, bearing the American ensign1 and the blue pennant; these were the first blacks the Japanese had ever seen. More bluejackets followed and the second band closed the formation. The sailors were all dressed in white frocks and blue trousers and the newly-issued blue flat hat – which Perry had caused to be decorated with a hatband of red, white and blue horizontal stripes with thirteen blue stars on the white stripe. The American formation and maneuvers, “conducted just as if they were marching into enemy territory,” impressed the Japanese. Perry marched the short distance from the beach at Kurihama to a pavilion hastily constructed for the meeting. It was a tense moment, but not a one of the 5,000-man Japanese force raised a hand to oppose the landing. Excellent discipline on both sides prevented an explosion that might have resulted in war instead of a treaty. The Americans never realized what a close thing it was. Just as the fleet swung at anchor with guns loaded and run out, so too were the Japanese ready for any treachery. Years afterwards, Kashigawi Shigefusa, a samurai, recorded that he and nine other two-sworded warriors were concealed under the floor of the reception hall with orders to rush out and slay the Commodore should the visitors attempt any violence. Awaiting Perry and his officers inside the pavilion were Princes Toda Izu and Ido Iwami. They rose from their camp stools and bowed silently as Perry and his officers were seated on priests’ thrones borrowed from local Buddhist temples. An awkward silence was broken by the Japanese interpreter’s announcement that the Princes were ready to receive the Americans’ documents. Perry beckoned to the two small ship’s boys, who advanced along with the two Negro seamen to a large central dais. Taking the boxes from the boys, the sailors unlocked them, displayed the contents with their official seals, and placed the letters in a scarlet Imperial dispatch case upon the table. This flaunting of the documents had no visible effect upon the Japanese, who were mesmerized by the sight of the huge black sailors. In return, two Japanese aides received from the hand of Prince Ido a scroll which they delivered to Perry; it grudgingly acknowledged receipt of the letters and told the Americans that, since it had been delivered, they could depart. Another awkward silence followed until the Commodore announced that he would be leaving in two or three days, but would return for their reply in the spring. The interpreter asked, “With all four vessels?” Perry replied “Probably more.” Everyone was back aboard by 11:30 in the morning. The squadron weighed anchor on Sunday morning of July 17 to winter over on the China coast and the Ryukyus. The next move was up to Abe Masahiro, leader of the Shogun's council. A daimyo known and trusted by most of the powerful lords of the more than one hundred fiefdoms of Japan, Abe was a gentle, well-liked man so shrewd that he had entered the council at age twenty-four in 1843. A politician who sometimes bent too easily and quickly to prevailing political winds, he carefully sounded out the daimyo about the proper response to Perry. These men were divided. Some knew nothing of the dangerous international situation in the western Pacific, but all seemed to agree that under no circumstances could Japan open its empire to foreign traders; their goods would upset the nation's internal order. But how to inform Perry of this when he returned with his warships? Some of the more powerful daimyo advised stalling while the bakufu built a modern military to deal with the commodore on Japanese terms. A number, indeed, were willing to go to war with the United States -- after proper preparations. These daimyo demonstrated a fascinating confidence that Japan could quickly match the West's military technology, as well as perhaps profit from that technology in international trade. ("We have reason to believe that the Americans and Russians have recently learned the art of navigation," a typically confident daimyo told Abe; "in what way would the keen and wise men of our empire appear inferior to the Westerners if they got into training from today?") Abe knew that the West, most immediately Perry, would not give Japan the needed time. Any doubt of that disappeared when Russian Admiral Efimii Vasil'evich Putiatin again led his four Russian ships into Nagasaki harbor just after Perry left Edo. D The Russians D The American expedition to Japan did not occur in a vacuum; rather, it was played out against the background of international politics and affected the balance of power in the Western Pacific. Although the trading rights sought by Perry were aimed more at the countering the British, it was the Russians who were the primary competitors for the opening of Japan. Beginning in the eighteenth century, Russian expansion into the Amur River region and over to Alaska created friction with Japan. The Kurile Islands and Sakhalin were contested by both countries, and clashes over fishing rights were common. In 1804 the Russian-American Company asked officials at Nagasaki for permission to trade with Japan so the company could supply the expanding Russian settlements to the north. The Japanese flatly rejected the request. The Russians decided during 1806-07 to teach the Tokugawa a lesson by raiding villages in the northern islands. The Japanese did not back down. Instead, they captured a Russian official in 1811 and held him for two years until the czar's officials finally apologized for the raids. Japanese officials began to warn that Russia posed the major threat to their country's security. In the 1840s this feeling intensified as Japan watched the Europeans exploit China as a result of the First Opium War.. In 1850 war broke out again in China with the Taipeng Rebellion, which gathered pace to become a serious threat to the ruling Manchu dynasty. The progress of the rebellion alarmed the Western powers, who saw their growing influence potentially undermined by events. British armies were “invited” by the Chinese to help in the suppression of the rebels. At the same time the Russian court learnt of American plas to force the opening of Japanese ports. Muraviev, Governor General of Siberia, warned the Czar Nicholas I that Britain and America threatened Russia's position in the Far East. In 1852, Admiral Efimii Vasil'evich Putiatin – veteran of a failed 1843 attempt to force the opening of Japan – was again dispatched with instructions to establish greater ties with Japan as well as with China. In 1853 Putiatin entered Nagasaki with his flagship Pallada, the Diana, and three other vessels, bearing official letters from the czar and seeking the formation of a trade pact between Russia and Japan. Local officials used the same tactics of delay on the Russian admiral as their counterparts at Edo Bay attempted with the Americans – but more successfully. With England and France taking the side of Russia's Turkish enemies in the looming Crimean War, Putiatin could not remain still for fear of attack by British or French ships. He sailed in and out of Nagasaki three times from July 1853 to March 1854. While Putiatin was not party to the negotiations that took place on Edo Bay, his repeated presence at Nagasaki helped to convince the Shogunate that the policy of “national seclusion” had to come to an end. D The Second Visit to Japan D Although having told the Japanese that he would return in the spring of 1854, Perry was aware that Putiatin was still in the area. Fearing that the Russian admiral might force the Japanese to sign a treaty while the Americans were still wintering on the China coast, Perry departed for Japan in January. (His suspicions were correct, for Putiatin had departed Nagasaki less than three weeks earlier after a second, month-long visit.) Perry’s early sailing date was also motivated by a joint British / French promise to “accompany him up to Japan next spring.” Perry gave them the slip and came with ten ships (four sailing ships, three steamers, and three supply ships -- a quarter of the U.S. Navy) and 1600 men and dropped anchor 26 miles from Edo on February 13, 1854.   The bakufu was neither surprised nor embarrassed by the early reappearance of the Americans, because it had already decided its policy over the winter months. While some progressive daimyo and ministers advocated open trade, and other more provincial lords argued for open warfare, the government settled on a middle course. Japan would promise kind treatment for castaways; would open the remote port of Shimoda for trade and as a coaling station (but not for three years); and would agree to provision American visitors at fair prices. Nonetheless, the Japanese negotiators procrastinated for weeks, haggling with Perry over the site of the negotiations. Perry was set on Edo; this the Japanese utterly refused, repeatedly suggesting various ports which the Commodore found equally impossible due to their lack of shelter. “Old Bruin’s” patience finally wore thin and he lost his temper, saying “if his proposals were rejected, he was prepared to make war at once; that in the event of war he would have fifty ships in nearby waters at once and fifty more in California, and that if he sent word he could summon a command of one hundred warships within twenty days.” Of course, this far exceeded the actual size of the American Navy at that time, but the Japanese could not know this. Toward the end of February Perry moved his ships up the bay until Edo could be seen from the mastheads; he meant this as a hint to the Japanese that he could go to Edo if he wished. Finally both sides compromised on the tiny village of Yokohama, where a treaty hall was quickly built. Perry landed for peace and trade talks on March 8th, 1854. Three naval bands played the Star Spangled Banner as twenty-seven boats landed 500 sailors and Marines. The ensuing procession demonstrated the commodore’s philosophy that “with people of forms it is necessary either to set all ceremonies aside or to out-Herod Herod in assumed personal consequence and ostentation.” The Americans disembarked, formed two lines, and presented arms. Through this aisle again marched the two colossal black sailors bearing the ensign and broad pennant. Perry, in full dress coat and gold-striped trousers, accompanied by a column of officers two abreast, followed them into the treaty house. Chief Commissioner Hayashi awaited him there. With the emperor’s approval, the Japanese had already agreed to yield to Perry’s demands, but as masters at the arts of evasion and procrastination, they delayed as long as they could in coming to terms. But in Perry they met their match in diplomatic skill and steadfastness. On the last day of March 1854, after intense negotiations, Perry and the Japanese signed the “Treaty of Peace and Amity between the United States and Japan” – better known as the Treaty of Kanagawa. The treaty guaranteed that the Japanese would save and care for shipwrecked Americans, and that they would provide food, coal, water, and other provisions for the American ships that docked in Nagasaki. In five years the same supplies could be procured at Shimoda and Hakodate. It also granted the United States permission to build a consulate in Shimoda (Townsend Harris, the first United States ambassador to Japan, would arrive in August). The Japanese agreed to all of these things but wouldn’t sign for trade; that would wait until 1857. This ended Japan’s two-hundred year isolation policy. Afterward, the emperor would claim that he had not been told all that was contained in the treaty. After the official negotiations were completed there was much celebration. The Americans presented the Japanese with a variety of gifts that included a miniature steam locomotive, a telegraph apparatus with lines, modern fire-fighting equipment, various agricultural tools, arms (including Colt six shooters and Hall's twenty-four-shot rifles), one hundred gallons of whiskey, clocks, stoves, and many books about the United States. As the banquets aboard Perry's flagship showed, the Japanese needed no lessons in merriment. Both Americans and Japanese liked to dance and drink. The Japanese responded with entertainment and gifts of their own: gold-lacquered furniture and boxes, bronze ornaments, porcelain goblets, and – to indulge the commodore’s personal hobby – a collection of seashells. Among the entertainment they provided for the Americans was a Sumo wrestling match; the Americans countered with a "Japanese minstrel show." Perry had originally pushed for American access to five Japanese ports, including Naha in the Ryukyus. Japan refused, designating only Shimoda and Hakodate. In the case of Naha, Japanese negotiators stated that since Ryukyu was a distant country, neither the Emperor or Japanese Government had any rights to confer access to its ports. This statement was a confirmation of Perry's own impression that the Ryukyu Kingdom was an independent entity. Upon returning to Naha, therefore, he swiftly organized a treaty specifically related to American interests in that region. A “Compact between the United States and the Ryukyu Kingdom” was drafted in both English and Chinese and formally signed on 11th July, 1854. It was ratified by the U.S. Senate the following year. D Perry at Shimoda D While Perry's second in command, Captain Henry Adams, sped home with the signed treaty aboard the Saratoga (which made the fastest trip yet between Japan and America), Perry took the remainder of his squadron to Shimoda to survey the harbor, study its shore, and record the site where the future American consulate would be located. It was during this phase of the expedition that Japanese artists made the Black Ship Scroll paintings. Shimoda was located about 130 miles from the city of Edo, at the southern end of the rugged Izu Peninsula. The Japanese did not want "foreign barbarians" close to Edo, and so selected an out-of-the-way port as the site where Westerners would be allowed to reside. Heine, the German-American artist on the Expedition, said of Shimoda, "the harbor of Shimoda consists of a spacious inlet surrounded by rolling countryside rising to hills of several hundred feet. Even our large ships could anchor within rifle shot of land, so abruptly does the shore slant to depth… There at the mouth of a small but vigorous river the town of Shimoda numbers about a thousand buildings." Once Perry and his men came ashore in Shimoda, they had much work to do. Shimoda was to become the chief port in Japan for Westerners. To prepare the way for the arrival of future Americans, Perry had his squadron carefully survey the port. Heine wrote, "we undertook a scrupulous coastal survey of the harbor, the shoreline and contiguous areas, and especially the isolated rocks and a series of reefs." Heine seems to have made topographical drawings that went with the surveys. One of the new technologies that Perry brought to demonstrate to the Japanese was the early camera, the daguerreotype. The making of an early photograph took place in Shimoda on May 7, 1854. Eliphalet M. Brown, Jr., a member of Perry's team, was the official daguerreotypist. At Commodore Perry's request, the governor of Shimoda selected several Japanese ladies to be daguerreotyped. About a hundred people gathered to witness this "experiment with that miraculous box." William Heine, the artist who accompanied Perry, wrote in his journal: "On one occasion I saw six or eight young women tricked out in their most elegant. All were attractive, and some would have been called lovely in different cultures and other lands." The caption on the scroll tells us that the seated lady is a "courtesan" who is having her picture taken so that it can be sent to the "the American king" to show him what "a Japanese beauty looked like." Rumors circulated not long thereafter that anyone who had been photographed would "die within three years." This was just an idle rumor, and the new technology was soon embraced. D The News Reaches Home D The New York Times bragged that the United States had opened Japan to the West, and upstaged the Europeans as well, by using "peaceful diplomacy, to overcome obstacles hitherto considered insurmountable," despite "the sneers, the ridicule, and the contempt of shortsighted European and American newspapers. The Times, however, was also puzzled. The Japanese "seemed remarkably conversant with the affairs of the United States -- knew all about the Mexican War, its occasion and results." Quite true. Even when Perry felt, in the words of a later historian, "like a combination Santa Claus and conjurer" as he demonstrated the toy railroad, the Japanese actually knew all about railways from the Illustrated London News, to which the Shogun himself regularly subscribed. More important, the Japanese had kept up with American affairs since 1797 when officials discovered that the Dutch, short of their own ships, were sneaking U.S. vessels into Nagasaki under the Dutch flag. The Shogunate demanded information about these Americans. The Dutch responded with history lessons that featured the revolt against the British in 1776 (because, the Dutch emphasized, of cruel treatment by the British), the 1787 Constitution, the great George Washington ("a very capable general" whose name has been given to "a new city"), and Thomas Jefferson. The Dutch had supported the new nation in the 1770s, so the Shogun heard a pro-American version of the history. By the 1840s, Japanese used the Dutch to acquire good world geographies, as well as histories, and exploited their contacts with China, where U.S. missionaries were publishing material, to obtain fresh information. Then, too, a few Japanese who had lived in the United States were permitted to return home and, as one reported in 1851, announced that Americans were "lewd by nature, but otherwise well-behaved." Japan might have chosen isolation, but its people, including peasants, were about as well educated as the British (and more so than the general French population), and in reality they were not isolated. D Effects of the Treaty of Kanagawa on Japan D Perry's small squadron itself was not enough to force the massive changes that then took place in Japan, but the Japanese knew that his ships were just the beginning of Western interest in their islands.  Following Perry’s example, Britain used its fleet in 1854 to force a treaty similar to the Kanagawa document on the Japanese; arrangements with the Netherlands, France, and Russia followed. They did not just threaten Japan -- they used their navies in combination on several occasions to defeat and disarm any of the Japanese feudal domains that defied them.  For Japan, these treaties had a wide variety of effects. The trade brought much foreign currency into Japan, disrupting the Japanese monetary system. The ruling Shogun seemed unable to do anything about the problems brought by the foreign trade and some samurai leaders began to demand a change in leadership.  It is unlikely that any foreign power could have bullied the bakufu into agreeing to these treaties were it not for the weakened state of the central government and the general inadequacy of its internal defenses. Furthermore, the years of isolation meant that the bakufu had only minimal knowledge about contemporary international diplomacy. The bakufu was barely able to control the its own regional daimyo or to prevent civil unrest amongst ordinary peasants and farmers, let alone foreign intruders with advanced military know-how. A sense of desperation was illustrated by the bakufu's sudden desire to seek the assistance of that long-forgotten institution: the Imperial Family. The bakufu hardly received the support it was looking for since the Imperial Court denounced the treaties. Thereafter, Japan became divided into two main factions: those supporting Sonno-Joi (“revere the Emperor and expel the barbarians”), or Kaikoku (“open the country”). Satsuma and Choshu, two of Japan's most powerful domains, had initially supported the Sonno-Joi cause, but shifted to the opposing camp after they received a harsh lesson in the destructive capability of naval artillery. They decided instead to emulate the foreigners and learn from them; mainly because both daimyo wanted to obtain the artillery. Once Satsuma and Choshu had aligned with Tosa and Hizen samurai, the end of the bakufu was near. The resulting civil war was brief. Finally, in 1867, the last Shogun, Tokugawa Yoshinobu, surrendered all powers of government to the Emperor. Some Tokugawa stragglers attempted to resist the inevitable by escaping to Hokkaido and settling up an Ezo Republic with an administrative capital at Goryokaku, but this was crushed in May of 1869. Belatedly, in September 1869, the new Japanese era was designated as Meiji, meaning “enlightenment.” Starting with the restoration of the emperor and filtering down even to the local level, Japanese bureaucracy, society, military, and economy was revamped to emulate the more modern and advanced West. Feudal Tokugawa practices were to be discarded as obsolete and attention focused instead on the acquisition of knowledge and technology from "the world". Scholars were sent to Europe to learn of Western technology, systematic reforms were implemented to improve education, the army was now comprised of conscripted peasants, and a new financial banking system was established. In short, Japan was to become more outward-looking. D Afterward D The significance of Mathew Perry’s achievement was recognized at the time: his American interpreter, Wells Williams, recorded in his diary that a “key was put into the lock and a beginning made to do away with the long seclusion of this nation, “ and the Japanese court physician Dr. Ito called it “good medicine,” which made “the bakufu for the first time realize how formidable a foreign nation might be.” Plaudits were showered upon Perry when he returned home, but no one summed up his accomplishments better than Washington Irving. “You have gained yourself a lasting name, and have won it without shedding a drop of blood or inflicting misery on a human being,” he wrote the commodore. “What naval commander has ever won laurels at such a rate?” For others on the expedition, fate would not be so kind. The expedition’s official agriculturalist, Dr. James Morrow, made many drawings of Japanese plants and flowers, including species of plants yet unknown to Americans. When the expedition was completed, Morrow refused to give his drawings to Perry to have them published with the official record of the journey. He reasoned that because he had been sent to Japan by the Secretary of State, not Perry, the State Department should publish his drawings and journal as a separate volume. Unfortunately his proposed volume of drawings was never published and his materials have disappeared. A similar fate was visited upon the 200-odd daguerreotypes made by Eliphalet Brown. While a number of them were reproduced as lithographs in the official report of Perry’s expedition, the bulk were subsequently lost in a fire at the Philadelphia works where the lithographic plates were being prepared. Only five daguerreotypes by Brown are known to have survived. Although his work was lost, the Committee on Naval Affairs recognized his efforts and recommended him in 1858 for additional compensation. At the conclusion of the expedition, Sam Patch was invited to remain in Japan. However, as it was a crime for Japanese to return to Japan, he was fearful of what would happen to him if he stayed. Sam returned to the United States on the Mississippi. His decision to return to America may have been motivated by his conversion to Christianity. While Sam went by many names (Sentaro, Sampachi, Kurazo, Kurakichi, etc.), curiously, the Black Ships Scrolls refers to him as “Matou.” One possibility is that under his friend Jonathan Goble's Christian "instruction" he had converted to Christianity and that the Marine had given him the Christian name "Mathew." This may explain why Sam was so reluctant to stay in Japan where Christianity was strictly outlawed. In the U.S. Sam and his friend Jonathan Goble enrolled at Madison University in New York State in 1855; neither graduated -- the former being found wanting in brains and the latter being expelled after marrying a local girl. Nonetheless, Sam was a baptised Christian, and on the strength of this fact, Goble secured a post in the Baptist mission to Japan. On April Fools’ Day, 1860, after four years in America, Sentaro finally returned to Japan, but, rather than fulfilling Perry’s dream as the representative of a ‘higher and better civilization’, he was now reduced to the role of cook and servant in the Goble household. For the rest of his life, Sentaro worked in the same capacity for several American missionaries resident in Japan. After repeated physical abuse at the hands of the short-tempered and impecunious Goble, we find Sentaro a few years later employed in the more congenial Yokohama household of another missionary, Dr. James Ballagh. In 1868, he was able to visit the United States for a third time when he accompanied Mrs. Ballagh and her children on their journey home. In 1874, while still in his early forties, he died after contracting beri-beri, and was given a Christian burial by his employer. The final word on Sentaro comes from one of his former employers, who concluded that “Sam had great opportunities in the world, but he didn’t have any brains to start on.” Whatever his intellectual limitations, however, he earned a small place in history as the only Japanese to accompany Perry on his mission to Japan, and, as the first Japanese subject to be photographed. Finally, although the opening of Japan must be credited to the Americans, it was the Russians who first provided the technical know-how that would allow the island country to expand onto the world stage. The Russian aid was as inadvertent as it was later damaging. Having been rebuffed again and again, Putiatin visited Shimoda in October 1854 in hopes of at last forcing a trade treaty upon the Japanese. The convenient death of the Shogun gave Abe Masahiro an excuse to put off Putiatin's demands for a treaty. At the same time, however, Abe removed a two-century rule against building large ships and named an admiral of the new Shogun's navy. While off Shimoda, Putiatin’s flagship, Diana, was caught in a great earthquake and tidal wave; the ship was destroyed and Putiatin and his crew were marooned on Honshu. While continuing negotiations with the Japanese, Putiatin asked permission for his men to build a vessel to take them home. Because Abe had lifted the restriction against building large ships, the Russian admiral’s request was granted. The Japanese watched intently and soon afterwards built an exact copy. The bold claim that the Japanese could quickly catch up technologically with the West was realized and demonstrated to devastating effect only fifty years later in the Straits of Tsushima, where virtually every ship of the Russian fleet was sunk or captured by Admiral Togo.   For the year following his return from Japan, Mathew Perry was assigned the task of writing an official narrative of the voyage and negotiations. On December 28, 1857, he announced that the final volume was complete. Only two months later, in February of 1858, Perry, now 63, caught a severe cold. His rheumatism returned, leading to an attack of the arthritis that had kept him from at first negotiating in Tokyo Bay. The rheumatism mounted to his heart and he died in the early hours of March 4, 1858. He lies in the Island Cemetery in Newport, Rhode Island – just across the bay from where he was born. Text of the Treaty of Kanagawa Text of Perry's Letter to the Emperor Photos & Paintings from the Perry Expedition   D Sources D While all of these books or sites provided important information for this collation about the Perry Expedition, several are worthy of a special recommendation for additional reading. As mentioned above, Morrison's biography "Old Bruin -- Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry" is the very best source for any information on the Perry. Sampachi (or Sentaro or Matou or Sam Patch) crops up peripherally in a number of places, but the most detailed treatment of his part in history came, surprisingly, from the site of some British photographers researching the photograph! See "The Sentaro Daguerreotype" in the list below. Admiral Putiatin appears in a number of very informative web sites about the Crimean War; obviously, the one with his name on it (below) is the best. For a fuller treatment of the Shimoda artwork, visit the "Black Ships Scrolls" via the listed link. U.S.S. Aulick webpage at http://www.navyhistory.com/destroyer/Aulickdd258.html, 16 April 2001. “Black Ships Scrolls” at http://www.us-japan.org/jsnc/virtualjapan/BSS/intro3.htm, 17 April 2001; also source for assorted images. The Clash: A History of U.S.-Japan Relations, Walter LaFeber, W. W. Norton & Co. Inc. 1997. "Chronology of Japanese History" at http://home.owc.net/~dturk/japanhistory/edohistory.html, 28 March 2001. Civil War Small Arms of the U.S. Navy & Marine Corps, J. D. McAulay, Andrew Mowbray Publishers, Lincoln, 1999. "Commodore Perry's Expedition to Japan" at http://www.grifworld.com/perryhome.html, 27 March 2001. “The Crimean War in the Far East” at http://www.fortunecity.com/olympia/ince/698/rurik/krim.html, 27 April 2001. The Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships -- Vincennes at http://www.hazegray.org/danfs/sloops/vincnns1.htm, 17 April 2001. Dictionary of Westward Expansion  at http://www.state.gov/www/about_state/history/time4.html, 30 March 2001. History of the Kuril Islands http://www.fortunecity.com/olympia/ince/698/rurik/kuril.html on 16 April 2001. The Kimball Files, SAC 1855-1903 at http://www.uoregon.edu/~kimball/sac.1855.1903.htm, 27 April 2001. The Lagoda Affair, in T he U.S.S. Preble, Sloop of War 1838-1863, by Robin Moore, at http://home.coffeeonline.com.au/~tfoen/preble.htm, 17 April 2001. Nagasaki city website, Dejima Museum, http://www1.city.nagasaki.nagasaki.jp/dejima/index_e.html, 16 April 2001. NARA, Committee On Naval Affairs, 1822-1946 at http://www.nara.gov/nara/legislative/house_guide/hgch04d.html, 19 April 2001. "Okinawa's History from the Sanzan Era to the Pacific War” at http://www.niraikanai.wwma.net/pages/base/chap1-4.html, 28 March 2001. “Old Bruin” – Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry, S. E. Morison, Little Brown & Co., Boston, 1967. “The Opening of Japan To The West” at http://www.library.yale.edu/beinecke/orient/japan.htm, 27 April 2001. “Perry Opens Japan” at Pacific Book Auction, http://www.pacificbook.com/catalogs/curcat136-6.html, 27 April 2001. “Putiatin” at http://www.fortunecity.com/olympia/ince/698/rurik/putiatin.html, 27 April 2001. The Sentaro Daguerreotype online at http://www.old-japan.co.uk/sentaro.html, 19 April 2001. The Tattoos of Michinaga Ei And Nicholas II, Brian Burke-Gaffney at http://www.uwosh.edu/home_pages/faculty_staff/earns/nick&ei.html on 27 April 2001 Treaty of Kanagawa text from the web page of Dr. Joseph V. O’Brien, Dept. of History, John Jay College of Criminal Justice at http://web.jjay.cuny.edu/~jobrien/reference/ob25.html, 28 March 2001 The U.S. Navy: An Illustrated History, Nathan Miller, American Heritage Publishing Co., New York, 1977. Notes 1Perry brought the ensign home, where it is now displayed in the Naval Academy Museum at Annapolis. At the end of World War Two, General MacArthur had it placed on the quarterdeck of the U.S.S. Missouri during the surrender ceremony in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945.

Source: Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" Establishing Context The Empire and the People Theodore Roosevelt wrote to a friend in the year 1897: "In strict confidence . . . I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one." The year of the massacre at Wounded Knee, 1890, it was officially declared by the Bureau of the Census that the internal frontier was closed. The profit system, with its natural tendency for expansion, had already begun to look overseas. The severe depression that began in 1893 strengthened an idea developing within the political and financial elite of the country: that overseas markets for American goods might relieve the problem of underconsumption at home and prevent the economic crises that in the 1890s brought class war. And would not a foreign adventure deflect some of the rebellious energy that went into strikes and protest movements toward an external enemy? Would it not unite people with government, with the armed forces, instead of against them? This was probably not a conscious plan among most of the elite -- but a natural development from the twin drives of capitalism and nationalism. Expansion overseas was not a new idea. Even before the war against Mexico carried the United States to the Pacific, the Monroe Doctrine looked southward into and beyond the Caribbean. Issued in 1823 when the countries of Latin America were winning independence from Spanish control, it made plain to European nations that the United States considered Latin America its sphere of influence. Not long after, some Americans began thinking into the Pacific: of Hawaii, Japan, and the great markets of China. There was more than thinking; the American armed forces had made forays overseas. A State Department list, "Instances of the Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad 1798-1945" (presented by Secretary of State Dean Rusk to a Senate committee in 1962 to cite precedents for the use of armed force against Cuba), shows 103 interventions in the affairs of other countries between 1798 and 1895. A sampling from the list, with the exact description given by the State Department: 1852-53 -- Argentina -- Marines were landed and maintained in Buenos Aires to protect American interests during a revolution. 1853 -- Nicaragua -- to protect American lives and interests during political disturbances. 1853-54 -- Japan -- The "Opening of Japan" and the Perry Expedition. [The State Department does not give more details, but this involved the use of warships to force Japan to open its ports to the United States] 1853-54 -- Ryukyu and Bonin Islands -- Commodore Perry on three visits before going to Japan and while waiting for a reply from Japan made a naval demonstration, landing marines twice, and secured a coaling concession from the ruler of Naha on Okinawa. He also demonstrated in the Bonin Islands. All to secure facilities for commerce. 1854 -- Nicaragua -- San Juan del Norte [Greytown was destroyed to avenge an insult to the American Minister to Nicaragua.] 1855 -- Uruguay -- U.S. and European naval forces landed to protect American interests during an attempted revolution in Montevideo. 1859 -- China -- For the protection of American interests in Shanghai. 1860 -- Angola, Portuguese West Africa -- To protect American lives and property at Kissembo when the natives became troublesome. 1893 -- Hawaii -- Ostensibly to protect American lives and property; actually to promote a provisional government under Sanford B. Dole This action was disavowed by the United States. 1894 -- Nicaragua -- To protect American interests at Bluefields following a revolution. Thus, by the 1890s, there had been much experience in overseas probes and interventions. The ideology of expansion was widespread in the upper circles of military men, politicians, businessmen -- and even among some of the leaders of farmers' movements who thought foreign markets would help them. Captain A. T. Mahan of the U.S. navy, a popular propagandist for expansion, greatly influenced Theodore Roosevelt and other American leaders. The countries with the biggest navies would inherit the earth, he said. "Americans must now begin to look outward." Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts wrote in a magazine article: In the interests of our commerce . . . we should build the Nicaragua canal, and for the protection of that canal and for the sake of our commercial supremacy in the Pacific we should control the Hawaiian islands and maintain our influence in Samoa . . . and when the Nicaraguan canal is built, the island of Cuba . . . will become a necessity. . . . The great nations are rapidly absorbing for their future expansion and their present defense all the waste places of the earth. It is a movement which makes for civilization and the advancement of the race. As one of the great nations of the world the United States must not fall out of the line of march. A Washington Post editorial on the eve of the Spanish-American war: A new consciousness seems to have come upon us -- the consciousness of strength -- and with it a new appetite, the yearning to show our strength. . . . Ambition, interest, land hunger, pride, the mere joy of fighting, whatever it may be, we are animated by a new sensation. We are face to face with a strange destiny. The taste of Empire is in the mouth of the people even as the taste of blood in the jungle. . . . Was that taste in the mouth of the people through some instinctive lust for aggression or some urgent self-interest? Or was it a taste (if indeed it existed) created, encouraged, advertised, and exaggerated by the millionaire press, the military, the government, the eager-to-please scholars of the time? Political scientist John Burgess of Columbia University said the Teutonic and Anglo-Saxon races were "particularly endowed with the capacity for establishing national states . . . they are entrusted . . . with the mission of conducting the political civilization of the modern world." Several years before his election to the presidency, William McKinley said: "We want a foreign market for our surplus products." Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana in early 1897 declared: "American factories are making more than the American people can use; American soil is producing more than they can consume. Fate has written our policy for us; the trade of the world must and shall be ours." The Department of State explained in 1898: It seems to be conceded that every year we shall be confronted with an increasing surplus of manufactured goods for sale in foreign markets if American operatives and artisans are to be kept employed the year around. The enlargement of foreign consumption of the products of our mills and workshops has, therefore, become a serious problem of statesmanship as well as of commerce. These expansionist military men and politicians were in touch with one another. One of Theodore Roosevelt's biographers tells us: "By 1890, Lodge, Roosevelt, and Mahan had begun exchanging views," and that they tried to get Mahan off sea duty "so that he could continue full-time his propaganda for expansion." Roosevelt once sent Henry Cabot Lodge a copy of a poem by Rudyard Kipling, saying it was "poor poetry, but good sense from the expansionist standpoint." When the United States did not annex Hawaii in 1893 after some Americans (the combined missionary and pineapple interests of the Dole family) set up their own government, Roosevelt called this hesitancy "a crime against white civilization." And he told the Naval War College: "All the great masterful races have been fighting races. . . . No triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumph of war." Roosevelt was contemptuous of races and nations he considered inferior. When a mob in New Orleans lynched a number of Italian immigrants, Roosevelt thought the United States should offer the Italian government some remuneration, but privately he wrote his sister that he thought the lynching was "rather a good thing" and told her he had said as much at a dinner with "various dago diplomats . . . all wrought up by the lynching." William James, the philosopher, who became one of the leading anti-imperialists of his time, wrote about Roosevelt that he "gushes over war as the ideal condition of human society, for the manly strenuousness which it involves, and treats peace as a condition of blubberlike and swollen ignobility, fit only for huckstering weaklings, dwelling in gray twilight and heedless of the higher life. . . ." Roosevelt's talk of expansionism was not just a matter of manliness and heroism; he was conscious of "our trade relations with China." Lodge was aware of the textile interests in Massachusetts that looked to Asian markets. Historian Marilyn Young has written of the work of the American China Development Company to expand American influence in China for commercial reasons, and of State Department instructions to the American emissary in China to "employ all proper methods for the extension of American interests in China." She says (The Rhetoric of Empire) that the talk about markets in China was far greater than the actual amount of dollars involved at the time, but this talk was important in shaping American policy toward Hawaii, the Philippines, and all of Asia. While it was true that in 1898, 90 percent of American products were sold at home, the 10 percent sold abroad amounted to a billion dollars. Walter Lafeber writes (The New Empire): "By 1893, American trade exceeded that of every country in the world except England. Farm products, of course, especially in the key tobacco, cotton, and wheat areas, had long depended heavily on international markets for their prosperity." And in the twenty years up to 1895, new investments by American capitalists overseas reached a billion dollars. In 1885, the steel industry's publication Age of Steel wrote that the internal markets were insufficient and the overproduction of industrial products "should be relieved and prevented in the future by increased foreign trade." Oil became a big export in the 1880s and 1890s: by 1891, the Rockefeller family's Standard Oil Company accounted for 90 percent of American exports of kerosene and controlled 70 percent of the world market. Oil was now second to cotton as the leading product sent overseas. There were demands for expansion by large commercial farmers, including some of the Populist leaders, as William Appleman Williams has shown in The Roots of the Modern American Empire. Populist Congressman Jerry Simpson of Kansas told Congress in 1892 that with a huge agricultural surplus, farmers "must of necessity seek a foreign market." True, he was not calling for aggression or conquest -- but once foreign markets were seen as important to prosperity, expansionist policies, even war, might have wide appeal. Such an appeal would be especially strong if the expansion looked like an act of generosity -- helping a rebellious group overthrow foreign rule -- as in Cuba. By 1898, Cuban rebels had been fighting their Spanish conquerors for three years in an attempt to win independence. By that time, it was possible to create a national mood for intervention. It seems that the business interests of the nation did not at first want military intervention in Cuba. American merchants did not need colonies or wars of conquest if they could just have free access to markets. This idea of an "open door" became the dominant theme of American foreign policy in the twentieth century. It was a more sophisticated approach to imperialism than the traditional empire-building of Europe. William Appleman Williams, in The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, says: This national argument is usually interpreted as a battle between imperialists led by Roosevelt and Lodge and anti-imperialists led by William Jennings Bryan and Carl Schurz. It is far more accurate and illuminating, however, to view it as a three-cornered fight. The third group was a coalition of businessmen, intellectuals, and politicians who opposed traditional colonialism and advocated instead a policy of an open door through which America's preponderant economic strength would enter and dominate all underdeveloped areas of the world. However, this preference on the part of some business groups and politicians for what Williams calls the idea of "informal empire," without war, was always subject to change. If peaceful imperialism turned out to be impossible, military action might be needed. For instance, in late 1897 and early 1898, with China weakened by a recent war with Japan, German military forces occupied the Chinese port of Tsingtao at the mouth of Kiaochow Bay and demanded a naval station there, with rights to railways and coal mines on the nearby peninsula of Shantung. Within the next few months, other European powers moved in on China, and the partition of China by the major imperialist powers was under way, with the United States left behind. At this point, the New York Journal of Commerce, which had advocated peaceful development of free trade, now urged old-fashioned military colonialism. Julius Pratt, a historian of U.S. expansionism, describes the turnabout: This paper, which has been heretofore characterized as pacifist, anti-imperialist, and devoted to the development of commerce in a free-trade world, saw the foundation of its faith crumbling as a result of the threatened partition of China. Declaring that free access to the markets of China, with its 400,000,000 people, would largely solve the problem of the disposal of our surplus manufactures, the Journal came out not only for a stern insistence upon complete equality of rights in China but unreservedly also for an isthmian canal, the acquisition of Hawaii, and a material increase in the navy -- three measures which it had hitherto strenuously opposed. Nothing could be more significant than the manner in which this paper was converted in a few weeks. . . . There was a similar turnabout in U.S. business attitudes on Cuba in 1898. Businessmen had been interested, from the start of the Cuban revolt against Spain, in the effect on commercial possibilities there. There already was a substantial economic interest in the island, which President Grover Cleveland summarized in 1896: It is reasonably estimated that at least from $30,000,000 to $50,000,000 of American capital are invested in the plantations and in railroad, mining, and other business enterprises on the island. The volume of trade between the United States and Cuba, which in 1889 amounted to about $64,000,000, rose in 1893 to about $103,000,000. Popular support of the Cuban revolution was based on the thought that they, like the Americans of 1776, were fighting a war for their own liberation. The United States government, however, the conservative product of another revolutionary war, had power and profit in mind as it observed the events in Cuba. Neither Cleveland, President during the first years of the Cuban revolt, nor McKinley, who followed, recognized the insurgents officially as belligerents; such legal recognition would have enabled the United States to give aid to the rebels without sending an army. But there may have been fear that the rebels would win on their own and keep the United States out. There seems also to have been another kind of fear. The Cleveland administration said a Cuban victory might lead to "the establishment of a white and a black republic," since Cuba had a mixture of the two races. And the black republic might be dominant. This idea was expressed in 1896 in an article in The Saturday Review by a young and eloquent imperialist, whose mother was American and whose father was English -- Winston Churchill. He wrote that while Spanish rule was bad and the rebels had the support of the people, it would be better for Spain to keep control: A grave danger represents itself. Two-fifths of the insurgents in the field are negroes. These men . . . would, in the event of success, demand a predominant share in the government of the country . . . the result being, after years of fighting, another black republic. The reference to "another" black republic meant Haiti, whose revolution against France in 1803 had led to the first nation run by blacks in the New World. The Spanish minister to the United States wrote to the U.S. Secretary of State: In this revolution, the negro element has the most important part. Not only the principal leaders are colored men, but at least eight-tenths of their supporters. . . . and the result of the war, if the Island can be declared independent, will be a secession of the black element and a black Republic. As Philip Foner says in his two-volume study The Spanish-Cuban-American War, "The McKinley Administration had plans for dealing with the Cuban situation, but these did not include independence for the island." He points to the administration's instructions to its minister to Spain, Stewart Woodford, asking him to try to settle the war because it "injuriously affects the normal function of business, and tends to delay the condition of prosperity," but not mentioning freedom and justice for the Cubans. Foner explains the rush of the McKinley administration into war (its ultimatum gave Spain little time to negotiate) by the fact that "if the United States waited too long, the Cuban revolutionary forces would emerge victorious, replacing the collapsing Spanish regime." In February 1898, the U.S. battleship Maine, in Havana harbor as a symbol of American interest in the Cuban events, was destroyed by a mysterious explosion and sank, with the loss of 268 men. There was no evidence ever produced on the cause of the explosion, but excitement grew swiftly in the United States, and McKinley began to move in the direction of war. Walter Lafeber says: The President did not want war; he had been sincere and tireless in his efforts to maintain the peace. By mid-March, however, he was beginning to discover that, although he did not want war, he did want what only a war could provide; the disappearance of the terrible uncertainty in American political and economic life, and a solid basis from which to resume the building of the new American commercial empire. At a certain point in that spring, both McKinley and the business community began to see that their object, to get Spain out of Cuba, could not be accomplished without war, and that their accompanying object, the securing of American military and economic influence in Cuba, could not be left to the Cuban rebels, but could be ensured only by U.S. intervention. The New York Commercial Advertiser, at first against war, by March 10 asked intervention in Cuba for "humanity and love of freedom, and above all, the desire that the commerce and industry of every part of the world shall have full freedom of development in the whole world's interest." Before this, Congress had passed the Teller Amendment, pledging the United States not to annex Cuba. It was initiated and supported by those people who were interested in Cuban independence and opposed to American imperialism, and also by business people who saw the "open door" as sufficient and military intervention unnecessary. But by the spring of 1898, the business community had developed a hunger for action. The Journal of Commerce said: "The Teller amendment . . . must be interpreted in a sense somewhat different from that which its author intended it to bear." There were special interests who would benefit directly from war. In Pittsburgh, center of the iron industry, the Chamber of Commerce advocated force, and the Chattanooga Tradesman said that the possibility of war "has decidedly stimulated the iron trade." It also noted that "actual war would very decidedly enlarge the business of transportation." In Washington, it was reported that a "belligerent spirit" had infected the Navy Department, encouraged "by the contractors for projectiles, ordnance, ammunition and other supplies, who have thronged the department since the destruction of the Maine." Russell Sage, the banker, said that if war came, "There is no question as to where the rich men stand." A survey of businessmen said that John Jacob Astor, William Rockefeller, and Thomas Fortune Ryan were "feeling militant." And J. P. Morgan believed further talk with Spain would accomplish nothing. On March 21, 1898, Henry Cabot Lodge wrote McKinley a long letter, saying he had talked with "bankers, brokers, businessmen, editors, clergymen and others" in Boston, Lynn, and Nahant, and "everybody," including "the most conservative classes," wanted the Cuban question "solved." Lodge reported: "They said for business one shock and then an end was better than a succession of spasms such as we must have if this war in Cuba went on." On March 25, a telegram arrived at the White House from an adviser to McKinley, saying: "Big corporations here now believe we will have war. Believe all would welcome it as relief to suspense." Two days after getting this telegram, McKinley presented an ultimatum to Spain, demanding an armistice. He said nothing about independence for Cuba. A spokesman for the Cuban rebels, part of a group of Cubans in New York, interpreted this to mean the U.S. simply wanted to replace Spain. He responded: In the face of the present proposal of intervention without previous recognition of independence, it is necessary for us to go a step farther and say that we must and will regard such intervention as nothing less than a declaration of war by the United States against the Cuban revolutionists. . . . Indeed, when McKinley asked Congress for war on April 11, he did not recognize the rebels as belligerents or ask for Cuban independence. Nine days later, Congress, by joint resolution, gave McKinley the power to intervene. When American forces moved into Cuba, the rebels welcomed them, hoping the Teller Amendment would guarantee Cuban independence. Many histories of the Spanish-American war have said that "public opinion" in the United States led McKinley to declare war on Spain and send forces to Cuba. True, certain influential newspapers had been pushing hard, even hysterically. And many Americans, seeing the aim of intervention as Cuban independence -- and with the Teller Amendment as guarantee of this intention -- supported the idea. But would McKinley have gone to war because of the press and some portion of the public (we had no public opinion surveys at that time) without the urging of the business community? Several years after the Cuban war, the chief of the Bureau of Foreign Commerce of the Department of Commerce wrote about that period: Underlying the popular sentiment, which might have evaporated in time, which forced the United States to take up arms against Spanish rule in Cuba, were our economic relations with the West Indies and the South American republics. . . . The Spanish-American War was but an incident of a general movement of expansion which had its roots in the changed environment of an industrial capacity far beyond our domestic powers of consumption. It was seen to be necessary for us not only to find foreign purchasers for our goods, but to provide the means of making access to foreign markets easy, economical and safe. American labor unions had sympathy for the Cuban rebels as soon as the insurrection against Spain began in 1895. But they opposed American expansionism. Both the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor spoke against the idea of annexing Hawaii, which McKinley proposed in 1897. Despite the feeling for the Cuban rebels, a resolution calling for U.S. intervention was defeated at the 1897 convention of the AFL. Samuel Gompers of the AFL wrote to a friend: "The sympathy of our movement with Cuba is genuine, earnest, and sincere, but this does not for a moment imply that we are committed to certain adventurers who are apparently suffering from Hysteria. . . ." When the explosion of the Maine in February led to excited calls for war in the press, the monthly journal of the International Association of Machinists agreed it was a terrible disaster, but it noted that the deaths of workers in industrial accidents drew no such national clamor. It pointed to the Lattimer Massacre of September 10, 1897, during a coal strike in Pennsylvania. Miners marching on a highway to the Lattimer mine -- Austrians, Hungarians, Italians, Germans -- who had originally been imported as strikebreakers but then organized themselves, refused to disperse, whereupon the sheriff and his deputies opened fire, killing nineteen of them, most shot in the back, with no outcry in the press. The labor journal said that the . . . carnival of carnage that takes place every day, month and year in the realm of industry, the thousands of useful lives that are annually sacrificed to the Moloch of greed, the blood tribute paid by labor to capitalism, brings forth no shout for vengeance and reparation. . . . Death comes in thousands of instances in mill and mine, claims his victims, and no popular uproar is heard. The official organ of the Connecticut AFL, The Craftsman, also warned about the hysteria worked up by the sinking of the Maine: A gigantic . . . and cunningly-devised scheme is being worked ostensibly to place the United States in the front rank as a naval and military power. The real reason is that the capitalists will have the whole thing and, when any workingmen dare to ask for the living wage . . . they will be shot down like dogs in the streets. Some unions, like the United Mine Workers, called for U.S. intervention after the sinking of the Maine. But most were against war. The treasurer of the American Longshoremen's Union, Bolton Hall, wrote "A Peace Appeal to Labor," which was widely circulated: If there is a war, you will furnish the corpses and the taxes, and others will get the glory. Speculators will make money out of it -- that is, out of you. Men will get high prices for inferior supplies, leaky boats, for shoddy clothes and pasteboard shoes, and you will have to pay the bill, and the only satisfaction you will get is the privilege of hating your Spanish fellow-workmen, who are really your brothers and who have had as little to do with the wrongs of Cuba as you have. Socialists opposed the war. One exception was the Jewish Daily Forward. The People, newspaper of the Socialist Labor party, called the issue of Cuban freedom "a pretext" and said the government wanted war to "distract the attention of the workers from their real interests." The Appeal to Reason, another Socialist newspaper, said the movement for war was "a favorite method of rulers for keeping the people from redressing domestic wrongs." In the San Francisco Voice of Labor a Socialist wrote: "It is a terrible thing to think that the poor workers of this country should be sent to kill and wound the poor workers of Spain merely because a few leaders may incite them to do so." But after war was declared, Foner says, "the majority of the trade unions succumbed to the war fever." Samuel Gompers called the war "glorious and righteous" and claimed that 250,000 trade unionists had volunteered for military service. The United Mine Workers pointed to higher coal prices as a result of the war and said: "The coal and iron trades have not been so healthy for some years past as at present." The war brought more employment and higher wages, but also higher prices. Foner says: "Not only was there a startling increase in the cost of living, but, in the absence of an income tax, the poor found themselves paying almost entirely for the staggering costs of the war through increased levies on sugar, molasses, tobacco, and other taxes. . . ." Gompers, publicly for the war, privately pointed out that the war had led to a 20 percent reduction of the purchasing power of workers' wages. On May Day, 1898, the Socialist Labor party organized an antiwar parade in New York City, but the authorities would not allow it to take place, while a May Day parade called by the Jewish Daily Forward, urging Jewish workers to support the war, was permitted. The Chicago Labor World said: "This has been a poor man's war -- paid for by the poor man. The rich have profited by it, as they always do. . . ." The Western Labor Union was founded at Salt Lake City on May 10, 1898, because the AFL had not organized unskilled workers. It wanted to bring together all workers "irrespective of occupation, nationality, creed or color" and "sound the death knell of every corporation and trust that has robbed the American laborer of the fruits of his toil. . . ." The union's publication, noting the annexation of Hawaii during the war, said this proved that "the war which started as one of relief for the starving Cubans has suddenly changed to one of conquest." The prediction made by longshoreman Bolton Hall, of wartime corruption and profiteering, turned out to be remarkably accurate. Richard Morris's Encyclopedia of American History gives startling figures: Of the more than 274,000 officers and men who served in the army during the Spanish-American War and the period of demobilization, 5,462 died in the various theaters of operation and in camps in the U.S. Only 379 of the deaths were battle casualties, the remainder being attributed to disease and other causes. The same figures are given by Walter Millis in his book The Martial Spirit. In the Encyclopedia they are given tersely, and without mention of the "embalmed beef" (an army general's term) sold to the army by the meatpackers -- meat preserved with boric acid, nitrate of potash, and artificial coloring matter. In May of 1898, Armour and Company, the big meatpacking company of Chicago, sold the army 500,000 pounds of beef which had been sent to Liverpool a year earlier and had been returned. Two months later, an army inspector tested the Armour meat, which had been stamped and approved by an inspector of the Bureau of Animal Industry, and found 751 cases containing rotten meat. In the first sixty cases he opened, he found fourteen tins already burst, "the effervescent putrid contents of which were distributed all over the cases." (The description comes from the Report of the Commission to Investigate the Conduct of the War Department in the War with Spain, made to the Senate in 1900.) Thousands of soldiers got food poisoning. There are no figures on how many of the five thousand noncombat deaths were caused by that. The Spanish forces were defeated in three months, in what John Hay, the American Secretary of State, later called a "splendid little war." The American military pretended that the Cuban rebel army did not exist. When the Spanish surrendered, no Cuban was allowed to confer on the surrender, or to sign it. General William Shafter said no armed rebels could enter the capital city of Santiago, and told the Cuban rebel leader, General Calixto Garcia, that not Cubans, but the old Spanish civil authorities, would remain in charge of the municipal offices in Santiago. American historians have generally ignored the role of the Cuban rebels in the war; Philip Foner, in his history, was the first to print Garcia's letter of protest to General Shafter: I have not been honored with a single word from yourself informing me about the negotiations for peace or the terms of the capitulation by the Spaniards. . . . when the question arises of appointing authorities in Santiago de Cuba . . . I cannot see but with the deepest regret that such authorities are not elected by the Cuban people, but are the same ones selected by the Queen of Spain. . . . A rumor too absurd to be believed, General, describes the reason of your measures and of the orders forbidding my army to enter Santiago for fear of massacres and revenge against the Spaniards. Allow me, sir, to protest against even the shadow of such an idea. We are not savages ignoring the rules of civilized warfare. We are a poor, ragged army, as ragged and poor as was the army of your forefathers in their noble war for independence. . . . Along with the American army in Cuba came American capital. Foner writes: Even before the Spanish flag was down in Cuba, U.S. business interests set out to make their influence felt. Merchants, real estate agents, stock speculators, reckless adventurers, and promoters of all kinds of get-rich schemes flocked to Cuba by the thousands. Seven syndicates battled each other for control of the franchises for the Havana Street Railway, which were finally won by Percival Farquhar, representing the Wall Street interests of New York. Thus, simultaneously with the military occupation began . . . commercial occupation. The Lumbermen's Review, spokesman for the lumber industry, said in the midst of the war: "The moment Spain drops the reigns of government in Cuba . . . the moment will arrive for American lumber interests to move into the island for the products of Cuban forests. Cuba still possesses 10,000,000 acres of virgin forest abounding in valuable timber . . . nearly every foot of which would be saleable in the United States and bring high prices." Americans began taking over railroad, mine, and sugar properties when the war ended. In a few years, $30 million of American capital was invested. United Fruit moved into the Cuban sugar industry. It bought 1,900,000 acres of land for about twenty cents an acre. The American Tobacco Company arrived. By the end of the occupation, in 1901, Foner estimates that at least 80 percent of the export of Cuba's minerals were in American hands, mostly Bethlehem Steel. During the military occupation a series of strikes took place. In September 1899, a gathering of thousands of workers in Havana launched a general strike for the eight-hour day, saying, ". . . we have determined to promote the struggle between the worker and the capitalist. For the workers of Cuba will no longer tolerate remaining in total subjection." The American General William Ludlow ordered the mayor of Havana to arrest eleven strike leaders, and U.S. troops occupied railroad stations and docks. Police moved through the city breaking up meetings. But the economic activity of the city had come to a halt. Tobacco workers struck. Printers struck. Bakers went on strike. Hundreds of strikers were arrested, and some of the imprisoned leaders were intimidated into calling for an end to the strike. The United States did not annex Cuba. But a Cuban Constitutional Convention was told that the United States army would not leave Cuba until the Platt Amendment, passed by Congress in February 1901, was incorporated into the new Cuban Constitution. This Amendment gave the United States "the right to intervene for the preservation of Cuban independence, the maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of life, property, and individual liberty. . . . " It also provided for the United States to get coaling or naval stations at certain specified points. The Teller Amendment and the talk of Cuban freedom before and during the war had led many Americans -- and Cubans -- to expect genuine independence. The Platt Amendment was now seen, not only by the radical and labor press, but by newspapers and groups all over the United States, as a betrayal. A mass meeting of the American Anti-Imperialist League at Faneuil Hall in Boston denounced it, ex-governor George Boutwell saying: "In disregard of our pledge of freedom and sovereignty to Cuba we are imposing on that island conditions of colonial vassalage." In Havana, a torchlight procession of fifteen thousand Cubans marched on the Constitutional Convention, urging them to reject the Amendment. But General Leonard Wood, head of the occupation forces, assured McKinley: "The people of Cuba lend themselves readily to all sorts of demonstrations and parades, and little significance should be attached to them." A committee was delegated by the Constitutional Convention to reply to the United States' insistence that the Platt Amendment be included in the Constitution. The committee report, Penencia a la Convencion, was written by a black delegate from Santiago. It said: For the United States to reserve to itself the power to determine when this independence was threatened, and when, therefore, it should intervene to preserve it, is equivalent to handing over the keys to our house so that they can enter it at any time, whenever the desire seizes them, day or night, whether with good or evil design. And: The only Cuban governments that would live would be those which count on the support and benevolence of the United States, and the clearest result of this situation would be that we would only have feeble and miserable governments . . . condemned to live more attentive to obtaining the blessings of the United States than to serving and defending the interests of Cuba. . . . The report termed the request for coaling or naval stations "a mutilation of the fatherland." It concluded: A people occupied militarily is being told that before consulting their own government, before being free in their own territory, they should grant the military occupants who came as friends and allies, rights and powers which would annul the sovereignty of these very people. That is the situation created for us by the method which the United States has just adopted. It could not be more obnoxious and inadmissible With this report, the Convention overwhelmingly rejected the Platt Amendment. Within the next three months, however, the pressure from the United States, the military occupation, the refusal to allow the Cubans to set up their own government until they acquiesced, had its effect; the Convention, after several refusals, adopted the Platt Amendment. General Leonard Wood wrote in 1901 to Theodore Roosevelt: "There is, of course, little or no independence left Cuba under the Platt Amendment." Cuba was thus brought into the American sphere, but not as an outright colony. However, the Spanish-American war did lead to a number of direct annexations by the United States. Puerto Rico, a neighbor of Cuba in the Caribbean, belonging to Spain, was taken over by U.S. military forces. The Hawaiian Islands, one-third of the way across the Pacific, which had already been penetrated by American missionaries and pineapple plantation owners, and had been described by American officials as "a ripe pear ready to be plucked," was annexed by joint resolution of Congress in July of 1898. Around the same time, Wake Island, 2,300 miles west of Hawaii, on the route to Japan, was occupied. And Guam, the Spanish possession in the Pacific, almost all the way to the Philippines, was taken. In December of 1898, the peace treaty was signed with Spain, officially turning over to the United States Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, for a payment of $20 million. There was heated argument in the United States about whether or not to take the Philippines. As one story has it, President McKinley told a group of ministers visiting the White House how he came to his decision: Before you go I would like to say just a word about the Philippine business. . . . The truth is I didn't want the Philippines, and when they came to us as a gift from the gods, I did not know what to do with them. . . . I sought counsel from all sides -- Democrats as well as Republicans -- but got little help. I thought first we would only take Manila; then Luzon, then other islands, perhaps, also. I walked the floor of the White House night after night until midnight; and I am not ashamed to tell you, gentlemen, that I went down on my knees and prayed Almighty God for light and guidance more than one night. And one night late it came to me this way -- I don't know how it was, but it came: 1) That we could not give them back to Spain -- that would be cowardly and dishonorable. 2) That we could not turn them over to France or Germany, our commercial rivals in the Orient -- that would be bad business and discreditable. 3) That we could not leave them to themselves -- they were unfit for self-government -- and they would soon have anarchy and misrule over there worse than Spain's was; and 4) That there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God's grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow men for whom Christ also died. And then I went to bed and went to sleep and slept soundly. The Filipinos did not get the same message from God. In February 1899, they rose in revolt against American rule, as they had rebelled several times against the Spanish. Emilio Aguinaldo, a Filipino leader, who had earlier been brought back from China by U.S. warships to lead soldiers against Spain, now became leader of the insurrectos fighting the United States. He proposed Filipino independence within a U.S. protectorate, but this was rejected. It took the United States three years to crush the rebellion, using seventy thousand troops -- four times as many as were landed in Cuba -- and thousands of battle casualties, many times more than in Cuba. It was a harsh war. For the Filipinos the death rate was enormous from battle casualties and from disease. The taste of empire was on the lips of politicians and business interests throughout the country now. Racism, paternalism, and talk of money mingled with talk of destiny and civilization. In the Senate, Albert Beveridge spoke, January 9, 1900, for the dominant economic and political interests of the country: Mr. President, the times call for candor. The Philippines are ours forever. . . . And just beyond the Philippines are China's illimitable markets. We will not retreat from either. . . . We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustee, under God, of the civilization of the world. . . . The Pacific is our ocean. . . . Where shall we turn for consumers of our surplus? Geography answers the question. China is our natural customer. . . . The Philippines give us a base at the door of all the East. . . . No land in America surpasses in fertility the plains and valleys of Luzon. Rice and coffee, sugar and cocoanuts, hemp and tobacco. . . . The wood of the Philippines can supply the furniture of the world for a century to come. At Cebu the best informed man on the island told me that 40 miles of Cebu's mountain chain are practically mountains of coal. . . . I have a nugget of pure gold picked up in its present form on the banks of a Philippine creek. . . . My own belief is that there are not 100 men among them who comprehend what Anglo-Saxon self-government even means, and there are over 5,000,000 people to be governed. It has been charged that our conduct of the war has been cruel. Senators, it has been the reverse. . . . Senators must remember that we are not dealing with Americans or Europeans. We are dealing with Orientals. The fighting with the rebels began, McKinley said, when the insurgents attacked American forces. But later, American soldiers testified that the United States had fired the first shot. After the war, an army officer speaking in Boston's Faneuil Hall said his colonel had given him orders to provoke a conflict with the insurgents. In February 1899, a banquet took place in Boston to celebrate the Senate's ratification of the peace treaty with Spain. President McKinley himself had been invited by the wealthy textile manufacturer W. B. Plunkett to speak. It was the biggest banquet in the nation's history: two thousand diners, four hundred waiters. McKinley said that "no imperial designs lurk in the American mind," and at the same banquet, to the same diners, his Postmaster General, Charles Emory Smith, said that "what we want is a market for our surplus." William James, the Harvard philosopher, wrote a letter to the Boston Transcript about "the cold pot grease of McKinley's cant at the recent Boston banquet" and said the Philippine operation "reeked of the infernal adroitness of the great department store, which has reached perfect expertness in the art of killing silently, and with no public squalling or commotion, the neighboring small concerns." James was part of a movement of prominent American businessmen, politicians, and intellectuals who formed the Anti-Imperialist League in 1898 and carried on a long campaign to educate the American public about the horrors of the Philippine war and the evils of imperialism. It was an odd group (Andrew Carnegie belonged), including antilabor aristocrats and scholars, united in a common moral outrage at what was being done to the Filipinos in the name of freedom. Whatever their differences on other matters, they would all agree with William James's angry statement: "God damn the U.S. for its vile conduct in the Philippine Isles." The Anti-Imperialist League published the letters of soldiers doing duty in the Philippines. A captain from Kansas wrote: "Caloocan was supposed to contain 17,000 inhabitants. The Twentieth Kansas swept through it, and now Caloocan contains not one living native." A private from the same outfit said he had "with my own hand set fire to over fifty houses of Filipinos after the victory at Caloocan. Women and children were wounded by our fire." A volunteer from the state of Washington wrote: "Our fighting blood was up, and we all wanted to kill 'niggers.' . . . This shooting human beings beats rabbit hunting all to pieces." It was a time of intense racism in the United States. In the years between 1889 and 1903, on the average, every week, two Negroes were lynched by mobs -- hanged, burned, mutilated. The Filipinos were brown-skinned, physically identifiable, strange-speaking and strange-looking to Americans. To the usual indiscriminate brutality of war was thus added the factor of racial hostility. In November 1901, the Manila correspondent of the Philadelphia Ledger reported: The present war is no bloodless, opera bouffe engagement; our men have been relentless, have killed to exterminate men, women, children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people from lads of ten up, the idea prevailing that the Filipino as such was little better than a dog. . . . Our soldiers have pumped salt water into men to make them talk, and have taken prisoners people who held up their hands and peacefully surrendered, and an hour later, without an atom of evidence to show that they were even insurrectos, stood them on a bridge and shot them down one by one, to drop into the water below and float down, as examples to those who found their bullet-loaded corpses. Early in 1901 an American general returning to the United States from southern Luzon, said: One-sixth of the natives of Luzon have either been killed or have died of the dengue fever in the last few years. The loss of life by killing alone has been very great, but I think not one man has been slain except where his death has served the legitimate purposes of war. It has been necessary to adopt what in other countries would probably be thought harsh measures. Secretary of War Elihu Root responded to the charges of brutality: "The war in the Philippines has been conducted by the American army with scrupulous regard for the rules of civilized warfare. . . . with self-restraint and with humanity never surpassed." In Manila, a Marine named Littletown Waller, a major, was accused of shooting eleven defenseless Filipinos, without trial, on the island of Samar. Other marine officers described his testimony: The major said that General Smith instructed him to kill and burn, and said that the more he killed and burned the better pleased he would be; that it was no time to take prisoners, and that he was to make Samar a howling wilderness. Major Waller asked General Smith to define the age limit for killing, and he replied "Everything over ten." In the province of Batangas, the secretary of the province estimated that of the population of 300,000, one-third had been killed by combat, famine, or disease. Mark Twain commented on the Philippine war: We have pacified some thousands of the islanders and buried them; destroyed their fields; burned their villages, and turned their widows and orphans out-of-doors; furnished heartbreak by exile to some dozens of disagreeable patriots; subjugated the remaining ten millions by Benevolent Assimilation, which is the pious new name of the musket; we have acquired property in the three hundred concubines and other slaves of our business partner, the Sultan of Sulu, and hoisted our protecting flag over that swag. And so, by these Providences of God -- and the phrase is the government's, not mine -- we are a World Power. American firepower was overwhelmingly superior to anything the Filipino rebels could put together. In the very first battle, Admiral Dewey steamed up the Pasig River and fired 500-pound shells into the Filipino trenches. Dead Filipinos were piled so high that the Americans used their bodies for breastworks. A British witness said: "This is not war; it is simply massacre and murderous butchery." He was wrong; it was war. For the rebels to hold out against such odds for years meant that they had the support of the population. General Arthur MacArthur, commander of the Filipino war, said: " . . . I believed that Aguinaldo's troops represented only a faction. I did not like to believe that the whole population of Luzon -- the native population, that is -- was opposed to us." But he said he was "reluctantly compelled" to believe this because the guerrilla tactics of the Filipino army "depended upon almost complete unity of action of the entire native population." Despite the growing evidence of brutality and the work of the Anti-Imperialist League, some of the trade unions in the United States supported the action in the Philippines. The Typographical Union said it liked the idea of annexing more territory because English-language schools in those areas would help the printing trade. The publication of the glassmakers saw value in new territories that would buy glass. The railroad brotherhoods saw shipment of U.S. goods to the new territories meaning more work for railroad workers. Some unions repeated what big business was saying, that territorial expansion, by creating a market for surplus goods, would prevent another depression. On the other hand, when the Leather Workers' Journal wrote that an increase in wages at home would solve the problem of surplus by creating more purchasing power inside the country, the Carpenters' Journal asked: "How much better off are the workingmen of England through all its colonial possessions?" The National Labor Tribune, publication of the Iron, Steel, and Tin Workers, agreed that the Philippines were rich with resources, but added: The same can be said of this country, but if anybody were to ask you if you owned a coal mine, a sugar plantation, or railroad you would have to say no . . . all those things are in the hands of the trusts controlled by a few. . . . When the treaty for annexation of the Philippines was up for debate in Congress in early 1899, the Central Labor Unions of Boston and New York opposed it. There was a mass meeting in New York against annexation. The Anti-Imperialist League circulated more than a million pieces of literature against taking the Philippines. (Foner says that while the League was organized and dominated by intellectuals and business people, a large part of its half-million members were working-class people, including women and blacks.) Locals of the League held meetings all over the country. The campaign against the Treaty was a powerful one, and when the Senate did ratify it, it was by one vote. The mixed reactions of labor to the war -- lured by economic advantage, yet repelled by capitalist expansion and violence -- ensured that labor could not unite either to stop the war or to conduct class war against the system at home. The reactions of black soldiers to the war were also mixed: there was the simple need to get ahead in a society where opportunities for success were denied the black man, and the military life gave such possibilities. There was race pride, the need to show that blacks were as courageous, as patriotic, as anyone else. And yet, there was with all this the consciousness of a brutal war, fought against colored people, a counterpart of the violence committed against black people in the United States. Willard Gatewood, in his book Smoked Yankees and the Struggle for Empire, reproduces and analyzes 114 letters to Negro newspapers written by black soldiers in the period 1898-1902. The letters show all those conflicting emotions. Black soldiers encamped in Tampa, Florida, ran into bitter race hatred by white inhabitants there. And then, after they fought with distinction in Cuba, Negroes were not rewarded with officers' commissions; white officers commanded black regiments. Negro soldiers in Lakeland, Florida, pistol-whipped a drugstore owner when he refused to serve one of them, and then, in a confrontation with a white crowd, killed a civilian. In Tampa, a race riot began when drunken white soldiers used a Negro child as a target to show their marksmanship; Negro soldiers retaliated, and then the streets "ran red with negro blood," according to press dispatches. Twenty-seven Negro soldiers and three whites were severely wounded. The chaplain of a black regiment in Tampa wrote to the Cleveland Gazette: Is America any better than Spain? Has she not subjects in her very midst who are murdered daily without a trial of judge or jury? Has she not subjects in her own borders whose children are half-fed and half-clothed, because their father's skin is black. . . . Yet the Negro is loyal to his country's flag. The same chaplain, George Prioleau, talks of black veterans of the Cuban war "unkindly and sneeringly received" in Kansas City, Missouri. He says that "these black boys, heroes of our country, were not allowed to stand at the counters of restaurants and eat a sandwich and drink a cup of coffee, while the white soldiers were welcomed and invited to sit down at the tables and eat free of cost." But it was the Filipino situation that aroused many blacks in the United States to militant opposition to the war. The senior bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Henry M. Turner, called the campaign in the Philippines "an unholy war of conquest" and referred to the Filipinos as "sable patriots." There were four black regiments on duty in the Philippines. Many of the black soldiers established rapport with the brown-skinned natives on the islands, and were angered by the term "nigger" used by white troops to describe the Filipinos. An "unusually large number" of black troops deserted during the Philippines campaign, Gatewood says. The Filipino rebels often addressed themselves to "The Colored American Soldier" in posters, reminding them of lynchings back home, asking them not to serve the white imperialist against other colored people. Some deserters joined the Filipino rebels. The most famous of these was David Fagan of the 24th Infantry. According to Gatewood: "He accepted a commission in the insurgent army and for two years wreaked havoc upon the American forces." From the Philippines, William Simms wrote: I was struck by a question a little Filipino boy asked me, which ran about this way: "Why does the American Negro come . . . to fight us where we are much a friend to him and have not done anything to him. He is all the same as me and me all the same as you. Why don't you fight those people in America who burn Negroes, that make a beast of you . . ."? Another soldier's letter of 1899: Our racial sympathies would naturally be with the Filipinos. They are fighting manfully for what they conceive to be their best interests. But we cannot for the sake of sentiment turn our back upon our own country. Patrick Mason, a sergeant in the 24th Infantry, wrote to the Cleveland Gazette, which had taken a strong stand against annexation of the Philippines: Dear Sir: I have not had any fighting to do since I have been here and don't care to do any. I feel sorry for these people and all that have come under the control of the United States. I don't believe they will be justly dealt by. The first thing in the morning is the "Nigger" and the last thing at night is the "Nigger." . . . You are right in your opinions. I must not say much as I am a soldier. . . . A black infantryman named William Fulbright wrote from Manila in June 1901 to the editor of a paper in Indianapolis: "This struggle on the islands has been naught but a gigantic scheme of robbery and oppression." Back home, while the war against the Filipinos was going on, a group of Massachusetts Negroes addressed a message to President McKinley: We the colored people of Massachusetts in mass meeting assembled . . . have resolved to address ourselves to you in an open letter, notwithstanding your extraordinary, your incomprehensible silence on the subject of our wrongs. . . . . . . you have seen our sufferings, witnessed from your high place our awful wrongs and miseries, and yet you have at no time and on no occasion opened your lips on our behalf. . . . With one accord, with an anxiety that wrenched our hearts with cruel hopes and fears, the Colored people of the United States turned to you when Wilmington, North Carolina was held for two dreadful days and nights in the clutch of a bloody revolution; when Negroes, guilty of no crime except the color of their skin and a desire to exercise the rights of their American citizenship, were butchered like dogs in the streets of that ill-fated town . . . for want of federal aid, which you would not and did not furnish. . . . It was the same thing with that terrible ebullition of mob spirit at Phoenix, South Carolina, when black men were hunted and murdered, and white men [these were white radicals in Phoenix] shot and driven out of that place by a set of white savages. . . . We looked in vain for some word or some act from you. . . . And when you made your Southern tour a little later, and we saw how cunningly you catered to Southern race prejudice. . . . How you preached patience, industry, moderation to your long-suffering black fellow citizens, and patriotism, jingoism and imperialism to your white ones. . . . The "patience, industry, and moderation" preached to blacks, the "patriotism" preached to whites, did not fully sink in. In the first years of the twentieth century, despite all the demonstrated power of the state, large numbers of blacks, whites, men, women became impatient, immoderate, unpatriotic.

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Kindergarten's Positive Impact

Source: NY Times
Credits: David Leonhardt
Dated: 2010-07-27

The Case for $320,000 Kindergarten Teachers

How much do your kindergarten teacher and classmates affect the rest of your life?

Economists have generally thought that the answer was not much. Great teachers and early childhood programs can have a big short-term effect. But the impact tends to fade. By junior high and high school, children who had excellent early schooling do little better on tests than similar children who did not — which raises the demoralizing question of how much of a difference schools and teachers can make.

There has always been one major caveat, however, to the research on the fade-out effect. It was based mainly on test scores, not on a broader set of measures, like a child’s health or eventual earnings. As Raj Chetty, a Harvard economist, says: “We don’t really care about test scores. We care about adult outcomes.”

Early this year, Mr. Chetty and five other researchers set out to fill this void. They examined the life paths of almost 12,000 children who had been part of a well-known education experiment in Tennessee in the 1980s. The children are now about 30, well started on their adult lives.

On Tuesday, Mr. Chetty presented the findings — not yet peer-reviewed — at an academic conference in Cambridge, Mass. They’re fairly explosive.

Just as in other studies, the Tennessee experiment found that some teachers were able to help students learn vastly more than other teachers. And just as in other studies, the effect largely disappeared by junior high, based on test scores. Yet when Mr. Chetty and his colleagues took another look at the students in adulthood, they discovered that the legacy of kindergarten had re-emerged.

Students who had learned much more in kindergarten were more likely to go to college than students with otherwise similar backgrounds. Students who learned more were also less likely to become single parents. As adults, they were more likely to be saving for retirement. Perhaps most striking, they were earning more.

All else equal, they were making about an extra $100 a year at age 27 for every percentile they had moved up the test-score distribution over the course of kindergarten. A student who went from average to the 60th percentile — a typical jump for a 5-year-old with a good teacher — could expect to make about $1,000 more a year at age 27 than a student who remained at the average. Over time, the effect seems to grow, too.

The economists don’t pretend to know the exact causes. But it’s not hard to come up with plausible guesses. Good early education can impart skills that last a lifetime — patience, discipline, manners, perseverance. The tests that 5-year-olds take may pick up these skills, even if later multiple-choice tests do not.

Now happens to be a particularly good time for a study like this. With the economy still terribly weak, many people are understandably unsure about the value of education. They see that even college graduates have lost their jobs in the recession.

Barely a week seems to go by without a newspaper or television station running a report suggesting that education is overrated. These stories quote liberal groups, like the Economic Policy Institute, that argue that an education can’t protect workers in today’s global economy. Or they quote conservatives, like Charles Murray and Ramesh Ponnuru, who suggest that people who haven’t graduated from college aren’t smart enough to do so.

But the anti-education case usually relies on a combination of anecdotes and selective facts. In truth, the gap between the pay of college graduates and everyone else grew to a record last year, according to the Labor Department, and unemployment has risen far more for the less educated.

This is not simply because smart people — people who would do well no matter what — tend to graduate from college. Education itself can make a difference. A long line of economic research, by Julie Berry Cullen, James Heckman, Philip Oreopoulos and many others, has found as much. The study by Mr. Chetty and his colleagues is the latest piece of evidence.

•

The crucial problem the study had to solve was the old causation-correlation problem. Are children who do well on kindergarten tests destined to do better in life, based on who they are? Or are their teacher and classmates changing them?

The Tennessee experiment, known as Project Star, offered a chance to answer these questions because it randomly assigned students to a kindergarten class. As a result, the classes had fairly similar socioeconomic mixes of students and could be expected to perform similarly on the tests given at the end of kindergarten.

Yet they didn’t. Some classes did far better than others. The differences were too big to be explained by randomness. (Similarly, when the researchers looked at entering and exiting test scores in first, second and third grades, they found that some classes made much more progress than others.)

Class size — which was the impetus of Project Star — evidently played some role. Classes with 13 to 17 students did better than classes with 22 to 25. Peers also seem to matter. In classes with a somewhat higher average socioeconomic status, all the students tended to do a little better.

But neither of these factors came close to explaining the variation in class performance. So another cause seemed to be the explanation: teachers.

Some are highly effective. Some are not. And the differences can affect students for years to come.

When I asked Douglas Staiger, a Dartmouth economist who studies education, what he thought of the new paper, he called it fascinating and potentially important. “The worry has been that education didn’t translate into earnings,” Mr. Staiger said. “But this is telling us that it does and that the fade-out effect is misleading in some sense.”

Mr. Chetty and his colleagues — one of whom, Emmanuel Saez, recently won the prize for the top research economist under the age of 40 — estimate that a standout kindergarten teacher is worth about $320,000 a year. That’s the present value of the additional money that a full class of students can expect to earn over their careers. This estimate doesn’t take into account social gains, like better health and less crime.

Obviously, great kindergarten teachers are not going to start making $320,000 anytime soon. Still, school administrators can do more than they’re doing.

They can pay their best teachers more, as Pittsburgh soon will, and give them the support they deserve. Administrators can fire more of their worst teachers, as Michelle Rhee, the Washington schools chancellor, did last week. Schools can also make sure standardized tests are measuring real student skills and teacher quality, as teachers’ unions have urged.

Given today’s budget pressures, finding the money for any new programs will be difficult. But that’s all the more reason to focus our scarce resources on investments whose benefits won’t simply fade away.

Lessons : The Best On-Line Periodic Table

Play with this. Explore by moving the cursor over the elements. Try selecting different options on the tabs as well as moving the temperature slider. It may help you to know that 20 degrees Celsius (68 F) = 293.15 kelvin

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Lessons : The Elements - Names, Abbreviations and Pronunciation Guides

Element No	Abbreviation	Name
Pronunciation Hydrogen - Phosphorus
1	H	Hydrogen
2	He	Helium
3	Li	Lithium
4	Be	Beryllium
5	B	Boron
6	C	Carbon
7	N	Nitrogen
8	O	Oxygen
9	F	Fluorine
10	Ne	Neon
11	Na	Sodium
12	Mg	Magnesium
13	Al	Aluminum, Aluminium
14	Si	Silicon
15	P	Phosphorus
Pronunciation Sulfur - Zinc
16	S	Sulfur
17	Cl	Chlorine
18	Ar	Argon
19	K	Potassium
20	Ca	Calcium
21	Sc	Scandium
22	Ti	Titanium
23	V	Vanadium
24	Cr	Chromium
25	Mn	Manganese
26	Fe	Iron
27	Co	Cobalt
28	Ni	Nickel
29	Cu	Copper
30	Zn	Zinc
Pronunciation Gallium - Rhodium
31	Ga	Gallium
32	Ge	Germanium
33	As	Arsenic
34	Se	Selenium
35	Br	Bromine
36	Kr	Krypton
37	Rb	Rubidium
38	Sr	Strontium
39	Y	Yttrium
40	Zr	Zirconium
41	Nb	Niobium
42	Mo	Molybdenum
43	Tc	Technetium
44	Ru	Ruthenium
45	Rh	Rhodium
Pronunciation Palladium - Neodymium
46	Pd	Palladium
47	Ag	Silver
48	Cd	Cadmium
49	In	Indium
50	Sn	Tin
51	Sb	Antimony
52	Te	Tellurium
53	I	Iodine
54	Xe	Xenon
55	Cs	Cesium
56	Ba	Barium
57	La	Lanthanum
58	Ce	Cerium
59	Pr	Praseodymium
60	Nd	Neodymium
Pronunciation Promethium - Rhenium
61	Pm	Promethium
62	Sm	Samarium
63	Eu	Europium
64	Gd	Gadolinium
65	Tb	Terbium
66	Dy	Dysprosium
67	Ho	Holmium
68	Er	Erbium
69	Tm	Thulium
70	Yb	Ytterbium
71	Lu	Lutetium
72	Hf	Hafnium
73	Ta	Tantalum
74	W	Tungsten
75	Re	Rhenium
Pronunciation Osmium - Thorium
76	Os	Osmium
77	Ir	Iridium
78	Pt	Platinum
79	Au	Gold
80	Hg	Mercury
81	Tl	Thallium
82	Pb	Lead
83	Bi	Bismuth
84	Po	Polonium
85	At	Astatine
86	Rn	Radon
87	Fr	Francium
88	Ra	Radium
89	Ac	Actinium
90	Th	Thorium
Pronunciation Protactinium - Dubnium
91	Pa	Protactinium
92	U	Uranium
93	Np	Neptunium
94	Pu	Plutonium
95	Am	Americium
96	Cm	Curium
97	Bk	Berkelium
98	Cf	Californium
99	Es	Einsteinium
100	Fm	Fermium
101	Md	Mendelevium
102	No	Nobelium
103	Lr	Lawrencium
104	Rf	Rutherfordium
105	Db	Dubnium
Pronunciation Seaborgium - Ununoctium
106	Sg	Seaborgium
107	Bh	Bohrium
108	Hs	Hassium
109	Mt	Meitnerium
110	Ds	Darmstadtium
111	Rg	Roentgenium
112	Cn	Copernicium
113	Uut	Ununtrium
114	Uuq	Ununquadium
115	Uup	Ununpentium
116	Uuh	Ununhexium
117	Uus	Ununseptium
118	Uuo	Ununoctium

Mathematics

Microscopes

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Moon Times

Source: http://aa.usno.navy.mil/cgi-bin/aa_rstablew.pl

             o  ,    o  ,                                   FAIRFIELD, IOWA                            Astronomical Applications Dept.
Location: W091 58, N41 01                         Rise and Set for the Moon for 2012                   U. S. Naval Observatory        
                                                                                                       Washington, DC  20392-5420     
                                                         Central Standard Time                                                        
                                                                                                                                      
                                                                                                                                      
       Jan.       Feb.       Mar.       Apr.       May        June       July       Aug.       Sept.      Oct.       Nov.       Dec.  
Day Rise  Set  Rise  Set  Rise  Set  Rise  Set  Rise  Set  Rise  Set  Rise  Set  Rise  Set  Rise  Set  Rise  Set  Rise  Set  Rise  Set
     h m  h m   h m  h m   h m  h m   h m  h m   h m  h m   h m  h m   h m  h m   h m  h m   h m  h m   h m  h m   h m  h m   h m  h m
01  1140 0026  1152 0206  1118 0143  1302 0230  1407 0205  1636 0214  1747 0227  1853 0434  1855 0645  1825 0737  1859 0913  1931 0927
02  1208 0125  1236 0301  1211 0232  1409 0304  1517 0236  1750 0256  1847 0327  1927 0544  1924 0747  1858 0836  1948 1002  2029 1004
03  1240 0223  1328 0354  1310 0318  1518 0337  1630 0308  1901 0346  1938 0434  1958 0652  1953 0848  1936 0933  2042 1047  2129 1038
04  1316 0321  1425 0442  1414 0359  1629 0409  1746 0343  2006 0444  2021 0545  2027 0757  2025 0948  2017 1028  2138 1127  2230 1110
05  1357 0418  1528 0526  1522 0436  1743 0441  1903 0423  2102 0549  2057 0656  2055 0900  2059 1047  2104 1120  2237 1204  2332 1139
06  1446 0513  1635 0606  1631 0510  1859 0515  2017 0509  2148 0658  2129 0804  2123 1002  2138 1143  2155 1207  2338 1237       1208
07  1540 0605  1744 0641  1743 0542  2015 0552  2125 0604  2227 0809  2159 0911  2153 1102  2222 1237  2250 1251       1308  0036 1239
08  1641 0651  1854 0714  1856 0614  2130 0635  2224 0705  2300 0917  2226 1014  2225 1201  2310 1328  2348 1330  0041 1338  0143 1311
09  1745 0733  2005 0745  2010 0646  2240 0724  2313 0811  2330 1023  2253 1116  2301 1258       1414       1406  0146 1409  0253 1347
10  1852 0810  2116 0816  2124 0721  2342 0820  2355 0920  2357 1127  2322 1216  2342 1354  0004 1456  0049 1439  0254 1441  0405 1429
11  2000 0843  2228 0848  2238 0759       0922       1027       1228  2352 1314       1447  0101 1535  0153 1510  0405 1516  0518 1519
12  2108 0914  2340 0922  2349 0843  0035 1027  0030 1133  0024 1327       1412  0028 1536  0203 1610  0259 1542  0518 1557  0629 1617
13  2217 0943       1001       0933  0119 1133  0100 1236  0051 1426  0026 1509  0119 1622  0307 1643  0408 1614  0633 1644  0733 1724
14  2327 1013  0051 1045  0053 1029  0156 1238  0128 1337  0120 1524  0103 1604  0215 1703  0413 1714  0519 1648  0746 1739  0830 1835
15       1045  0158 1136  0150 1131  0229 1341  0154 1436  0151 1621  0146 1656  0316 1740  0521 1746  0632 1726  0853 1841  0918 1947
16  0038 1119  0300 1233  0238 1235  0257 1443  0221 1535  0226 1718  0235 1744  0419 1814  0631 1818  0746 1809  0953 1949  0959 2058
17  0149 1159  0354 1336  0320 1340  0324 1543  0248 1633  0306 1811  0329 1827  0524 1845  0742 1853  0859 1859  1043 2059  1034 2206
18  0259 1246  0440 1442  0355 1444  0350 1642  0317 1731  0351 1902  0427 1906  0631 1916  0855 1932  1008 1956  1126 2208  1105 2311
19  0406 1340  0520 1548  0426 1547  0417 1741  0350 1828  0441 1948  0528 1941  0739 1947  1007 2016  1110 2059  1202 2315  1134     
20  0507 1441  0554 1653  0454 1649  0445 1839  0426 1923  0537 2029  0632 2013  0848 2019  1116 2107  1203 2205  1234       1203 0013
21  0559 1547  0624 1757  0521 1749  0515 1937  0508 2016  0636 2106  0737 2044  0958 2054  1220 2204  1248 2312  1303 0019  1232 0114
22  0644 1655  0651 1859  0547 1849  0549 2034  0555 2105  0737 2139  0843 2113  1108 2133  1317 2307  1327       1331 0121  1302 0213
23  0722 1802  0718 1959  0614 1948  0627 2128  0646 2149  0840 2210  0949 2143  1218 2218  1407       1401 0018  1359 0222  1335 0312
24  0754 1908  0744 2059  0642 2047  0710 2220  0743 2228  0945 2239  1057 2215  1324 2310  1449 0012  1431 0123  1428 0322  1412 0408
25  0823 2011  0811 2158  0713 2144  0758 2307  0842 2303  1050 2309  1207 2251  1426       1526 0119  1459 0226  1500 0420  1454 0503
26  0850 2113  0840 2256  0748 2241  0851 2349  0944 2336  1157 2339  1317 2332  1521 0009  1558 0225  1527 0328  1534 0518  1540 0555
27  0916 2213  0912 2354  0827 2334  0948       1047       1306       1426       1609 0113  1628 0330  1556 0428  1613 0615  1631 0643
28  0942 2312  0949       0912       1049 0028  1153 0006  1417 0013  1533 0019  1650 0220  1657 0433  1626 0528  1656 0709  1725 0727
29  1009       1030 0050  1002 0024  1153 0102  1300 0036  1529 0050  1634 0115  1725 0328  1725 0535  1659 0627  1744 0759  1823 0806
30  1039 0010             1058 0110  1259 0134  1409 0106  1640 0135  1728 0217  1757 0435  1754 0636  1735 0725  1836 0845  1922 0841
31  1113 0108             1158 0152             1521 0138             1814 0325  1827 0541             1815 0821             2023 0913

                                             Add one hour for daylight time, if and when in use.

NOTE: BLANK SPACES IN THE TABLE INDICATE THAT A RISING OR A SETTING DID NOT OCCUR DURING THAT 24 HR INTERVAL.

Nature of Science

Source: http://www.indiana.edu/~ensiweb/natsc.fs.html

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Now all Americans are above average?

Source: Yahoo News
Credits: Faux News
Dated: 2010-07-31

Emilie says: Huh? They don't accept anything less than average means that about half of everything is unacceptable. Now they are going to raise the average so that nobody gets below the average anymore. Maybe they should have an arithmetic test before appointing people to be president of school districts. TOEFL might be a good idea too. At least it seems that English is not Mark Warner's native language and he needs more practice before being interviewed or he will make the district sound stupid.

School will no longer give out any D's to raise school standards

Interview with Mark Warner, School Board President of the Mount Olive School District

"What do you have against D's?"

"Well I don't personally have anything against D's except that it's unacceptable. We don't accept as a society anything below average, and why would we allow students to get grades for graduation if they are performing below average."

"So explain to us how it works, cause we understand that in your school district 384 students a month ago in June ended the school year with a D as a final grade. What happens to those 384 students come September?"

"First of all I want to apologise to those students, cause we allowed it to happen, and it shouldn't have happened in the first place. And what will happen will be a greater support network for anyone receiving a grade lower than 70%. We have tutoring, we have support groups, we have even to the extent that we will have extended an after nightschool for students in that situation."

"So basically the way you plan to combat it is just help them not get a D, help them do better, but here's why some parents argue with your philosophy here, they say that C is an average. C is considered an average grade. So now you are saying that if anybody is below average they automatically fail."

"But that is what we are supposed to be doing in real life. Real life does not accept anything less than average. Be it job performances. Be it job. What you do on the job. Are not accepted by employers. So why would we allow children to graduate and go into the real world and be below average. I can't understand it."

Emilie says: Neither can I

One Nation Under Educated

Source: Daily Finance Credits: James Altucher Dated: 2010-08-06 Seven Reasons Not to Send Your Kids to College Imagine a retirement where you could have an extra $1million to $3 million in the bank with basically no effort. Now imagine telling your kids that you aren't going to send them to college. And, you go on, you want them to immediately start a business or get to work as soon as they finish high school. These are difficult things to imagine because we've been so scammed by the "career industry" that tells us we need college degrees in order to succeed in life, regardless of how much money we spend for those degrees or what we actually do with our lives during the four to eight years it takes us to get those degrees. But in my view, the entire college degree industry is a scam, a self-perpetuating Ponzi scheme that needs to stop right now. Here Are Seven Reasons to Say "No College" to Your Kids: 1. More than 60% of people entering college take more than four years to graduate. So whatever you think your kids are going to cost you to go to college, add 20% to 100%. 2. The cost of the average college tuition has gone up nine-fold since 1976 versus seven-fold for health care and three-fold for inflation. 3. The differential in lifetime income between a college graduate and a non-college graduate over a 45 year career is approximately $800,000 (read on). 4. If I put that $200,000 that I would've spent per child to cover tuition costs, living expenses, books, etc. into bonds yielding just 3% (any muni bonds) and let it compound for 49 years (adding back in the 4 years of college), I get $851,000. So my kids can avoid college and still end up with the same amount in the worst case. 5. If smart, motivated, ambitious kids (the type of kids who get the most out of college) avoided college I'm sure the differential would be a lot less than $800,000 and may even be negative (i.e. they would make more if they avoided college and started going into the business world earlier). 6. The average debt burden of a college graduate is $23,000. Up from $13,000 10 years ago. Students with professional degrees can see their debt burden go higher than $200,000. Total student borrowing has topped $75,000,000,000. It's too much for young adults just starting their careers. 7. Alternatives to spending $200,000 per kid so they can waste four years of their lives: Give them $20,000 to start one to five businesses. Most businesses fail but that's ok. The education from the process lasts a lifetime and the network you build when you start a business will lead to many future jobs and possibilities. Travel the world. That would be an education that pays many dividends and is much cheaper. Your kids can then go to college with a much more mature view of the world. Work. They won't get the best jobs but they can make money, network, get a "hands-on" education, learn the value of money and go to college in their 20s when they can afford it -- and make every dollar worth it. Plus your kids will have a more clear idea of what they want to do in the world. Volunteer. Let them see a side of life that is harder and where they can add value. An education like that is invaluable. Do nothing but read. Get the benefits of a college education without paying the $200,000. I'd be happy to support a child that wants to home school a college education.

Source: NY Times Credits: Bob Herbert Dated: 2010-08-10 Putting Our Brains on Hold The world leadership qualities of the United States, once so prevalent, are fading faster than the polar ice caps. We once set the standard for industrial might, for the advanced state of our physical infrastructure, and for the quality of our citizens’ lives. All are experiencing significant decline. The latest dismal news on the leadership front comes from the College Board, which tells us that the U.S., once the world’s leader in the percentage of young people with college degrees, has fallen to 12th among 36 developed nations. At a time when a college education is needed more than ever to establish and maintain a middle-class standard of living, America’s young people are moving in exactly the wrong direction. A well-educated population also is crucially important if the U.S. is to succeed in an increasingly competitive global environment. But instead of exercising the appropriate mental muscles, we’re allowing ourselves to become a nation of nitwits, obsessed with the comings and goings of Lindsay Lohan and increasingly oblivious to crucially important societal issues that are all but screaming for attention. What should we be doing about the legions of jobless Americans, the deteriorating public schools, the debilitating wars, the scandalous economic inequality, the corporate hold on governmental affairs, the commercialization of the arts, the deficits? Why is there not serious and widespread public engagement with these issues — and many others that could easily come to mind? That kind of engagement would lead to creative new ideas and would serve to enrich the lives of individual Americans and the nation as a whole. But it would require a heavy social and intellectual lift. According to a new report from the College Board, the U.S. is 12th among developed nations in the percentage of 25- to 34-year-olds with college degrees. The report said, “As America’s aging and highly educated work force moves into retirement, the nation will rely on young Americans to increase our standing in the world.” The problem is that today’s young Americans are not coming close to acquiring the education and training needed to carry out that mission. They’re not even in the ballpark. In that key group, 25- to 34-year-olds with a college degree, the U.S. ranks behind Canada, South Korea, Russia, Japan, New Zealand, Ireland, Norway, Israel, France, Belgium and Australia. That is beyond pathetic. “While the nation struggles to strengthen the economy,” the report said, “the educational capacity of our country continues to decline.” Everybody is to blame — parents, students, the educational establishment, government leaders, the news media and on and on. A society that closes its eyes to the most important issues of the day, that often holds intellectual achievement in contempt, that is more interested in hip-hop and Lady Gaga than educating its young is all but guaranteed to spiral into a decline. Speaking this week about the shortage of degrees in the 25- to 34-year-old demographic, Gaston Caperton, the president of the College Board and a former governor of West Virginia, said, “When I was in school, we were No. 1 in the world in college graduations. When I was governor, we were third, and I was surprised by that drop. Now we’re 12th at a time when a good education is critically important to getting a decent job.” Among other things, he called on educators to develop curricula that are more “interesting and inspiring.” And he said it is essential for students to work harder. These are gloomy times in the United States. A child drops out of high school every 26 seconds. As incredible as it seems from the perspective of 2010, the report from the College Board tells us that “it is expected that the educational level of the younger generation of Americans will not approach their parents’ level of education.” What is the matter with us? Have we been drinking? Whatever happened to that vaunted American dream? In Hawaii, the public schools were closed on 17 Fridays during the past school year for budget reasons. When this is the educational environment, you can say goodbye to the kind of cultural, scientific and economic achievements that combine to make a great nation. We no longer know how to put our people to work. We read less and less and write like barbarians. We’ve increasingly turned our backs on the very idea of hard-won excellence while flinging open the doors to decadence and decline. No wonder Lady Gaga and Snooki from “Jersey Shore” are cultural heroes. In their important book, “The Race Between Education and Technology,” the Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz pointed out that educational attainment in the U.S. “was exceptionally rapid and continuous for the first three-quarters of the 20th century.” Then, foolishly, we applied the brakes. All that’s at stake is our future.

One Nation Under Educated Seems Poised to Expand

Source: Mother Jones
Credits: Stephanie Mencimer (Staff Reporter, Mother Jones)
Dated: 2010-12-15

[ Emilie says : We home school and the money would come in really handy. I even support rethinking the school system, making use of smaller mixed age schools (one-room schoolhouses) supported by on-line programs. But the proposal as described here is going to demolish what is left of the existing public school system after non-stop test-preparations have reduced its ability to teach effectively, without providing any alternative. The only reason I can see for anyone to support it is that it will all but guarantee a ready supply of people suited only to be unemployed tea-party supporters. The downside is that it takes an education to recognize this. ]

Rick Scott's School Plan for Scoundrels

Zuma/Amy Beth Bennett

The Florida governor-elect's proposal to overhaul the state education system is a fraudster's dream.

Conservatives have been plotting for years to blow up the public school system. Now, Florida's incoming governor Rick Scott is poised to light the fuse.

During his campaign, Scott pledged to overhaul the state's schools while simultaneously reducing school property taxes by $1.4 billion. How to accomplish both? Privatization, of course. His plan, which promotes online schooling along with other educational options, may actually pave the way for the elimination of such pesky budget busters as buses, cafeterias, teachers, and, well, school facilities themselves.

Scott's transition office did not respond to inquiries from Mother Jones, but according to various news reports, Scott is cooking up an education proposal that would expand an existing voucher program designed for low-income and disabled kids, opening it to all students. The result would be that instead of public school funds filtering through the unionized public bureaucracy, it would go with the students, who could use the money to enroll in the school of their choice—public, private, charter, or virtual. If parents are wealthy enough to pay for their child's education with their own funds, they can use the voucher money for laptops or school supplies, or even sock it away in a college fund. The proposed voucher amount, about $5500, is only 85 percent of the annual cost of educating a child in Florida.

Far-right conservatives have been pushing vouchers for years as a way to dismantle public schools and fund parochial schools. But Scott's proposal may be the first to propose using vouchers as a way of also cutting taxes. The plan is modeled on one proposed by the conservative Goldwater Institute in Arizona, which last year posited that the state could save a significant amount of money if it gave parents a spiff to opt out of the public school system. It's been supported by the Foundation for Florida's Future—a think tank founded by Scott's predecessor, former Gov. Jeb Bush, and run by Bush's former education policy advisor, who is now on Scott's transition team.

Scott's plan is radical because it's designed to get around a constitutional problem the state encountered a few years back when, during Bush's tenure, it attempted to create vouchers to send public school students to private schools. But Scott apparently believes that his proposal will slip through, in part because the money could be used for other public schools. There are many flaws in Scott's proposal. But here's a biggie: It’s likely to be a fraud magnet.

As soon as the state starts handing families $5500 a year, it's virtually assured that enterprising thieves will devise various schemes to help them part with those funds, including by starting "independent" for-profit virtual schools, charter schools, and other predatory "educational" institutions. While the idea of privatizing the education system may seem like a big money saver, and no one really loves school bureaucracies, putting that much taxpayer money out there without adequate oversight (i.e. bureaucracy) is a formula for disaster.

It's not just a hypothetical harm, as charter schools in many states have demonstrated. Charter schools get paid by the number of kids they enroll, and they are free from much of the bureaucracy Republicans like to bash so much. All that money mixed with all that freedom hasn't produced much in the way of an education boost: Charter schools perform no better and often much worse than traditional ones. But they have produced a bumper crop of fraudsters.

In recent years, the US Department of Education's Office of the Inspector General has been raising red flags about charter school fraud and embezzlement, a problem that is increasing. In March, the OIG wrote that it had opened more than 40 charter school criminal investigations that resulted in the convictions of 15 charter school officials, with 24 cases still pending. Most of the cases involved charter school operators and employees who falsely increased enrollment figures and used the extra money to bankroll lavish lifestyles. They often engaged in testing and grade-fixing antics to ensure the money kept rolling in. At the time the report was released, prosecutors had recovered more than $4 million stolen by charter school employees and operators since 2005.

Scott, the former CEO of a health care company, should have a unique understanding of what sorts of predators lurk in the private sector searching out new ways to profit at the public trough. The company he used to run, Columbia/HCA, was quite adept at ripping off government programs. In 2003, the company pleaded guilty to 14 "corporate" felony charges and ended up repaying the government almost $2 billion for Medicare and Medicaid fraud. At the time, it was the largest health care fraud case in American history.

Scott, who claimed he was unaware of the massive fraud taking place at the company, oversaw an era when the company routinely overbilled the federal health plans, inflated patient diagnoses to increase reimbursements, gave kickbacks to doctors for referring patients to company facilities, filed false data about hospital space use, and engaged in other sleazy practices—practices that in some cases aren't all that different from those of dubious school operators.

Even so, Scott appears ready to liberate public school parents to take their money anywhere they like, especially to online schools—a new cause célèbre for Jeb Bush, who recently launched an advocacy project called Digital Learning Now! to lobby against barriers to online public schools.

One of the hallmarks of Scott's education reform plan is the idea that many kids don't need to go to school at all; they can learn everything they need to in virtual classrooms. Online schools offer many cost-saving advantages, but unfortunately many of them are so bad that even the military won't take people who graduate from them. Online schools also seem even more vulnerable to fraud than regular old charter schools.

In June, Bush spoke at a graduation ceremony at Electronic Classroom for Tomorrow, Ohio's largest online school, which enrolls nearly 10,000 kids but only graduates 35 percent of them. ECOT didn't get off to a stellar start, demonstrating some of the pitfalls of such schools. In its early years, the management company running the school overcharged the state $1.7 million in teaching hours it couldn't document, as well as $500,000 in computer equipment that disappeared with students who never came back.

Scott's education "reform" plan seems be less about actually making Florida's schools better and more about paying private companies to run bad ones. On his transition team are a couple of CEOs of for-profit charter school companies with questionable track records, including the head of Imagine Schools, which runs underperforming charter schools in Ohio, Arizona, and Florida. Five of the 11 schools the company runs in Ohio are on an academic emergency list and another three are on an academic watch list. The Imagine School in Florida is on probation for its second consecutive "F" rating and at risk of being closed by the state. Charter schools figure prominently into Scott's reform plans.

These are the sorts of schools that would likely be on the receiving end of Scott's universal voucher program. It might help him cut property taxes for the state's rich seniors and wintering hedge fund managers, but it's hard to see how the plan does much to improve "accountability" as he's claimed—or more importantly, improve the fortunes of Florida's school children.

Open Source Physics

Open Source Physics

Loads of models and simulations, they just received the Science Prize for Online Resources in Education (SPORE) from Science, the journal of the AAAS.

Paper Models

Source: Beautiful Paper Models

Buildings and Structures Free Paper Models

Free paper models of buildings from around the world. Castles, Palaces, Churches, Museums, Historical, Houses, Lighthouses, RPG Layouts... 

Paper Model Building Categories:
Castles and Palaces  Churches and Museums  City buildings  RPG Buildings & Layouts  Historical & Famous	Houses, Cottages & Villas  Lighthouses & Windmills  Towns and Villages  Transportation Related  Other

 

Castles and Palaces

Build your own Paper Model Medieval Castle

Blarney Castle Paper Model

Build a Castle - Simple. Pyramid, ziggurat and more, under the heading: The Built Environment.

Hagrid's Hut - The hut where the the loveable big friend of Harry Potter lives.

Hogwarts Castle - Very nice castle paper model from the great Harry Potter books and movie.

Industrial Palace, Prague

Neu-Montford

Simple Castle

Skipton Castle - Paper model of a gate house and coloring pages

WarMaster - Paper models of Castles and Village buildings 

Churches, Libraries and Museums

Church Saint Martin - And other churches.

Celtic Monastery model

Irish Church - A nice paper model of a church with a stone texture from Pepachal.

Minnesota Museum of the Mississippi - Sky Scraper, 3 story Museum, Motel, Lighthouse, World Trade Center and more.

Museum of Saint-Denis And Pennti of Brittany 

City Buildings, Industrial

Auto Work Shop, 1920

Bank Paper Model

Berlin City Buildings - Go to Berlin, then Modelle in left menu

Pop-Up Model of Apartment Interior - Very cute and clever.

SimCity 2000 - Very large scale paper model project.

Sky Scraper Models 

Gaming (RPG) Buildings and Layouts

Dragons Here

Combat Storm - Go to downloads for worn torn buildings for wargaing with plastic army men.

Fantasy Cutouts - Very nicely designed Hovel. One of my favorites.

Forgeworld Cerrus

Germ's World Floor Plans - for 3d dungeon and spacestation gaming

Greywolfs Paper Models

Junior General - Historic military RPGs. "Paper Soldiers" for a multitude of paper soldiers, terrain, houses & more. Or, you can choose a scenario and within is everything you need for that scenario. Great!

Paper Make It - Dice Tower, City of Stone and other very nice models

Props for Tabletop Gaming - Buildings, furniture and critters

Warhammer Cardstock Constructions

White Wash City - Old west saloon! Go to Free Stuff on left.

Wizards Foldup Paper Models 

Historical and Famous

Anne Frank's Paper Model House

Bancroft Roman Villa

Build Your Own Illinois Historic Building Models - Historical Buildings That Played A Part In Abraham Lincoln's Life: Abraham Lincoln's Home In Springfield, Illinois, Thomas Lincoln Home, Old State Capitol, Berry-lincoln Store, Great Western Depot, Old Main At Knox College, Beecher Hall, Lincoln Tomb, Shastid House, Vandalia State House, Tinsley Building, And Other Historical Buildings In Illinois, Very Nice!

Campanile Di San Marco - Go to free test on left

Canon Buildings of the World - Lots In of great buildings in Architecture and Toys: Taj Mahal, Sydney Opera House, Great Pyramid, Sphinx, Arc de Triomphe, Tower Bridge, Colosseum, Eiffel Tower, Leaning Tower of Pisa, Parthenon, Notre-Dame, Neuschwanstein, Tower of London, Mont-Saint-Michel, France, Statue of Liberty, lots more.

Disney Buildings/Attractions - Temple of the Forbidden Eye, Cinderella's Castle, Twilight Zone Tower of Terror, Sleeping Beauty Castle

Easter Island Head and Statue

Heritage Models - The Tithe Barn, very nice and detailed.

Prehistoric Ohio Paper House Kits - Iroquois Longhouse and Teepee Diorama free paper model kits as well

Lint Hotel in Cologne

Philadelphia Memorial Hall

Miniature Gallery - Harvard, United Nations, Seoul Art Center Buildings. A new model each month since 2003. Because of foreign characters in the file names I was unable to open the zip files. But by renaming the files when prompted to download they do open.

Norwegian Log Cabin - The paper model Log Cabin is at the bottom of the page. It is the oldest part of their museum.

Scotland Yard Paper Model - Western Town and Cactus Junction

Stalag Luft III POW Camp

Statue of Liberty and building hit by atomic bomb in Gallery D.

Tower - from Meiji-era Tokyo, diagram links, upper left corner

Wonders of the World - Free paper models of some of the wonders of the world, model is at the bottom of each page.

Yokohama Stadium - 2002 FIFA World Cup held here

Zippys Models - Very nice free paper models of a water mill, stone age hut, Tudor style cottage, old west paddle store. 

Houses, Apartments, Schools, Cottages and Villas

Beaver House

Canon - Lots of city and town paper buildings. A school house, hospial, airport, police station, stores, house, basic multi level building, firestation and shop.

Christopher's Buildings

House from Cupid Fair

House Paper Models

Konaya - Free paper model of Japanese House

MAGs Papiermodelle - Sheds, Farm buildings, Bavarian Chapel, Train station and more.

MiniBldg Paper Models

Paper Buildings - SimCity, Kame House from Dragonball Z

Papercraft Pallas - You have choices of textures.

Ranch and 2 Story House

Sukusuku Homes

Japanese House Interiors - Papercraft under Sado & Irori

Tudor Building

Tudor Cottage - Simple Tudor cottage

Tudor Style Houses

Village and Castle

Vintage Art Paper Model Buildings 

Lighthouses, Windmills and Bridges

Japan Coast Guard - Each dot on map is a paper toy of various lighthouses.

Kartonmodelle

Kawasaki City River Flood Gate

Windmill

Windmill and Wooden House 

Towns, Villages and Farms

Australian Outback Farm

Bogus Places - Various town sections from around the world that are Bogus! Nice. From CartoonToys.

Ben and Jerry's New England Village

 Build Your Own Victorian Village - Build your own paper model Barn, Blacksmith's Shop, Farmhouse, Park Lodge, Prince Albert Model Cottage, Suburban Villa, Wheelwright's Shop and Windsor Cottage, all free from the Museum of Childhood. Nice.

European Buildings - Lots!

Farm Houses - Scottish farmhouse, Mill Store in Fort Augusta, Kamsdorfer Farm, Truss house & more.

Farm Buildings and more

Outhouse - from Paper Creek Model Works 

Transportation Related (Also See: Trains /Buses)

Aircraft Hangar 1/144 scale

Airport Control Towers and Hangers - Control towers and aircraft hangers from WWI and WWII.

Japanese Bus Terminal - Right-click on paper model images and save & print from paint program. Images larger than what is seen.

Scale Scenes - Small goods store and small warehouse with choice of different textures. Paper models are in OO, NO scale with instructions for printing in HO scale for railroad layouts. A free printable scale ruler as well. Very nice.

Clever Models - Go to Freebies (top left) for a Square Gatehouse and a Snowplow designed for model railroads.

Other

Art Tower Mito - Paper model tower from single sheet of paper!

Iceberg - Various free paper model buildings and more.

Sugar in the room - Child's room, cute!