Privacy Rights

Do you have a right to privacy? That depends on if you are a member of a protected group or if the government wants information you consider private. You might be surprised at what is now regarded as information that should be available, at least to government employees.

Did you think your child's every move should be tracked? I thought not, but both the federal and California governments disagree with you. According to the Silicon Valley Mercury News Online, preschoolers in Contra Costa County are going to be wearing radio tracking devices while at school. They will be tracked everywhere they go, class, play area, cafeteria, even the bathroom. Big Brother will be watching. Can any thinking person believe such tracking will stop with preschoolers?

Other government proposals are also invasive. Some states are proposing to equip all cars with GPS tracking devices. Their excuse is that they will use the information to determine how many miles the car travels and use that to send a tax bill to fund roads. If you believe it will stop there I'm sure you will be interested in a good deal on this bridge in Brooklyn I've heard about. The fact is that we already have a good way to tax vehicles. It's called the fuel tax. Fuel consumption is closely related to distance driven and vehicle weight so fuel taxes are nearly proportional to the wear and tear each vehicle causes on the roads. In fact heavy trucks often pay a weight-mile tax.

Of course electric vehicles avoid the fuel tax, but the solution is still quite simple and need not involve GPS tracking. Every car is equipped with an odometer that records miles driven. It would be easy to tax electric vehicles based on odometer reading.

It is clear that many want to increase how much government can know about our private lives. That is one side of the coin but there is another side.

What if you know something that might be useful to someone? For example you know that an EMT responding to an accident was exposed to hepatitis. Would you tell him? You better not, at least if you are in the medical profession. That would violate HIPAA, the Health Insurance Privacy and Accountability Act. If a hospital discovers that a patient has a communicable disease it is prohibited from telling anyone about it without specific permission. That makes sense in some cases; you don't want your private information becoming public (though it is questionable from a first amendment standpoint). However it makes no sense to not give that information to those who might need it. If a patient has hepatitis and someone has been exposed, that someone should have a right to know about it.

This can be taken to ridiculous extremes. A while back a man with amnesia was in a Portland hospital. He could not remember his name or any other identifying characteristics. Nobody knew who he was. Simple solution, just put his picture in news so friends or relatives could see it. Simple but illegal, HIPAA prohibited that.

There is an even worse use of privacy laws. Too often they are used to protect the guilty, especially government employees. A misbehaving school teacher may have his identity protected or a government agency may be prohibited from responding to public charges to protect the privacy of the accuser. Let's get real; if the accuser goes public, the accused has a right to do so as well. Of course this prohibition cuts both ways. Sometimes it prohibits the accused from giving a good public response. However I fear that it often serves to help the accused hide misbehavior which ought to be public.

Our privacy laws need a serious rethinking. That should be done from the point of view of wisdom, not what government officials want.

A Longer School Year?

President Obama and others are proposing that the school year in the U.S. be extended. The theory is that more time in the classroom will improve learning. There probably is something to that, but is it really the best way to improve education? I doubt it.

More class time would be more of the same, that is obvious. If teaching or student commitment is inadequate, we would just get more poor teaching and lack of student commitment. If parents regard schools as simply a baby-sitting service they would regard a longer school year as more baby-sitting rather than pushing their children to learn. What we need, before we extend the school year, is to teach more effectively. That is especially true of math, science, logic, and critical thinking.

Look at a typical science project in an elementary school. The child is expected to make a model of island ecology or some other scene. After hours with paper, crayons, and clay, the student proudly delivers the project. The teacher then grades it based on how well the colors match reality and how well shaped the model is. Next open house, that project is likely to be displayed as an example of how well the students are learning. Yes they have learned: they learned something about art, but precious little about science.

Sadly, science is often taught as a collection of bloodless facts which students are expected to memorize and regurgitate. Children who eagerly read mystery stories or watch mystery TV shows are not exposed to the way scientists investigate the mysteries of the universe. Students may follow the clues of the mystery story to the final conclusion of who is guilty. However they are denied a view of the excitement that comes from examining scientific clues and finally reaching a conclusion that reflects the real world.

As an example, we have students being told that nearly all the world's scientists believe in man-made global warming. However that is presented as a simple fact, to be accepted and not disputed. Typically only the shallowest of evidence is presented and no alternative explanations are allowed, much less offered to the students. The teacher is the authority and is not to be questioned.

Contrast this with they type of teaching I read about years ago, in Reader's Digest though if memory serves. The author described how, during the first class of the year, the teacher held up what he described as a model of a skull from a South American animal, now extinct. He said that the animal had vanished, leaving no trace that it had ever existed. He then described the animal, its food, its environment etc. Then he gave a quiz on what he had said. Most students did quite well at regurgitating what their teacher had told them. As a result every student got a zero on the quiz.

Can you see why the students flunked? If not, you may be a victim of the “memorize and regurgitate” system of “education.” Not even one student bothered to ask the critical question, “How do you know all this? Especially if the animal left no trace of having ever existed?”

That teacher was driving home a lesson in critical thinking, something central to science.

We need more of that in education. Students should be encouraged to question, to think critically, to generate their own theories and then to describe how such theories could be tested. Instead, too often the questioning student is regarded as a troublemaker. As in Kipling's story “The Elephant's Child,” curiosity and questions can elicit disapproval.

In other disciplines as well, emphasis should be on learning and thinking. Some memorization is necessary of course. Students need to memorize addition, subtraction and other mathematical facts. However school personnel should always keep in mind that they are to prepare students for a changing world, a world filled with con artists. Some of those con artists are criminals, some are advertisers and sales people, some are politicians. Students should learn to evaluate claims as they would the clues in a murder mystery.

With a commitment to real learning instead of busy-work, we can improve our educational system, and we can do it with students spending the same amount of time in class as they do now.

Only after we establish a solid educational system should we consider extending the school year. Even then there is a way to get more effective learning time without more time in class, or more homework. I plan to discuss that next time.

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The Power of Expectations, Part 2

Fans of American college football recognize the Brigham Young University (BYU) Cougars, consistently one of top programs in the country. It was not always so. One player described the team prior to 1972 as the college football equivalent of flying standby. In 47 years the cougars had 31 losing seasons, only one conference championship and had never been to a bowl game. What happened? What turned that team around?

What happened was a coach named Lavell Edwards. By 1994 his BYU teams had 16 conference championships, had played in 19 bowl games and had won a national championship. He had only one losing season in 23 years. How did Edwards create such a remarkable turn-around? More importantly, what can we learn from how he did it?

Of course there was no single magic bullet, Edwards did a lot of things that made a difference (many described in the book, Lavell, Airing it Out). However one of the biggest actions was that he changed expectations. Without that, none of his other improvements would have been very effective.

Prior to the Edwards era, BYU did not expect a winning football team. The school just faced too many disadvantages. It was a religious school, committed to ideas like turning the other cheek. The team lacked money for recruiting and could not hire as many coaches as other schools had. School rules against drinking, smoking, non-marital sex etc. kept many good athletes away. Perhaps most importantly, many players would take two years off to serve a church mission. The coaches thought that those missionaries would lose their competitive fire. Opposing coaches felt sorry for BYU because those players were off preaching instead of playing football.

Coaching meetings often turned into gripe sessions, dwelling on all the reasons they couldn't win. The results were predictable.

Then Edwards became head coach and decided that he had to make some changes. He encouraged players on missions to return and play – and they did not lose their scholarships for going on missions. He believed that religion and football were compatible, and he diffused that belief through his staff.

Lavell Edwards shifted the focus of BYU football from what they could not do to what they could do. He wanted to win and he found a way to do it. He convinced coaches and players that they were expected to win – and they did.

He was also wise in just what expectations he encouraged. At the time, all the top teams had great running backs and emphasized a ground game. It was unrealistic to think that BYU would be recruiting those “blue-chip” players; they wanted to play on teams with winning records. However it was realistic to try a different emphasis. Edwards went to a passing offense. He recruited passing quarterbacks, along with good receivers, and linemen who could block for the pass. He hired assistants who could coach a passing game. He soon drove opponents crazy with his offense.

The result was a big turn-around in both attitude and games won. Recruiting became easier. BYU players regularly made all-conference and even all-American teams. One even won the Heisman Trophy, symbolic of the best college football player in the country. Significantly that trophy winner was a quarterback, the Cougars still weren't attracting top running backs.

Opposing coaches began to complain that returned missionaries gave BYU an unfair advantage.

Coach Edwards' method of changing expectations is instructive.

He looked at what was possible, not what he would have liked. Knowing he could not get the top athletes other teams had, he found a way to work around that.

He never said nor implied that it would be easy. In fact he let everybody know that there would be a lot of work and uncertainty involved.

His message was that improvement was possible and he expected everybody involved to do his part.

This approach applies elsewhere as well. In school, students should be expected to meet difficult but realistic goals. It would be unrealistic to expect a middle school student to do a problem in calculus of variations. However that middle school student should be challenged to do middle school math – and expected to meet the challenge.

In business, employees should be expected to contribute to the profitability of the company. Not every important assignment will be challenging, but when a difficult task needs doing, those assigned to it should be expected to get the job done. There should be no excuses. Nor should there be excuses for sloppy performance in routine but necessary tasks.

In public affairs, we should expect everybody to earn his own way except for those who have serious handicaps. Expecting people to remain on the dole becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. It discourages independence and interferes with the development of their full human potential. Every normal human has the capacity for growth and for earning his own way. We must not provide excuses that encourage dependence. Race, poverty, unhappy childhoods, all can be overcome, but only if expectations motivate the effort to overcome them.

We must set challenging but realistic expectations whenever the opportunity arises, then hold people accountable to meet those expectations. Truck drivers should be expected to drive safely and on schedule. Company presidents should be expected to make profitable and honorable decisions. School teachers should be expected to teach their subjects and students to learn those subjects. Politicians should be expected to live up to their promises and fired by the voters if the don’t.

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The President's Education Speech

(NOTE: I was working and did not hear Obama’s speech to the schools. What follows is based on the text of that speech as published on the web.)

OK let's be clear at the outset. The president's school speech was generally pretty good, though it did have its share of political grandstanding and some misconceptions. He hit most of the right things and tried to encourage children to apply themselves to learning. I especially liked the part about how the students must be responsible for their own education, that's something I often use when I teach a class. I've been known to start the first class by saying, “My job is to teach; your job is to learn. Your job is more important

I believe the president made a few minor errors, but that is forgivable. However he also left out some important items, and their absence made his speech much less effective than it should have been. In his focus on the knowledge and information society he forgot that not every child will grow up to be an engineer, a nurse, or a lawyer. Some will become painters, electricians, plumbers, carpenters and other types of craftspeople. What about the children who want those careers? They were completely left out. Based on Obama's speech they could well decide that education is not important for what they want to do. That would be a serious mistake.

Unfortunately not only the president, but many other people seem to think that the crafts are a lower status occupation not requiring any intelligence. They want to concentrate on jobs requiring a four-year college degree. That is a grave error (and could put our economy in the grave).

As John W. Gardner said, “The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.”

We need people to build our buildings, wire them for electricity, put in the plumbing, paint them etc. In fact I suspect that the average plumber does more for our health than does the average physician. Plumbers help us get pure water and dispose of germ-laden body waste. Without their work, disease would run rampant. Plumbing and other crafts are essential to our economy and our way of life.

Nor are crafts the place for the weak of mind. Most such jobs require regular use of math and geometry. They frequently require creative solutions to unforeseen problems. Uneducated plumbers will give us pipes that don't hold water. Worse yet, public denigration of the crafts will direct young people to other pursuits and leave us with no plumbers and no pipes. Also no electrical wiring, no carpentry, no welding of metal structures. Our society and economy will collapse.

We need people to do the craft jobs and there are young people who prefer to work with their hands. They should be encouraged and prepared to do it right. I still remember in secondary school when we were learning about some geometrical concepts, including calculation of various areas. A classmate raised his hand and asked, “How will I ever use this stuff, I want to be a cat skinner?” (Bulldozer operator)

The teacher' wisely responded, “If you work for somebody else, you probably won't use it. However if you have your own equipment you'll use it all the time to estimate how much dirt you will have to move.”

What that teacher said is true of all the crafts. Painters, carpenters, welders, plumbers, all use their minds as much as they do their hands. If those minds are not prepared, the hands will make mistake after mistake.

We must regard craftspeople as the national asset they are. Joe the plumber, Eli the electrician, Will the welder, all are in good careers, careers necessary to our economy. In fact they have the added advantage that their jobs are unlikely to be outsourced. A company may hire a computer programmer in India. However that company won't be hiring someone in India to plumb their new building in the U.S. or to paint its walls.

I'm reminded of a manager I used to work for, call him Bill. He was a very educated man and also very family oriented. His son was apparently equally talented, good at academics and sports. He could have gone to college on an athletic scholarship as Bill had done. However what the son wanted was to run an excavation company. Bill's reaction was to first be certain that this was his son's real interest. He then helped the son get set up with the equipment and skills he needed. That son will probably never be famous, but he enjoys his work and his job isn't going to be exported.

So, Obama missed the mark on that one. The crafts are every bit as important as any other job in our economy. Those young people who are interested in such jobs should be encouraged to prepare themselves well for the work they will do.

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