What's Wrong with Head Start

         Liberals often tout the Head Start program as a sterling example of a successful government program.  When they do so in your hearing, say this:

         While Head Start can boast that some children show some progress after a year or two in the program, those children remain well below the national norm.  Even those modest outcomes vanish once Head Start children enter our catastrophically bad urban public schools.  Once in the public school system, Head Start students quickly lose any superiority they had over the disadvantaged children who did not attend Head Start.

         We know this because, in 1998 under President Clinton, Congress demanded that the Department of Health and Human Services conduct a rigorous national evaluation of the program, the first evaluation of its kind on that scale.  That study discovered that Head Start produced little meaningful or enduring impact.  For example, even after spending months in Head Start, 4-year-olds could identify only two more letters of the alphabet than children from similar backgrounds not in the program.  Three-year-olds were worse.  They could identify only one and a half more letters on average.  That study revealed virtually no gain for Head Start students in math, in oral comprehension, in motivation, and in interaction with both peers and teachers.

         At the same time as that study was conducted, Congress decided to fund a significant increase in Head Start enrollment.  They intended for enrollment to grow by 22 percent, but it grew by only 2 percent, or less than 1/10 of the projected total.  Parents weren’t going for it.  Who would?

         Think about this:  If you spent more than $22,000 per year for college, you’d expect a commensurate return on your investment.  If, for all that money, the college you selected for your son or daughter failed to deliver the educational goods, you’d send your student elsewhere, and rightly so.  That is exactly how much the government now invests to keep a child in Head Start full time for a year.  Clearly, lack of money is not the problem.  Head Start gets plenty of money.  We spend billions of dollars on it every year, with little more to show for it than if we had simply flushed it away, which is, in effect, exactly what we have done.  By first grade, whatever benefits the program produces are already dried up.

         According to David Muhlhausen, of the Heritage Foundation, what I have said above about Head Start has been too lenient and too optimistic.  He argues that the statistical measurements employed in the study were too lax and showed improvement where little or none actually existed.  Evaluated more rigorously, that study evidenced no statistically measurable impact on any of the eleven educational measures taken.

         I, for one, would have expected far more and far better from a program into which we have poured upwards of $100 billion since 1965.
          The gains are small.  They might be imaginary.  They evaporate quickly.  They cost over $100 billion.

         Still, liberals call this a success.

         When it comes to federal programs, liberals are far too easily pleased.

Churchill-olatry

         Winston Churchill said that "All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope."

         But Churchill was wrong.  He was wrong because, while these things can be named in a single word, they are not their names.  These things are not simple.  They never were and never will be.  When you say "freedom," you have not expressed freedom.  You have merely given it a label.  Freedom cannot be expressed in a word.  Freedom is an incomplete concept.  When someone insists on freedom, you must ask them, “Freedom – to do what?”   Until you know the “to do what?” part of what they seek, you won’t know if it’s freedom they want or licentiousness, two things that must never be confused.

         But Churchill is too given to such comments, which are more memorable than they are true.  They ring in the ears, but that ringing is not the ring of truth, but of shallowness dressed up in the bright ribbons of rhetoric.  For those who merely look, that might be enough.  For those who think, it is not.  To say, as Churchill does above, that “all the  great things are simple” is flatly false, almost stupidly false:   “All”?  Really, “all”? 

         As Mike Arnold reminds me, Churchill's comment is a comment on how politicians see the world. 

         As for me, I have never understood the rampant Churchill-olatry abroad in some circles.  I have my guesses, but they must wait for another time.

Theology and Bureaucracy (part 3)

         Institutionally mandated bureaucratic action is not the same as prudent, compassionate, enlightened, or humane action, whether we consider its origin, purpose, motive, or effect.

         The difference between humane action and bureaucratic action is the difference between human solidarity, a “we” relationship among equals, on the one hand, and a task-to-be-completed and a problem-to-be-solved function, on the other.  The former is an I/I relationship; the latter is a pre-programed interaction between two mere its.  The former is a relationship within a community; the latter is a function within a machine.

         To see more clearly what a bureaucracy is, compare it to the church, that is, compare it to the church as it ought to be, not to the church as it too often is.  The church is a body; the bureaucracy is a mechanism.  The church is animated by the Spirit and by love.  The bureaucracy is not animated at all; it is driven.   No spirit of love lies at its heart.  It has no heart, only rules, regulations, and functionaries where hearts ought to be.  It is not about persons but procedures, policies, and practices, from which the truly human has been systematically and purposely evacuated, where the guidebook reigns supreme, and where imagination, creativity, and compassion are sacrificed to the system’s inflexible and inhuman requirements.  The sad thing is this:  Rather than the bureaucracy growing to resemble the church, the church has grown to resemble the bureaucracy.  As a result, souls have withered, clerical souls especially.   

         Within the bureaucracy, the mutuality of persons evaporates.  It is no longer you and I face-to-face because we are no longer ourselves.  We are not persons among persons.    

We are functionaries, on the one side, and cases with numbers for names, on the other.

         Remember this the next time you vote:  The bigger the government, the bigger the bureaucracy; the bigger the bureaucracy, the smaller the human being and the smaller the realm of authentic human life and interaction

The Socialist -in-Chief, on his plans for American industry

Barack Obama, this week, at the Colorado state fairgrounds, in Pueblo:

“I said I believe in American workers, I believe in this American industry, and now the American auto industry has come roaring back and GM is number one again. So now I want to do the same thing with manufacturing jobs not just in the auto industry, but in every industry.”

These aren’t my words.  They belong to the Socialist–in-Chief

Lolo Jones vs. Fast Women

              According to the self-appointed track and field geniuses and athletic performance gurus in the MSM, American hurdler Lolo Jones, the American record holder in her event, an athlete who missed a gold medal by just a quarter second, would have run faster, and maybe have gotten an Olympic medal, if she hadn’t been so virginal.  Her critics apparently think that, if you sleep around a lot, you hurdle more quickly

As a former decathlete, I disagree.  While sleeping around might make one a fast woman, it doesn’t make one faster. 

Genesis and the Free Market

My friend and former colleague, economist Charles Van Eaton, reminds me that the historical account of the transaction between Abraham and Ephron in Genesis 23 is a useful ancient example, perhaps even a prototype (not his word), of exchanges in a free market, and that such market exchanges are nearly as old as recorded history itself.

         Free market exchanges require but a handful of crucial, or irreducible, elements: (1) reasonably well-defined property rights, (2) freedom of exchange, (3) basically reliable protection against fraud, and (4) a stable and useful medium of exchange, all of which are present in the Biblical text before us.  Here’s what I mean:

         (1) Even among the ancient Hittites, we find reasonably well-defined property rights.  The Hittites understood both ownership and, in that light, who owned what.  In this case, the field and cave in question belonged to Ephron (v. 7), as everyone knew.  Once the sale had been made, it belonged to Abraham (vv.16-18).

         (2) Freedom of exchange appears here in the unfettered and uncoerced negotiations between Abraham and Ephron (vv. 10ff.).  Both men made offers and counter-offers until they reached a mutually agreeable price.  If, at any time, the negotiations took a turn either of them disliked, or if they could not reach a mutually satisfactory conclusion, bartering would cease.  Either one could have stopped the process at any moment.  But they did not.  They kept at it until they reached a mutually satisfactory price, one agreeable to both.  Abraham liked the price, and so did Ephron.  Thus, when this transaction was complete, both considered themselves better off.  Each considered himself a winner:  Ephron preferred to have the money rather than the land, Abraham the land rather than the money.  In order to close the deal, both had to get what they preferred, and they got it. (Notice this interesting historical point:  As seen from the perspective of the seller, ancient Hittite negotiation proceeded from the bottom price upwards; our negotiation, as seen from that same perspective, proceeds from the highest price downward.)

         (3) Surrounded as they were by the elders of the city, men who sat daily at the city gates, both Abraham and Ephron had many witnesses to their transaction, witnesses who could repeat later what they saw now, witnesses whose testimony would help suppress fraud and double-dealing, witnesses invoked for precisely such purposes by Ephron as a means to allay Abraham’s fears (vv. 11, 12).  We have the same today, in signed and witnessed contracts, in testimony given under oath in court, and in judicial pronouncements backed by law enforcement.

         (4) The two men carried out their negotiations using the local currency, in this case pieces of silver.  The text does not say who minted the coins, but that is of little importance.  Whoever minted them, whether done publicly or privately, the folks themselves validated it by using that currency as the medium of exchange.  It did not have to be silver, of course.  It could have been gold, or copper, or even cattle and sheep (though it is difficult to make change with livestock).  All it needed to be was acceptable to both sides, which normally means that it is convenient, durable, and portable.  We have the same today in the coins and dollars we use, though our government continues to monkey with our currency’s value by printing trillions and trillions more dollars at will, thus lowering the value of each one.   

Paul in Athens (part 3)

The general tone and tenor of Paul’s Areopagus speech was one of condemnation and opposition.  In Corinth, it continued.  Paul was not looking for common ground.  He was not building bridges.  Pagan beliefs and practices were his target, not the object of his affirmation.  The perverse beliefs of the Greeks are what separated Paul from them.   Their beliefs were not a truth they and he both owned, but the foolish and wicked errors he intended to correct.  He did not reach out to them on the basis of their beliefs.  He condemned their beliefs.  They returned the favor.

Paul knew the options that fallen life gives us in this regard:  Either we worship God or we worship things that are not God.  To worship God, requires the mediation of Jesus Christ -- a mediation both of knowledge and of salvation -- of which the Greeks philosophers had neither.  In order to fill that staggering lack, Paul determined to know nothing among them except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.  In this regard, just as it was with Jesus Himself, nothing about the god of Aristotle or Plato crossed Paul’s lips.  At the shocking sight of idolatry surrounding him on all sides, Paul’s spirit convulsed and wretched within him, just as ours ought to do within us.

But rather than wretch and convulse, some Christian theologians and apologists attach themselves to Greek errors both for apologetic purposes and for theological method.  Paul did not.  Rather than attaching his preaching and his apologetic to their idolatries, he pointed out to them their superstition and their ignorance and, in order to heal what ailed them, he directed them to Christ and the resurrection.

Paul’s speech was iconoclastic.  Because the Athenian marketplace reflected the hearts of those who made it and who frequented it, Paul cast down their gods, not from pedestals made of marble, but from pedestals in the human heart.  Paul knew that their invocation of an unknown god was a sham and a pose.  He knew it was a suppression of the truth.  It was an evasion of their obligations before the one God Who is.  It was a substitution of a false god for the real God.  It was not innocent; it was as wicked as it was false.  Suppression, evasion, substitution:  It was what Cornelius Van Til said it was: “culpable ignorance” (Van Til, Paul at Athens, p. 11).  In Paul’s own words:  “Where is the wise:  where is the scribe?  where is the disputer of this world?  hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?  For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God it pleased God through the foolishness of the preaching to save them that believe.” (1 Cor. 1: 20, 21).

Do not miss Paul’s point:  The wisdom of God decreed that, by means of the wisdom of the world, the world could not know God.  Natural theology simply does not lead to knowledge of God.  To say otherwise is to oppose both Paul and God.  Human wisdom, whether Aristotle’s or someone else’s, is more than merely challenged; it is exposed, debunked, and rejected.  The Greeks, known for their supposed wisdom, could not locate even its beginning (Psalm 111: 10).

Rather than endorsing their natural theology, from verses 24 onward, Paul used it as a weapon against them, resisting them and refuting them, sometimes with their own words and ideas.  He directed them to seek God (v. 27), implying quite clearly that by their philosophy and religion they had missed Him.  Paul told his Greek listeners that, despite their excessive religiosity (v. 22), they failed to know God, and that they were ignorant (vv. 23, 30), in response to which he placed before them the resurrected Jesus as Lord.  Concerning Jesus, Paul mentioned that He is fully human and, as such, is subject to death, and that he is Judge of the world (v. 31).  Apart from knowing that, they could not and did not know God.  No one can.  They were estranged from God, and, by rejecting Paul’s message, remained so.  They demonstrated that amusement and novelty (v. 21) are not the same as the pursuit of Truth.  When the Truth Himself appeared in Paul’s speech, they mocked it and turned away (v. 32).  That was where their natural theology led them.  That is where it always leads.  Nevertheless, despite their failing and their rejection of the truth, even when it was proclaimed directly before them, the Greeks thought they offered God authentic worship.  Paul, in order to puncture their bubble of delusion, highlighted their ignorance.  By limiting himself here primarily to highlighting their ignorance, Paul declined to trace out in fuller details the whole litany of their evils and errors the way he did in Romans 1.

According to F. F. Bruce, Paul “does not argue from ‘first principles’ of the kind that formed the basis of various systems of Greek philosophy; his exposition and defense of his message are founded upon the biblical revelation and they echo the thought, and at times the very language, of the Old Testament writings.  Like the biblical revelation itself, his speech begins with God the creator of all, continues with God the sustainer of all, and concludes with God the judge of all” (Bruce, Paul: Apostle of the Heart Set Free, p. 239).  To be sure, Paul finds his preaching text in an altar dedication.  But that they know they do not know God, and that he knows they do not know God, is hardly an endorsement of their natural theology.  Rather, their ignorance offers him a chance to explain to them the history of salvation, which, in this speech, finds its climax in Christ, just as it does in Paul’s epistles.